Search Results

Watch "talk to us" by Kirsten Burger at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Hardly anyone speaks in 'speak to us of'. It is rather the eyes and gestures of the 4 protagonists that speak, like in the finest silent film tradition. Their natures seem isolated, their actions form a kind of fabric. It seems as if they are the sum of a single soul in its longing, its love lust, its loneliness. "No one hears me scream, my fears are discreet, but now, in the midst of the strongest of ocean swells, I keep my eyes wide open, and under the spray, I can make out shapes, then I am the medusa, the little daughter of the earth and the sea.“ Many stories from two world wars have not been told until today. And yet they are inscribed in the deep tissues of the body, are passed on and want to be explored. A journey of images that invites us to wander through this landscape of souls. My grandfather is a Stalingrad survivor. In 1945 he escaped from the encirclement of the embattled city and made his way back to Vienna on foot. For the rest of his life, he not only had to cope with physical war wounds, but also suffered from the mental consequences of the war: he hardly spoke to people and only communicated with his horses. This pain and the great silence was transferred to my father, who also has difficulties talking about it to this day. And this in itself has an impact on me and my life. In "Talk to us", I have tried to explore these transmissions and the unspeakable, the barely comprehensible. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents "talk to us" At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Kirsten Burger Theater, Circus / Movement, Film, Mime, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language German Running Time 93 minutes Year of Release 2022 Hardly anyone speaks in 'speak to us of'. It is rather the eyes and gestures of the 4 protagonists that speak, like in the finest silent film tradition. Their natures seem isolated, their actions form a kind of fabric. It seems as if they are the sum of a single soul in its longing, its love lust, its loneliness. "No one hears me scream, my fears are discreet, but now, in the midst of the strongest of ocean swells, I keep my eyes wide open, and under the spray, I can make out shapes, then I am the medusa, the little daughter of the earth and the sea.“ Many stories from two world wars have not been told until today. And yet they are inscribed in the deep tissues of the body, are passed on and want to be explored. A journey of images that invites us to wander through this landscape of souls. My grandfather is a Stalingrad survivor. In 1945 he escaped from the encirclement of the embattled city and made his way back to Vienna on foot. For the rest of his life, he not only had to cope with physical war wounds, but also suffered from the mental consequences of the war: he hardly spoke to people and only communicated with his horses. This pain and the great silence was transferred to my father, who also has difficulties talking about it to this day. And this in itself has an impact on me and my life. In "Talk to us", I have tried to explore these transmissions and the unspeakable, the barely comprehensible. "TALK TO US" a Film by Kirsten Burger / Aska: Laura Vogel / Alina: Cox Ahlers / Zola: Franziska Pack/ Lola: Clara Gracia / Directed by Kirsten Burger /Screenplay by Kirsten Burger / Produced by Cox Ahlers / Editor Daniela del Pomar /Cinematographer Anne Braun/ Music Composition Mabe Fratti / Production Manager :Cox Ahlers, Kirsten Burger, Alice Greenhill / Sound Design Olaf Giesbrecht / Voices: Laura Vogel, Cox Ahlers, Olaf Griesbrecht /Sound Recordist:Milian Vogel /Sound Editing : Milian Vogel, Matias Santos /Set Design and Costumes Franz Reimer /Set design and Make-up Adriana Fiedler /Colorist Till Beckmann /Title Design Alessandra Leone/ Text inspired by: Aglaja Veteranyi, Kahlil Gibran, Adelaide Bon / „Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media." 2022 About The Artist(s) Kirsten Burger, born 1975 in Heidelberg, works as an experimental filmmaker, theatre director, author and actress in Berlin. From 1996 -1998 she studied free arts and graphics with Prof. Adolf Frohner in Vienna and interdisciplinary studies in Hamburg with Johannes Süttgen, a student of Joseph Beuys, among others. The idea of Beuys' 'expanded concept of art' and 'social sculpture' still influence her work today. Influenced by Viennese Actionism as well as by works by Grotowski and other performative and political forms of expression in public space, she became increasingly interested in theatrical interventions. 1999 - 2002 she completed her Bachelor's degree in Physical Theatre in Berlin. 2003 -2006 she worked as an actress, among others: Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Deutsche Oper, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin and at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich. From 2006 she was a founding member & conceptual director of the collective 'Oper Dynamo West', which staged new music theatre in the public space of Berlin's City-West. Within the collective, Burger created numerous productions of her own in public space until 2011. From 2012 onwards, Burger created theatrical interventions, experimental and essay films in various contexts and with people from a wide range of backgrounds. She won several international prizes for her cinematic work, including for her film 'Das Große Glück'. In 2022 she directed her debut feature film 'Speak to Us of' wich was planed to be a thetaer peace. The main feature of her artistic work in film is an examination along the border between reality and fiction and their overlapping. Her entire work is characterised by relating this to different forms and media of artistic expression. Since 2022 she has directed the young Rambazamba Theater Berlin, which is the most important inclusive theater in Germany. In 2023 she founded the young ensemble there, which celebrated its first premiere in 2023 with "raving" in the Humbold Forum Berlin. Get in touch with the artist(s) mail@kirstenburger.de and follow them on social media www.kirstenburger.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.

By Benito Ortolani, Samuel L. Leiter | This volume contains the proceedings of the “Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World” symposium, held in New York City in October 1997 < Back Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World Benito Ortolani, Samuel L. Leiter Download PDF Edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel L. Leiter This volume contains the proceedings of the “Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World” symposium, held in New York City in October 1997, in conjunction with the “Japanese Theatre in the World” exhibit shown at the same time at the Japan Society and, in the spring of 1998, the Villa Stuck in Munich, Germany. The editors, Benito Ortolani and Samuel L. Leiter, both of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, are internationally recognized scholars of Japanese theatre. More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage (W)here comes the sun? By Tamás Jászay Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF It's almost a family atmosphere: we spectators, barely a hundred of us, sit around the empty space. Office lights hang high above, from which a cheap paper screen is lowered from time to time, projecting still or moving images. This projection is one of the essential elements of this refreshed, dusted-down, updated Ibsen production, Solness , which premiered on the studio stage of the Örkény István Theatre in Budapest in autumn 2022 and, due to great interest, has been performed at the Szkéné Theatre from February 2024. On the screen, we see the building plans of the master builder and his student, which were never realised, and which are commented on with admiration or hatred. The shadows of the characters projected sharply onto the screen inadvertently add comments and stories to the projected images. If you happen to be sitting on the other side of the screen, you can see the images indelibly projected onto the desperate, pleading, explaining faces, not just their shadows. The screen becomes a time gate. Plans that never materialize transport us to an imagined, idealized futur e, but as we approach the finale, the canvas also becomes a powerful means of bringing the past to life. Suddenly we are watching a family home video, a private documentary of the past half century; the period when Pál Mácsai, playing Solness, became one of Hungary's best known and most admired actors. We peek, we peep into his life, as we have done so many times during the performance, and the (self-)ironic audio commentary is provided at this point by the video's protagonist, Mácsai-Solness himself. Finally, the screen is the "protagonist" in the bombastic finale: we see a projection of Hilde Wangel, who entered previously Solness's ordered yet infinitely lonely life, taken by the master builder as a vampire. From the short introduction, it is clear that Solness , directed by Ildikó Gáspár, plays with different stakes than the usual interpretations of Ibsen's late drama. The director can do all this here and now because the theatrical reception of Solness , written in 1892, is negligible in Hungary. This is worth emphasizing because Henrik Ibsen is clearly the most Hungarian of the Nordic playwrights. The climaxes of his extensive oeuvre are an inescapable cornerstone of the Hungarian repertoire: A Doll's House , Hedda Gabler , The Wild Duck , and even Peer Gynt , which focuses on the totality of the world rather than on a family, regularly appear on stages in Budapest and the provinces. The Master Builder Solness , considered by many to be one of the finest achievements of Ibsen’s oeuvre, is a rare visitor to our region. Yet the first Hungarian-language premiere was already in 1905, relatively early on: part of the ars poetica of the very first Hungarian independent theatre group, the Thália Society, was to introduce contemporary foreign drama to Hungarian audiences. However, theatre memory records fewer than ten (!) Hungarian-language Solness performances in the more than a hundred years that followed, and none of these became canon-shaping performances. In this way, Ildikó Gáspár's production stands lonely in Hungarian theatre history, while loneliness is a prominent theme of the production. Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath This is by no means an over-interpretation: the performance plays with the thematization and problematization of the relationship between the dramatic text written by Ibsen, translated into Hungarian and shortened by the director herself, the reality/present time of the theatrical performance and the reality off stage. We are a long way from, say, Shakespeare's meta-theatre: here, the speech about the theatre does not become a stand-alone (performable) insertion. Instead, from the first to the last moment of the performance, the theatre as a phenomenon becomes an integral part of the plot written by Ibsen. This Solness speaks about the theatre as a political institution, about the perceived or real conflicts between the different generations that run the institution, about the challenges of maintaining the influence acquired in cultural life, about the proper management of a common legacy. It speaks about the Örkény István Theatre itself, its current and renewed artistic leadership, and the chances of young theatre-makers in an unsupportive environment. And it does all this while telling the story of Ibsen's master builder Solness virtually in full. In this sense, the performance is therapy. The psychologizing of Ibsen, of the family, is somewhat relegated to the background in order to make the spectator realize that it is possible, even necessary, to reflect on certain traumas of the community space through the tools of the theatre. Readers who have not seen the show might have reason to believe that Solness in Budapest is a show for gossip-hungry "experts" who are sensitive to the internal affairs of the theatre world, but they could not be more wrong. Since the context around the performance is as important as the text of the performance in this case, some further information needs to be shared before I get to the performance itself. The director Ildikó Gáspár has evolved from a successful and remarkable dramaturg and translator into a director known mainly in Hungary, but also in German and Scandinavian-speaking countries over the last decade. In her performances, she analyses classical and contemporary dramatic texts with both insight and sensitivity, leads her actors in an inspiring way, and always with a highly emphatic and meticulously elaborated visual and musical world. It is difficult to find a common denominator between the two dozen productions of her directing career that began in 2011. Regardless of the period of the drama and its author, the problem-sensitive interpretation of the text, always carefully crafted to bring it as close as possible to the viewer of the present day, is a characteristic of each of her productions. Ildikó Gáspár is a founding member of the Örkény István Theatre, which opened in downtown Budapest in 2005. She became a key member of the theatre as a dramaturg and made her debut as a director here. Örkény's situation is unique in many respects: of all the municipal theatres in Hungary with a permanent company, repertoire and venue, we can think of no other theatre that has undergone such a significant change in profile in such a short space of time. The theatre, which for decades until the early 2000s presented solely comedy and cabaret, has now become one of the capital's most important theatres, with a highly successful ensemble working with the best directors to build a profile that is mainly, but not exclusively, prose drama. The first 'master builder' of the Örkény's image is the actor-director Pál Mácsai, who has been the theatre's director since its foundation. Pál Mácsai in 2025 will hand over his position to Máté Gáspár after 20 years of management. The latter name is familiar to many in the context of another memorable ensemble: it was he who, together with Árpád Schilling, laid the foundations for the international success story of the Krétakör Theatre as manager in the early 2000s. Alongside Máté Gáspár, Csaba Polgár, the theatre's leading male actor, will take over the artistic directorship of the Örkény Theatre from January 2025. The same Csaba Polgár who plays Ragnar, the dreaded adversary of Mácsai's title character in Solness . Ragnar's mother, Bertha Brovik (originally a male character) is played by Judit Pogány. The actress has been a major figure in Hungarian theatre and film since the 1970s and 1980s. And although she turned 80 in 2024, she is still performing in ten different productions at the Örkény Theatre. They are joined by the fourth generation: as the haunting Hilde Wangel, we see Mária Szaplonczay, who graduated from the University of Theatre and Film in 2024. Ildikó Gáspár's direction does not directly talk about this system of relations, which may seem complicated at first sight and not necessarily transparent to the outsider. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the above-mentioned relationships are evident to the regular theatregoer in Hungary even if they are not stated. Having mentioned before projection and the different layers projected onto the screen, by bringing these relations (theatrical and generational) into play, it is as if a new filter has been added to Ibsen's drama, showing more and different aspects of the familiar story. Let's return to the starting point. We, the audience, sit around an empty office or living space. In the first few minutes, we see the same brief scene play out four times in quick succession between Ragnar and his mother Bertha, and Ragnar's fiancée Frida. The old Brovik is not feeling well, and the young people, at first gently, then increasingly irritated and impatient, want to send her home, which the old woman clearly takes as an attack: she accuses the youngsters of wanting to get rid of her for good. The playful yet nervous opening (with an annoying background noise coming from the invisible speakers: like the sound of blood pounding in your ears in a particularly tense situation) identifies and sets the main theme of the performance: the communication gap between young and old. There is, of course, no small amount of didacticism in the way Ibsen arranges his formula: Solness, at the height of his career, has once pushed Brovik from her position, and now his daily life is filled with the dread of his disciple, Brovik's son Ragnar, rebelling against him. The performance does not support the latter, however: Ragnar probably 'just' wants to work, has a family and a decent living, and does not seem to be a man with world- conquering ambitions. But then, it's not him who's important here, but Solness himself: the performance seems to take place 'inside his head', where dreams, desires, memories, visions and hallucinations are lined up in a whimsical order. Solness is the center of the universe he creates and sustains: he is the sun (cf. sol), which shines in solitude (cf. soleness). Everyone is dependent on him: old Brovik, Solness's predecessor; her son Ragnar, Solness's disciple; Frida, Ragnar's fiancée, Solness's employee and lover; Aline, Solness's wife, with whom he has never been able to come to terms with the tragedy of their loss of their children. The family doctor circulates as a lonely satellite around them. And then the asteroid Hilde Wangel unexpectedly strikes, upsetting the delicate balance. The emphasis is on making the relationships between the characters as clear as possible: this is helped by the layout of the space. The actors sit between us, next to us: when they enter a scene, they speak from an intermediate position that subtly blurs the boundaries between stage and auditorium and then return to that position at the end of the scene. We sometimes feel as if we could be the characters ourselves, if only because the problems succinctly expressed are a strong reminder of our own concerns and questions. Apart from Bertha Brovik, who only appears at the beginning of the performance, all the characters are present in the space throughout. As is often the case with Ibsen, two characters usually share their thoughts about a third. The pair then almost provocatively stand in front of the 'object' of their conversation, while (s)he listens to them with silent attention. It is worthwhile for the viewer to observe the actors who are not acting, their expressions, their gazes, to discover their small reactions to what they see and hear: it is as if they were voyeurs, like us. The performance plays with this too: the family friend, a doctor, takes (seemingly) random shots with his old camera and flash. He is the one who, already in Ibsen, Solness accuses of secretly watching his every move. Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath The creation and maintenance of an everyday atmosphere is an integral part of Luca Szabados' simple(seemingly) visual world. Solness and his successor Ragnar wear the same black leather jacket: who is copying or imitating whom, who is adapting to whom, or whether it is the 'uniform' of the architect's office, is left unclear. The basic color of the other characters' costumes is brown or drape, all of them earthy - a nice rhyme with the constant, desperate preoccupation of Solness's wife Aline with her potted houseplants. The only one who stands out is Hilde Wangel, who unexpectedly enters: a slightly worn white ballet skirt, which soon turns out to be a wedding dress, peeks out from under a bright red hoodie covering her upper body. Let's take a close look at Hilde's arrival! This is one of the first episodes where the story is emphatically out of its original flow, and the viewer becomes suspicious. There is something unrealistic and erotically exhilarating about the meeting of the grey-haired Solness and the brash young Hilde. The girl no one expects, but who is known to almost everyone in one way or another, claims and demands to be a fairytale creature: ten years to the day before, Solness promised her a kingdom, and she has come to make that promise a reality. Throughout the performance, the strictly cut text follows Ibsen's original drama, but here it is enriched with a new element. When Hilde begins to talk about Solness kissing her several times when she was twelve, the architect goes into a fit of rage. He shoves her out of the room; while looking the mute spectators in their eyes, he explains that everything the girl says is a lie: he certainly doesn't kiss children. Suddenly Hilde reappears in the space, but by then everything has changed: Solness' carefully constructed statue has been destroyed in an instant. And the sensitive viewer is left with a vivid reminder of the way in which Hungarian public discourse has (not) dealt with #metoo issues - both in and outside the theatre. A typical he said/she said situation: the performance does not clearly state who is right, i.e. what really happened between the two. The scene written by Ibsen remains intact, but thanks to the sensitive dramaturgical and directorial intervention, it is enriched with a new, touchingly contemporary layer. (And we realize too that in the late 19th century, it was not shocking for an older man to have an intimate relationship with a child. In the 2020s it is impossible to ignore it.) Solness-Mácsai is aware of us, the audience, from the very first scenes, and while we know, in the spirit of the theatrical pact, that his utterances to us are not those of the actor but of the character, the dissonance of the boundary crossing is felt early on. When Solness says he is lucky, Mácsai could say the same. Or when he gazes dreamily at the women in the audience and then admits to the doctor that he has had many women in his life, whose "line" is that? The profile of the successful master builder is not only embossed on his portrait but is inseparable from the profile of the successful actor, director, theatre manager. And when he begins to speak condemningly of the young people who are demanding space for themselves at all costs (he even gets one of the spectators out of his seat), one cannot help thinking that Solness-Mácsai is (perhaps) talking about himself. For example, that in Hungary theatre directors are not appointed for a few years, but often for decades. Consequently, entire generations are left out of the theatre cycle without having gained any experience of leadership and without realizing their own vision of how a theatre or ensemble should operate. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is not an accusation against Mácsai, who has built one of the country's most high-quality theatres, but merely an outline of the context. Mácsai Pál’s Solness is an acting masterpiece. He portrays a burnt-out, tired, cynical and self-reflective character who, despite his achievements and successes, lives on his enduring charm even after the age of sixty. He talks to everyone in a slightly condescending, lecturing way. He knows a lot and has seen a lot, which is why he is acutely aware that his time is coming to an end. The scapegoating, which has probably been going on for some time, has had a reassuring result: young people are to blame for everything. Solness's world is bewilderingly round: just as he got rid of Brovik, the new generation will want to get rid of him. A man of this type needs a 'court' that fears and adores him, and whose members are all weaker than he is. His narcissism knows no bounds: he even teaches the audience a song about himself. The old and sickly Brovik (Judit Pogány) is no longer a real opponent, just a toothless lion. His son Ragnar (Csaba Polgár) seems to be a more difficult case, but Solness is probably overthinking things: Ragnar does want a place for himself, but not against Solness, rather just beside him. Ragnar's fiancée Frida (Emőke Zsigmond) is impressed by Solness's interest and affection, but he sees her as a disposable object, a tool. Solness's wife Aline (Gabriella Hámori) seems to be a confused, introverted, lonely figure, but she sees and senses everything that happens around her. The loss of his children is the great tragedy of her life, which she tries in vain to explain away as God's will, but in reality, she blames herself. At the moment of the children's death, the relationship between Aline and Solness is at a standstill, and they are unable to move on from there: they have nothing more to say to each other. The doctor (Sándor Terhes) observes and registers: Solness considers him both his confidant and his enemy, sent by Aline to kill him. Young people are dangerous, Solness repeats again and again, and the most beautiful illustration of the theme is the intrusion of Hilde Wangel (Mária Szaplonczay) and her attempt to break the equilibrium. Yet she does nothing but take seriously an irresponsible statement, a promise made to a child ten years earlier. In his eyes, Solness is a hero, whom he endows with supernatural powers and from whom he expects to enliven his own ordinary, boring life. But Hilde can not only be a new beginning for Solness's empty marriage, she can also replace his dead children. Solness, a great manipulator, effectively involves his wife, Aline, in this game, who takes care of the girl immediately after Hilde's arrival and puts her in one of the old children’s rooms. In the first half of the hundred-minute performance, the sensitive relations of the Solness- universe are sharply depicted, before the focus narrows to the internal conflicts of the Solness-Mácsai figure and Solness's relationship with Hilde. The home video, mentioned at the beginning of the text, thus becomes a memorable inset to the performance. Selections from the video archive of the Mácsai family show Pál Mácsai's parents, his brother and, of course, himself as a child and young adult. And so we arrive at the spring of 1994, when Pál Mácsai recited the poem Highly Esteemed Overlords by the 19th century revolutionary poet Sándor Petőfi in front of 10,000 people in the Budapest Sports Hall. It is without exaggeration that this is the emblematic material of the Hungarian- language YouTube, which has more than one and a half million views, and Mácsai adds a self-deprecating audio commentary to his own recital from 30 years earlier. Hilde literally walks into the picture: she clicks repeatedly, the recording stops, starts again, while she re-enacts Mácsai's (Solness’s?) striking gestures in front of the screen. In the finale, when Solness, who has a fear of heights, climbs to the roof of the house to place the wreath, against the strong protests of her relatives and Hilde's insistence, the girl and the master builder are also placed in the center. The video spins again: climbing a ladder to the rooftop above Budapest, Hilde in her wedding dress and (Solness-)Mácsai, wearing a costume and make-up clearly evoking Bela Lugosi's iconic Dracula. The old master, terrified of the power of youth, yet morbidly attracted to it, sucking the blood of youth and drawing strength from it, reaches the top - but at what cost? The sun, known to have a harmful effect on vampires, shines over the rooftops at dawn, and the cast choruses the re-envisioned Beatles song—here comes the sun... Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Tamás Jászay (45), theatre critic, editor, university lecturer, curator. Since 2003 he's been working as a freelance theatre critic: in the last 20 years he published more than 1200 articles (mostly reviews) in more than 20 magazines all around the world. Since 2008 he is co-editor, since 2021 editor-in-chief of the well-renowned critical portal, Revizor ( www.revizoronline.com ). Between 2009 and 2016 he was working as the co-president of the Hungarian Theatre Critics' Association. In 2013 he defended his PhD thesis on the history of Krétakör Theatre (Chalk Circle Theatre). He regularly works as a curator too: Hungarian Showcase (Budapest, 2013), Szene Ungarn (Vienna, 2013), THEALTER Festival (Szeged, since 2014), dunaPart (Budapest, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2023). Since 2015 he's been teaching at Szeged University, since 2019 as an assistant professor. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Report from London (December 2022) Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

L. Bailey McDaniel Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States L. Bailey McDaniel By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF CRACKING UP: BLACK FEMINIST COMEDY IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY UNITED STATES. Katelyn Hale Wood. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021; Pp. 204. Cracking Up by Katelyn Hale provides a worthy addition to Humor Studies and an invaluable contribution to scholarship that explores Black feminist performance and comedy. Although often marginalized in performance archives, Black women comedians are “integral in the trajectory of stand-up comedy” (4) and occupy a vital cultural and political role as “storyteller, truth-teller, protest leader, and critical historiographer” (148). Wood’s four central chapters illuminate the ways that Black feminist comics have advanced feminist, Queer and queered expressions of joy and opposition to anti-Black racism & a vital act of social critique that is at once liberatory, recuperative, and agency-building. Beginning with a telling juxtaposition of stand-up pioneer Jackie “Moms” Mabley and concluding with comic Wanda Sykes’ 2019 portrayal of Mabley in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , Wood demonstrates the “politic of joy” that defines Black feminist stand-up. The contributions of the artists she explores perform necessary cultural and political work, generating a productive nexus for the “pleasures, communities, and spiritual experiences that thrive in the face of, and in spite of, legacies of racialized grief.” Wood points out how these performances offer “both visceral and epistemological” insights that are facilitated not merely by performer, but audience as well (4). The text’s methodology bolsters its impressive rigor as well as its readability. Incorporating issues central to and lenses employed by canonical Black feminists (e.g. Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins), Wood also integrates (and at times, critiques) theoretical frameworks from humor scholars (e.g. Henry Bergson, Sigmund Freud), while at the same time making astute use of queer scholars who conspicuously consider intersectional issues of race and power (e.g. José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson). This interdisciplinarity offers a worthwhile resource to scholars of Black Feminism, Humor Studies and African American Performance. Wood incorporates a materialist historiography that gainfully attends to specific cultural and political realities; performer and character identities; performance implements such as costume, props, set design, marketing, make-up, and sound; and, of course, content. Wood’s archival labor is buttressed by analyses that integrate considerations of spectatorship, both original and subsequent, with the latter nodding to video and digital spectators after the live event & what Wood terms “mediated” audiences. These live and mediated audiences, whether incarcerated women watching Mo’Nique’s 2007 stand-up live and in person at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, or the consumers who view the same performance (and its editorial choices) after the fact, always exist as a requisite component of performance in Wood’s examination. Cracking Up also maintains an investment in contextualizing and acknowledging the multivalent connections shared by what initially and wrongly appear as disparate and/or disconnected performers and performance strategies. Not unlike Cracking Up ’s subjects, Wood repeatedly reveals (and celebrates) the political, Black feminist, and often queer throughlines of performers and performances over multiple decades. In a kind of “meta” technique, the text practices the Black feminist and queer methodologies that Wood brings to light in the individual performers/performances themselves. Wood’s first chapter supplements the still-under-researched figure of stand-up and Black feminist icon Jackie “Moms” Mabley. Initiating what she terms an “archival intervention” (23) into the overlooked achievements of Mabley, Wood expounds on Mabley’s rhetorical and performance-related innovations that lay the groundwork for the intersectional and radical Black feminist subjectivity that will benefit Black/Queer women comics and their audiences into the next century. Despite the limitations of Mabley’s performance archive to date, Wood fruitfully situates “Mabley’s dynamic civil rights comedy within Black feminist and Black queer performance aesthetics” while also “re-contextualiz[ing] histories of stand up” itself (27). As she does throughout, here Wood advocates for a productively fluid archive of Mabley that “centers [her] comedy as decidedly Black, feminist, and queer,” making sure to “read against histories that attempt to quiet or make mutually exclusive such identity markers and performative strategies of resistance” (32). Focusing on actor and comedian Mo’Nique’s 2007 stand-up special I Coulda Been Your Cellmate! , chapter two skillfully invokes José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” and concretizes the multiple ways that Cellmate! builds queer- and Black-feminist-informed communities while simultaneously establishing opposition to the carceral state. More than just Black, queer, feminist dissent, Mo’Nique’s stand-up event and subsequent/mitigated performances of it achieve a “cracking up” of the racist and heteropatriarchal status quo, often through a reclamation and celebration of Black/queer women’s erotic power. This chapter also presents a valuable offering to the field of Prison Studies, as Wood shrewdly explores the matrix of the audience’s (1) “Black feminist elsewhere” that is both “imagined and material” alongside (2) an “imaginary release from imprisonment and surveillance” that accompanies the literal “physical release of laughter" (54). Chapter three investigates what Wood describes as the queer temporalities that exist in the comedy of Wanda Sykes. For Wood, Sykes’ stand-up prompts a productive subversion of linearly-organized temporalities and myths of American progress. Looking specifically at Sykes' repertoire from 2008-2016, Wood unveils the ways that Sykes’ Black feminist comedy challenges more than just white supremacy and homophobia, but in fact cracks up notions of citizenship and progress that are invested in heteronormative, homoliberal taxonomies. Said another way, beyond its initial mocking of white supremacist and homophobic history, Sykes’ work advocates a disruption of restricting (and false) temporality as experienced by queer bodies of color. Wood’s final chapter contemplates Black feminist comics’ articulation of collective and individual mandates for equality and justice within the twenty-first century landscape of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-trans, and homophobic violence. Wood considers how the stand-up of Amanda Seales, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, and Michelle Buteau advocates a specific kind of Black feminist agenda whereby comedy functions as critique of “the new racism” of the twenty-first century. Incorporating recent cultural phenomena (and resistance strategies) such as #MeToo , Wood effectively unpacks the post-Obama/Trump-era appeal for “new waves of stand-up comedy” that gainfully “combine[s] comedy and a desire for social justice” (110). Cracking Up reveals how Black feminist stand-up shapes Black subjectivity, while also disrupting modes of oppression that inspire discrimination and violence. Making expert use of her foundational concept of “cracking up,” Wood concretizes the ways that Black feminist comedians successfully and queerly influence national character and identity. Indeed, as they facilitate and celebrate embodiment, these truth-tellers breach anti-Black and heteropatriarchal narratives through performer and audience, alike. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Wood, Katelyn Hale. Cracking UP: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021. About The Authors Professor McDaniel is a Michigan native who grew up in and around Wayne County. After earning an undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Michigan, she spent five years in New York City studying acting and performing. She earned her graduate degrees in English at Indiana University. She is thrilled to be back home, doing the work that she loves with students she deeply appreciates and respects. The undergraduate and graduate courses she teaches typically investigate issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and physical abilities as they are engaged in modern drama, US ethnic literature, and postcolonial literature and drama. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Carol Westcamp Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Late Work of Sam Shepard Carol Westcamp By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. The Late Work of Sam Shepard, by Shannon Blake Skelton, brings necessary attention to the later phase of Sam Shepard’s works, including his short prose, plays, acting performances, and screenplays. Previously published scholarship has tended to focus on Shepard’s most prolific period, roughly categorized as 1965 to 1985, as well as his family plays, such as Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1980), and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Skelton argues that with Shepard’s 1988 directorial debut in Far North and 1991 play States of Shock, Shepard transitioned to a “Late Style” that mixed genres and “resisted the clichéd notions that an aged artist in their autumnal period will offer gentle reflection” (3, 5). In the introduction, Skelton maps out the main points of the project from Shepard’s personality to the gender dynamics of his works. Each chapter corresponds with each key point, creating a thematically organized structure to the book. The first chapter studies the Shepard persona. Since Shepard was an actor, a writer, and even a celebrity, his image circulated widely during the height of his fame in the 1980s. Skelton argues that during his Late Style, Shepard adopted a paternal character due to his acting roles as well as his “status as an elder statesman of American theatre” (72). This new persona began to emerge when he was cast as law professor Thomas Callahan in the movie The Pelican Brief (1993) and was solidified in his role as father and husband Patrick Singer in the movie Safe Passage (1994). These father figure roles continued in subsequent films: Allie’s father Frank Calhoun in The Notebook (2004) and the elder mentor Tom in Mud (2012). This Late Style identity showed an artist who may have passed beyond his most popular period but stayed active in a variety of art forms. Skelton writes, “From acting and directing to writing, Shepard has seemingly made peace with himself, his art, his legacy, and his persona” (72). In the next chapter, Skelton examines Shepard’s self-reflexive exploration of authenticity and the artist in American culture. Much of Shepard’s earlier work probed how artists struggle with authenticity, trying to remain true to the art or the artistic self while facing a world of capitalism, which tries to change art to make it more commercially popular. Some plays such as Cowboy Mouth (1964), Angel City (1976), and True West may have represented this struggle, but they did not offer resolutions. During his Late Style, Shepard positioned the artist as older and wiser. Using close reading, Skelton focuses on two specific works and two solutions. Howard in the film Don’t Come Knocking (2005) achieves authenticity by forming relationships with others. For Hobart in the play Kicking a Dead Horse (2007), authenticity is ultimately unobtainable in life, so he finds it by embracing death. Chapter three explores the relationship between memory and trauma as demonstrated in the plays Simpatico (1993), The Late Henry Moss (2000), and When the World Was Green (1996), the latter of which was co-written with Joseph Chaikin. As with many of his earlier works, Shepard never offered easy answers but revealed characters struggling to comprehend a “past that consistently informs the present” (13). For instance, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind address the personal dynamics of remembering and forgetting traumatic events in families’ pasts. But it was not until the Late Style works when Shepard revealed ways of “grappling with the past and its memories to transform the individual” (135). Sympatico demonstrates that one can achieve peace through confronting and then letting go of painful histories. Late Henry Moss and When the World Was Green show that one can reconcile with a past trauma by reenacting the event. Focusing on the two plays States of Shock (1991) and The God of Hell (2004), the fourth chapter addresses the politics of Shepard’s work during the Gulf War and the War on Terror. These two plays, unlike earlier ones, “unabashedly engage with political issues and offer commentary on broader concerns of the contemporary world” (137). Skelton argues that both plays show masculine, political conservatives attempting to change the minds of the other (potentially subversive) characters who question the supremacy of patriarchal narratives. Through these plays, Shepard suggests that “conservative ideology can be defeated through (1) direct action (States of Shock) (2) resistance by women (The God of Hell) and (3) the responsibility of one to be politically aware and engaged” (161). In the final chapters, Skelton analyzes how Shepard engages with the legacy of colonialism as well as gender dynamics. While the body of Shepard’s work has focused on the mystique of the American cowboy, his Late Style showcased the perspective of indigenous people, as in the plays Silent Tongue (1994) and Eyes for Consuela (1998). Shepard tried to move past romanticized notions of the Native American figure, showing instead more in-depth characters. Much of Shepard’s early work has been criticized for its lack of women and glorification of masculinity. However, during the Late Style, Shepard used the homosocial space in plays such as Ages of the Moon (2009) and Heartless (2012) to challenge patriarchal assumptions, tackle the collapse of masculine expectations, and address same-sex desire. Skelton’s book is an important contribution to the critical studies of Sam Shepard, offering discussion of Shepard’s major themes, stylistic changes, and late works. The book builds upon previous publications such as Stephen J. Bottoms’s The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (1998) and Matthew Roudané’s The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (2002). Roudané’s collection does offer two essays that address Shepard’s Late Style, but the essays do not provide the comprehensive insight of Skelton’s monograph. Skelton gives a personal touch to the striking impact that Shepard has had on American culture. Carol Westcamp University of Arkansas at Fort Smith The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2018 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.

Drew Barker Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Drew Barker By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF by Drew Barker The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Between this interview (edited for length and clarity from October 2022) and the publication of this issue, Gancher and Mezzocchi’s 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm won an OBIE Award. Since it was one of three productions to be given such an honor in the category of “Digital+Virtual+Hybrid Production,” all of which were reviewed over the last three seasons due to the pandemic, one wonders how such recognition will impact and inspire other digital+virtual+hybrid projects in the future. Regardless, it can certainly be argued that Gancher and Mezzocchi’s production (co-directed by Elizabeth Williamson) met the historical moment better than most digital theatre productions. The play satirically addresses the weaponization of misinformation via social media during a presidential election season that mirrored not only the prior presidential election season, but also the weaponization of misinformation in other parts of the world. Ultimately, using satire and a suite of digital technologies allowed the production to feel familiar and dangerous at the same time. If new times demand new forms, what will we miss if we hesitate to embrace the progress made in terms of theatrical creativity and audience engagement? We should remember what Barbara Fuchs declares: “At its most elaborate, digital theater does more than simulate the real: it complicates and remixes it, foregrounding the artifice and conventionality in how we think about production, performance, audiences, and theater itself.” [1] Playwright Sarah Gancher and multimedia creator Jared Mezzocchi collaborated on the critically-acclaimed, digital production of Russian Troll Farm in late 2020, and are now working on a new project -- even as other productions of Russian Troll Farm continue their success. In this interview by Performing Arts Librarian, Drew Barker, Gancher and Mezzocchi discuss how their creative process has evolved. BARKER: Your 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm was a benchmark for digital theatre during the pandemic. Now you’re both teaming up again, and the word “epic” has been tossed around. What can you tell us about this new project you’re working on? GANCHER: We are working on an epic about deep time that is set throughout all the different eras of history present in one Brooklyn bar -- Sunny's in Red Hook. It has been in continuous operation since 1890. And of course, there's a lot of history on that spot before that point, and there will be a lot of history on that spot after this time. We are asking the question: What would you learn if you were able to see all of the history in one spot superimposed on top of all the moments of history superimposed on top of each other? If you were able to hop back and forth between them, remix and match them? What would we find out about ourselves, and what will we find out about the patterns that we live? We're hoping that when superimposed that they all add up to make a giant question that none of them make individually. I think that it's going to be a massive participatory art project sort of made by the community, consisting of a film shoot at Sunny's with snippets of video that are like scenes or seamless moments from across all the different eras of Sunny's, and then after playing their part in that people can walk down the street to this big warehouse where there will be an installation showing everything that's being shot at Sunny's superimposed on top of each other and allowing people to hop back and forth between them and see the composite story as it begins to emerge. And there's bluegrass involved because of the famous bluegrass jam that happens at Sunny's. It will also have an on-line component. It's very cool, but it's currently hard to explain. MEZZOCCHI: I would add that it's a two-part process for an audience member to participate in the scene, and then go into an entirely different space, and see how that participation plays a role in a much wider, larger container of time and space. And now you're both the viewer of a kind of a gallery installation of live mixed video, while also seeing yourself reflected inside of it. And so, you're kind of unlocking the history of the place, but also you're participating in a new part of the history of the place. What does it mean when we are aware of our own immediate footprint in time? It's like a widening of the consciousness of the participant. And I think that's the big question for me -- what does that do to a person when they know that they're a part of the history of a place? GANCHER: It’ll be an experiment and obsession, and it's sort of in two senses: one where we'll literally have people playing music and jamming, and then also there's going to be a kind of like a visual jam session as people, essentially solo with images taking turns, matching the images to the music, finding and making meaning in the connection between these different moments. MEZZOCCHI: So, perhaps we can create a jam session, both audibly and visually. All of those things are for me, as a technologist, taking the discoveries of Russian Troll Farm which made that thing feel more full of breath in life. Because the editor was present, the editor was doing the thing live. Now in this residency [at Bethany Arts Center] working with Sarah, watching Sarah now take the reins, I don't think our collaboration would have led to this without Russian Troll Farm. I also don't think that my technological inventions would have brought me where I am today without Russian Troll Farm. GANCHER: I think that we both -- if I may speak for Jared and I certainly intend to -- we found Russian Troll Farm so thrilling because we were making up something that nobody had ever done before, and that we weren't sure whether or not it was going to work, or how it would work. And so we had to also invent a process, and we both got really into that. I mean, it's painstaking, it's slow. It's frustrating. But it's also so fun. And so cool, because you feel like you're making a new form. MEZZOCCHI: And I think that, I don't know, the older I'm getting, the more rare I'm realizing it is to find people that you can kind of run around in the dark with. And the pandemic felt like the darkest time. And I felt so fortunate with Sarah, with Elizabeth [Williamson], with that cast, that we all in the middle of a pandemic found each other and said, “Let's keep playing tag for a second” I wanted to hold onto that accidental joy that was found in the middle of horrific trauma, because that was a joy that I've never felt before, ever. BARKER: Sarah, you've written that as a playwright you're obsessed with questions of how history shapes us. How has the pandemic shaped your storytelling process? GANCHER: My main experience of the pandemic was as a parent trying to raise a five year old, who became a six year old, and then a seven year old, all while in a shoebox apartment. I went from being a full time playwright, writing a minimum of 40 hours a week to virtually having no writing time at all, and kind of going insane. It was a nightmare, watching all of the things that I had planned that I was so excited for all fall apart and crumble. But I do think those ashes have turned out to be very fertile for me, because there have been multiple things that I never would have done, never would have tried, had life continued on its original trajectory. Russian Troll Farm in particular created an appetite to try new things more. So, I just finished the first draft of lyrics for my first musical book, where I'm also writing the music. Considering this new project with Jared, which I'm so hyped on now, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to attempt it before. And I don't think that anybody would have thought about offering me that opportunity before Russian Troll Farm. If we’re considering the pandemic as a whole politically, the themes continued to resonate with Russian Troll Farm -- disinformation, mass delusion, echo chambers, mass hysteria, and the fact that our collective unconscious seems spiraling into a deep depression -- and I don't know, we should probably get on that. BARKER: Indeed. Things were different for you, Jared, but it was still an upheaval, right? MEZZOCCHI: Yeah, I feel like everything changed for me. I look back on the very beginning, when we did She Kills Monsters [at the University of Maryland in April 2020]. Because I decided to call the chair and say, “Don't cancel it, we have an opportunity to do research here.” And I made that call to her while I was in a panic down in Arkansas after a regional theatre production of Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime that I was directing had just shut down. It had been a moment of real, positive, directorial growth for me that was stripped away the day before tech. And so I look back on that and I don't know why I made that phone call. And I also don't know why that same day, I called my board at Andy’s Summer Playhouse and said, “Cancel the summer. Because if we cancel now, then we don't spend any more money preparing for a summer season that won’t happen, and therefore we have more money to deal with what this brings. And let's go weird.” I remember the thrill of being in a support system at UMD and at Andy's that allowed me to take a risk, because the safety net was more educational in both of those realms. And that put me in different shoes, so then I felt more courageous when walking into my freelance life and calling Sarah, which happened about two weeks later. And so, I think that being in two educational environments allowed me -- and I'm really saying this for the first time -- allowed me the courage and to say, “Fuck it. Like, it's research.” The flip to using the term “research” was a big thing for me, and that hasn't changed. And I think that getting the recognition, sharing the lessons learned, getting the positive press, and then making more connections made me realize the power of being an experimenter who could produce things, produce things quickly, and vocalize the flaws of each experiment. Suddenly the power of discovery was the thing, and I'm not ever going to forget that. BARKER: How do words and design influence you both now during your creative process in terms of dramaturgy? Is it like asking about the chicken and the egg? Or, how is the story influenced by the format? GANCHER: I think it's both chicken and egg. And nobody knows where either one came from. One of the nicest things that anybody's ever said to me in my life was when Jared said much of what he technologically invented for Russian Troll Farm only happened because of the demands of the script. A lot of people presumed that it was written for Zoom, but in fact it was barely adapted for that format. In my brain it had always been for the stage. Now in this latest residency, as we began to iterate, I start thinking about the story. What is the event? Sometimes I write “scratch drafts,” like sort of pre-writing, like scenes, but they don't even have character names yet, you know? I've never shown anybody in my life work that early, but I showed it to Jared. And then that sort of kickstarted him thinking from the container and also asking, “What is the event?” What will the tech for this need to look like? And, as we ping pong back and forth, we influence each other. MEZZOCCHI: I would add to that if you're coming from content, and I'm coming from form, we're both kind of saying, “Here's how I would take your offering and make it function inside of my brain,” and vice versa. If the text is the content constant, and the tech is the variable, here's how function can form and then flip it and say, if the tech is the constant, and the text is the variable, here's what happens there. Tech is a tool, and function is the space that we're kind of finger painting in. That to me feels pretty subversive to the industry standards. GANCHER: It's more related to the sort of experimental devising world that we actually both come from -- nobody knows that we're both musicians, and nobody knows that we both come from the world of devising and experimental stuff. It’s actually quite key to the way that we work together, and it reminds me of my favorite Suzan Lori Parks quote: “Form is content.” And I think that I'm trying to work with Jared not like a playwright traditionally works with the designer, but like the other half of my brain, or like I'm the other half of his brain. Also, his live video editing skills responded to hearing the rhythm in the words, which totally amplified the humor and timing in Russian Troll Farm in a unique way. BARKER: Jared, among many other things on Twitter you’ve talked about mediaturgy. Can you comment on how you position that in your current theatrical practice? MEZZOCCHI: That idea was actually based on a course I teach. It’s not about just telling stories on digital terms. We ask questions like: Why and how are we using technology to drive the story forward? What’s its point of view for the story? How is it used differently for each character? It’s not just spectacle. Mediaturgy informs choices which then contributes to the overall dramaturgy. Ideally, it allows for more collaboration, with the actors understanding a new language within a new process, too. Digital storytelling should be seen as a scene partner. GANCHER: I would add that mediaturgy makes you consider new questions as well. For example, how are you casting the audience? Are they spying on the characters? How does the story move in digital theatre? It’s a bit of a filmic question, too, of course. Does it move in jumps, does it move in fades? Does it root us down in one spot, or does it disorient us? But more importantly, does it live up to our vision? MEZZOCCHI: It was helpful that the world slammed to a halt, and we had to interrogate how we use and connect through technology. As a society, and as a theatre community, in order to get to the necessary technological solutions we must also address the problems of how we use technology. We’re continuing to learn how to use the tech as a tool, not have the technology use us. GANCHER: In this new process, the whole team is writing with you. As someone who teaches writing, I want to encourage that kind of collaboration even though it’s scary and difficult. We need to find the people who can make that work. www.sarahgancher.org www.jaredmezzocchi.com (Twitter: @jaredmezzocchi) Drew Barker is the Performing Arts Librarian at the University of Maryland at College Park. As a dramaturg he has worked at Triad Stage (NC), Round House Theatre (MD), Center Stage (MD), and Theatre J (DC). He was the curator for the exhibits The Art Craft of Puppetry (2022), Remembrance Resilience (2021) and The Triumph of Isabella: Exploring Performance Through Art (2018-19) at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. His research and creative projects include information design and literacy, the U.S. Civil War, and the working relationship between playwright Naomi Wallace and historian Marcus Rediker. [1] Barbara Fuchs, Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic. (London: Methuen Drama, 2022), 25. 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.

Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 1986, during my first year at Dartmouth College, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on Black Theatre with Professor Errol Hill (1921-2003).[1] More than thirty years later I still count myself lucky to have had my introduction to the history of Black Theatre under Errol's guidance. His rigorous scholarship and penetrating questions helped to set the standards for my own further explorations of Black Theatre History over the coming years, and I still remember our final chat many years later at a 2002 ASTR conference when he was asking me about the progress of my new book on slavery and US theatre. Errol would have been 100 years old this year. A century after his birth, he still stands as one of the giants in the field of Black Theatre scholarship. His landmark History of African American Theatre with Jim Hatch (1929-2020), his work as a playwright, his foundational study, Shakespeare in Sable, his pioneering book, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900, his many edited collections of plays by Black dramatists, as well as his monumental Theatre Collection, now housed at Dartmouth College—all of these contributions have shaped the development of the field in innumerable ways for thousands of scholars and students who never had the chance to meet him. For those who did have the chance to work with him, his mentorship proved equally invaluable—generous and exacting in equal measure. The award that bears his name with the American Society for Theatre Research has recognized more than thirty outstanding works in Black Theatre since its launch in 1997. (The list of those winners is included in the Book Review section of this issue and can also be found on the ASTR website at astr.org.) What I miss most—even thirty-five years after our first encounter in Hanover, NH—is the bellow of laughter that would erupt from this most dignified and handsome of men, transforming him into a joyous figure always ready to welcome new colleagues to the field. I spoke recently with his wife, Grace Hope Hill—his partner in his life, his research, his theatrical productions, and over many years of travel and adventure. I said how much I still missed his laugh. Grace exclaimed, “His laugh was so loud.” She also shared a story of Errol’s early days that links to so many of the themes shared in this issue about the need to support and document Black Theatre. In the 1950s, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica received a 300£ donation from a British bookstore owner (at Foyles Bookshop) and Errol, then serving as a “Drama Tutor” in the program, headed out into communities across Jamaica to develop new works by regional authors. As Grace recalls, “He helped with the writing, directing, and acting… We worked with very limited funds and did everything ourselves. Errol was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” That statement sums up Errol’s contribution to Black Theatre Studies so beautifully – for both those who knew him and those who never had the chance to meet him, “He was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” Help us celebrate Errol’s legacy in this issue dedicated to Black Theatre. Honor the innumerable artists and scholars who have created and documented the field of Black Theatre for more than two centuries of passionate work and those who are propelling it forward into the future. Ronald N. Sherr, "Errol G. Hill," oil on panel, Dartmouth College [1] For more on Errol’s extraordinary career, including his time with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Yale University, Dartmouth College, as a professional actor and playwright, and as an accomplished scholar, see the link to his papers now housed at Dartmouth College: https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/1185. by Heather S. Nathans Tufts University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 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.

Nathalie Aghoro Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Nathalie Aghoro By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF by Nathalie Aghoro The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Musical variations, the pursuit of belonging, and a persistent specter: These constitutive elements of the three experimental plays by Quiara Alegría Hudes known as the Elliot Trilogy speak of tragedy. They are imbued with the trauma of war, nostalgia, and alienation—a theme that George Steiner identifies as crucial for the dramatic form in his article “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered.” For Steiner, “the necessary and sufficient premise, the axiomatic constant in tragedy is that of ontological homelessness . . . of alienation or ostracism from the safeguard of licensed being. There is no welcome to the self. This is what tragedy is about.”[1] Hudes’s central protagonist Elliot seeks to recover a sense of home in a society removed from the realities of war he experienced as a soldier in Iraq. Over the timespan covered by the three plays Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (2012), Water by the Spoonful (2012), and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2014), the playwright redefines tragedy when she sends her hero on a quest for redemption after a fatal error in judgment. But even when he seems on the cusp of overcoming it, the haunting echoes of his past as well as a family curse catch up with him and threaten to shatter his world. The tragic is at the center of the Elliot Trilogy’s plot, but formally the primary dramatic impulses are theatrical experimentation with form and the inclusion of musical variety as each play focuses either on the classical fugue, free jazz, or classical Puerto Rican music. The plays differ in their structural composition and their aesthetic concerns, an instance that reflects the formation process of the trilogy. In an interview with Anne García-Romero, Hudes explains that she “did not set out to write a trilogy, but a few years after . . . Elliot, . . . [she] felt there was still more story to tell, and more structural and stylistic experimentation . . . to do in regards to music and playwriting.”[2] The plays reflect this evolution of the creative process, since they work effectively as standalone productions as much as they present a conceptual and topical arc that unites them into a three-movement oeuvre. Both a composer and a playwright by training, Hudes combines her vocations in the 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by developing a musical structure for a theatrical staging that poetically reflects on loss and suffering. The second play, Water by the Spoonful, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 because of its “imaginative . . . search for meaning” that emerges from an experimentation with virtual, actual, and theatrical space and an exploration of family and community in the twenty-first century.[3] The tragic dimension in Water by the Spoonful is realized as there is no escape from past fatal mistakes—neither in real life nor online. While in the first two plays Elliot is haunted by the first person he killed as a soldier in Iraq and struggles with the untimely and avoidable death of his little sister as a child, The Happiest Song Plays Last marks a departure from tragedy that still retains the tragic, but merely as one among other more prominent themes. As Hudes explains in a video interview for the 2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Elliot is “poised to overcome” his past troubles in the last part of the trilogy and the play explores this orientation toward the future from a personal and social perspective.[4] This becomes particularly apparent in the renewed formal engagement with music as an auditory medium that, for Hudes, is capable of uniting people in celebration while simultaneously addressing grave social conditions with critical lyrics to promote political change.[5] Indeed, the drama does not lose the nostalgic undertones and dissonances established in the previous plays. However, a bittersweet hopefulness—uncommon for classical tragedy—takes over with the Puerto Rican troubadour tradition that Hudes introduces into performances of The Happiest Song Plays Last through the sound of the cuatro which is the national instrument of Puerto Rico. This article will explore how the Elliot Trilogy reconceptualizes traditional elements of tragedy—such as the psychological isolation of the tragic protagonist or the intersections between the worldly affairs and the realm of the dead—for twenty-first century concerns with formal experiments that link the classical genre to the contemporary stage. The Elliot Trilogy repositions the isolated, tragic subject in a network of human connections by highlighting the intersubjective threads that run into danger of being unacknowledged or hidden from view and by exposing the dynamics of alienation in the process. When the tragic intersects with theatrical experiment in the Elliot Trilogy, apparently incompatible spheres converge, harmonize, and sometimes clash, challenging what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” of “what is visible or not in a common space.”[6] This productive friction in Hudes’s plays turns the stage into a space for the negotiation of contemporary communal concerns and thus invites us to think about tragedy’s sociocultural significance today. Therefore, I will discuss how the dramatic usage of music echoes the characters’ alienation, how the supernatural and other virtual dimensions resonate with an actual world of suffering and fate, and how formal experimentation in the Elliot Trilogy exposes the hamartia of the characters and conveys their struggle to find a new sense of normalcy after their loss of innocence. Tragedy and the Staging of the Sensible Defining tragedy as the drama of alienation means to implicitly link its characters to the absolute absence of companionship. The tragic fate is cast as unique. It is the lonely path of a singular individual caught, according to Steiner, in “the logic of estrangement from life, of man’s ontological fall from grace.”[7] In this vein, a hero’s isolation is the minimum requirement for the unfolding of tragedy. In Aristotelian terms, the hero’s alienation resides in a fatal action, the hamartia, and as soon as it is performed “fallen man is made an unwelcome guest of life or, at best, a threatened stranger on this hostile or indifferent earth (Sophocles’ damning word, dwelt on by Heidegger, is apolis).”[8] The estrangement thus sets the acting subject apart. Even if it remains unsaid in Steiner’s definition of the term, tragedy therefore implies a world populated by human beings, a polis or a community that differs from and eventually interacts with the tragic hero. To conceive of the hero’s homelessness means to relate the uniqueness of tragic fate to discursive practices about citizenship, community, and belonging. To be alienated means that there are processes at play that shatter the hopes for meaningful, intersubjective interactions. Hence, the tragic hero stands in relation to a community (on stage as well as off stage during the performance in front of an audience) and from the dialectical engagement with these relations emerges the political potential of tragedy. Tragedy is a dramatic threshold that renders the blind spots of a community visible by negotiating social practices from the perspective of the tragic lone hero at its margins. If, as Rancière writes in The Politics of Aesthetics, “artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility,” the theatrical experimentation with tragedy’s tropes and characteristics engages simultaneously with the politics of alienation and belonging.[9] When Rancière writes about the politics of the arts, he locates the political in the everyday communal dynamics that influence human perception and in the different possibilities of participation that the division of labor, common space, and time entail. He argues that “the distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.”[10] Such a division has influence on what is palpable, whose voices and actions can be heard, who can be seen and recognized as a member of the community, and who is granted (political) agency. Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts.[11] In other words, the system of in/visibility that governs a community functions through delineations of inclusion and exclusion. Theater is particularly apt to make the distribution of common ground and difference palpable because the theatrical performance simultaneously represents and embodies fictional characters and events. The shared space with living bodies on stage allows the spectators to tap into the various registers of sensory perception available to them and to connect them to a communal experience. When Plato and Aristotle seek to deal with “the split reality of the theatre” by either ascribing to it the function of enacting or practicing the ideal form of community as Plato does or through catharsis representing the world with the purpose to purge the social body from unwanted emotions as in Aristotle’s view, they set the conditions for theater to serve contradictory political purposes.[12] In his discussion of these differing artistic regimes, Rancière observes that the tragic stage simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle . . . redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a monarchical paradigm.[13] This malleable political potential of the stage can be understood as the precondition both for the states of community that it makes palpable and for the subversions of the boundaries that the distribution of the sensible establishes. Hudes challenges the distribution of the sensible in national discourses of collective drama as well as in the private institution of the family through the lens of tragedy. In the Elliot Trilogy, the protagonist’s function as a soldier in wars fought overseas by the US emplaces his actions in a space and time that the civilian community that he rejoins after each tour does not share with him. As such, the very function that determines the protagonist as a national subject instead of a ruler—as someone who serves his country—irrevocably alienates him from the everyday lives of the society he lives in. Consequently, Hudes’s plays are a departure from the monarchical paradigm of the Aristotelian tragedy. They complicate the subject matter of the nation and the interpellation of the individual as national subject with the personal experience of alienation and the precarious state of belonging. Her reconceptualization of tragedy acknowledges the complexity of social and political dynamics in the twenty-first century that is exceedingly high because the global directly ties in with the local. Globalized interconnections expose that there are no simple truths and that the individual needs to navigate their actions as a human being, citizen, and inhabitant of the world simultaneously. Musical Echoes: Tragedy, Dissonance, and Alienation Music is the major acoustic experimental dimension that connects Hudes’s work to tragedy. In his early treatise The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche emphatically posits that music engenders tragedy in classical Greek drama. He writes “that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing else” and he thus elevates it to “the true primal drama.”[14] Consequently, he locates the chorus as the site were tragedy takes place while rejecting A. W. Schlegel’s understanding of the chorus as the “ideal spectator,” or as Nietzsche describes it, “the epitome and concentration of the mass of spectators.”[15] For Nietzsche, this idealized definition of the chorus does not take into account the diegetic function of the chorus: “the true spectator, whoever he might be, must always remain aware that he is watching a work of art and not an empirical reality, while the tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to grant the figures on the stage a physical existence.”[16] However, the chorus also does not merely react to the dramatic actions on stage,[17] but serves as a threshold between both “a living wall that tragedy pulls around itself to close itself off entirely from the world and maintain its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.”[18] Along these lines, the embodied music of the chorus connects the actuality of the performance with the fictional action. It is the invisible fabric that separates the tragic hero from the world and simultaneously has an effect on the audience because it translates her or his actions and, hence, promotes processes of understanding and making sense that allow the spectators to relate the drama on stage to their own lives. Poised at the interstices of human alienation and intersubjective connection, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue lends itself to entering into a dialogue with Nietzsche’s position on the classics from a contemporary perspective – thinking its musical and formal experimentation as the resonant location from which tragedy materializes. The structure of Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue mirrors the structure of the musical genre by the same name. It is divided into preludes and fugue scenes in which four characters take turns in speaking lyrical dialogue sentences. One voice sets the melody and the others join in to create the counterpoints and interweaving parts of the musical whole. The voices of Elliot, his father, adopted mother, and grandfather join forces to relate the experience of three generations of a Puerto Rican family as members of the US military. When the chorus introduces a scene with the grandfather as a soldier in 1950 Korea, they complement each other to provide a description of the fictional space that remains invisible due to the minimalistic stage design: GINNY: A tent. No windows, no door. Walls made of canvas. A floor made of dirt. The soil of Inchon, Korea is frozen. GRANDPOP: Sixteen cots they built by hand. Underwear, towels, unmade beds. Dirty photos. GINNY: That is, snapshots of moms and daughters and wives. . . . GRANDPOP: A boy enters.[19] Only when these last words are spoken, the enactment of the scene begins while the oratory mode continues with two more voices eventually joining in. Hence, the chorus of four voices initiates the action. Without them, the drama could not play out as it does. They introduce each of the three male family members and, together, they bring them to life with their speech. At the same time, their communal effort counterpoints the isolation experienced by the soldiers in the field and the silence regarding their war experiences that they keep to themselves when they come back home. The tragedy, one could argue, happens between these voices – in their musical entanglement as well as in the temporal asynchronicity that keeps them from coming together in perfect harmony. In one of the preludes, Elliot’s grandfather, who owns a flute on which he plays Bach for his comrades during the war, explains the tensions that govern the fugue: Of everything Bach wrote, it is the fugues. The fugue is like an argument. It starts in one voice. The voice is the melody, the single solitary melodic line. The statement. Another voice creeps up on the first one. Voice two responds to voice one. They tangle together. They argue, they become messy. They create dissonance. Two, three, four lines clashing. You think, Good god, they’ll never untie themselves. How did this mess get started in the first place? Major keys, minor keys, all at once on top of each other. (Leans in) It’s about untying the knot (35). The dissonance of the voices pitches the harmonic unity of a shared experience against the isolation of the individual in a situation where lives are lost and nobody wins. When Elliot is injured in Tikrit, the multiplicity of voices recounting the incident clashes with his isolated and solitary position: POP: Seventy-four barbs chew into his bone. GRANDPOP: It is not a sensation of rawness. GINNY: It is not excruciating pain. POP: It is a penetrating weakness. GRANDPOP: Energy pours out of his leg. GINNY: Like water from a garden hose. ELLIOT: Sarge! POP: The boy knows he is trapped (41). Throughout the trilogy, Elliot’s injured leg will serve as a reminder that he has left his physical—and also psychological—integrity behind in an event that cannot be genuinely shared with family or civil society. In the passage above, the fugue resonates with the distance and the sense of alienation that separates and simultaneously unites the four characters. Overall, the temporal layering of the respective wars in which the family members served emphasizes that the war experience remains invariably the same in the 1950s, 1960s, and in 2003. García-Romero argues that by “utilizing the fugue structure, Hudes sets up the expectation of a multi-vocal landscape which surrounds one main theme or idea” underlining “that the impact of the subject of military service is all pervasive and that regardless of generation or military conflict, the devastation of war is universal”.[20] In Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, the grandfather’s commentary that the fugue is all “about untying the knot” can also be considered as a self-reflexive commentary on the joint experimentation with musical and theatrical aesthetics. The tragic tone is supported by the minor key of the grandfather’s flute when he plays a Bach tune several times throughout the entire play: “Minor key, it’s melancholy,” says the grandfather when he assumes the function of the narrator for a moment (36). However, scenes serving as preludes fragment the fugue and thus disrupt the process of melancholic resolution, reflecting that all members of the family choir have their individual stories that they do not necessarily share. The sense of alienation that results from any war experience inhibits the potential for perfect harmony. Supernatural Frictions and Musical Improvisation In Water by the Spoonful, the potential for dissonance to resolve into harmony vanishes even further as tragedy takes over the everyday. Early in the play, Elliot’s cousin Yazmin, a music professor, introduces free jazz as the governing aesthetic principle: Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, 1964. Dissonance is still a gateway to resolution. . .. Diminished chords, tritones, still didn’t have the right to be their own independent thought. In 1965 something changed. The ugliness bore no promise of a happy ending. . . . Coltrane democratized the notes. He said, they’re all equal. Freedom. It was called Free Jazz but freedom is a hard thing to express musically without spinning into noise. This is from Ascension, 1965.[21] The play’s experimentation with jazz aesthetics echoes its concern with the impossibility of both personal and collective traumata to be reconciled into a single and simple narrative of good versus evil that promises but ultimately is incapable of providing solace. The repercussions of violence and death permeate all actual and virtual spaces that the characters inhabit and force them to navigate the complex and intricate affective networks caused by tragic flaws. Water by the Spoonful exposes the uncanny layers of human suffering by tying them to the sonification of noise and freedom in free jazz. The repercussions of Elliot’s past actions become a haunting personification that continues to exist in the now of the world on stage, a spectral tear in the split coexistence of Yazmin’s lecture hall and the sandwich shop Elliot works at after his return. The ghosts from his past are literally trapped in-between worlds and the musical tunes reconceptualize the tragic device of the specter as they render the complexity and democratic dissonance of trauma narratives audible. While Yazmin plays Coltrane for the audience, a ghost appears on stage. The man goes to Elliot and addresses him in Arabic, disrupting his everyday activities. The apparition takes on the form of a civilian Elliot killed during the war, and his appearance in the second part of the trilogy can be understood as an element of dramatic escalation or theatrical noise. In Rancière’s words, the specter and Elliot are interlinked through their respective “bodily positions and movements” that visualize “the parceling out of the visible and the invisible” on stage.[22] The collision of the supernatural with the actual world acts out the distribution of inclusion and exclusion in the communal perception. In the first play, Elliot merely has nightmares about him, but in Water by the Spoonful, the remnant echo from the war becomes an anthropomorphic, supernatural manifestation that only Elliot perceives and renders it difficult for him to perform his task. GHOST: Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? ELLIOT: That’s three teriyaki onion with chicken. First with hots and onions. Second with everything. Third with extra bacon. Two spicy Italian with American cheese on whole grain. One BMT on flatbread. Good so far? GHOST: Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? (18). Without looking the ghost in the eye, Elliot is perturbed when the specter appears but tries to remain professional as he continues his conversation with a customer while the ghost insists on asking Elliot the same question over and over again. It translates into a concern of legal status: “Can I please have my passport back?” (11). The passport—Elliot always carries it in his pocket—acquires a symbolic value on stage for the freedom that Elliot took from a man, i.e. the freedom to live, but also the freedom to pass borders, and, ultimately, to pass peacefully over the threshold to the afterlife. The clashing of languages and the asymmetrical communication situation with an inaudible third party on the phone emphasize their entanglement in the conflict between two nations that holds them captive. The discrepancy between the food order and the struggle for life and freedom could be read as an instance of dramatic irony that underlines the urgency which pervades the situation. In The Happiest Song Plays Last, we finally learn that the passport represents a constant reminder to Elliot’s hamartia or, in other words, the fatal misjudgment that he confesses when he acknowledges that he “knew he was a civilian” in front of his family: “At first I thought it was an AK in his hands. Split second before I shoot, I’m like, that’s a cricket bat. And then I pulled the trigger and took his face off. How am I supposed to tell anyone that?”[23] As long as the passport is not returned to its owner, the suffering continues for all parties involved. Since the passport cannot be returned despite the attempts Elliot makes to send it to the civilian’s family, the suffering continues indefinitely without any prospect of forgiveness or absolution. “Man makes ghost, man keeps ghost,” says one character near the end of The Happiest Song Plays Last (83) and in a pivotal moment when Elliot meets Ali, an ex-Iraqi Armed Forces soldier, the only possibility for resolution is that they can acknowledge each other: “No forgive. I cannot forgive. But you know real who I am. I know real who you are. Witness for each other” (36). The mutual recognition evoked in the scene rejects the possibility of a happy ending while still offering an avenue for reconciliation. It suggests that Elliot’s confession can be considered as the impetus for transforming the haunting memories of the past, the noise, into a jarring, yet encompassing narrative that consists of multiple, dissonant layers told collectively. As García-Romero observes, Hudes adopts the four principles of “cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation” [24] established by the teacher and playwright María Irene Fornés in her dramatic productions. The ghost highlights how closely connected these aspects are in Hudes’s work.[25] On the one hand, the specter is a manifestation of the multiple invisible convergences between hybrid cultural identities and the complex histories emerging from conflict that are potentially silenced. On the other hand, the specter itself is a theatrical experiment. The impossible presence of the dead materializes on stage as a reminder of the potential for fatal misjudgments that haunts every violent confrontation, thus opening up a space for the collective negotiation of the invisible repercussions of war and its silencing effects on the human subject such as trauma or death. Human Connections and Haunting Specters of Alienation Alienation thwarts the successful pursuit of belonging for the characters in the Elliot Trilogy. Any form of human connection that they establish is frail and precarious, but they persist in their search for an allegiance to family and community. In Water by the Spoonful, the additional staging of the virtual dimension of the internet as a potential space for human connections furthers the dominant theme of belonging. The chat room complements the other spatial layers of the lecture hall, the realm of the dead, and Elliot’s living environment. Staged at the same time, these spheres resonate with the formal commitment of Hudes to the delineated free jazz aesthetics since their simultaneity shows how Elliot and other characters seek to overcome their sense of isolation. All spaces are equal and prone to intersect at any time throughout the play. Thus, the theatrical stage is fraught with spatial overlaps and the various actions in different places and spheres often intersect in dissonance, threatening to “spin . . . into noise” (18). The experimental engagement with digital space or, more precisely, the virtual promise of second chances in life upheld by an online community takes center stage in Water by the Spoonful. Scenes in the experiential world alternate with staged conversations in an online chat room and a virtual self-help group hosted by Elliot’s birth mother, a recovered drug addict. Her motivation is only revealed when the separation of her online and offline identities collapses and the virtual clashes with the real world. This happens when Elliot walks in on her in a café where she is meeting an online community member who needs advice. ELLIOT: I looked at that chat room once. The woman I saw there? She’s literally not the same person I know. (To John) Did she tell you how she became such a saint? JOHN: We all have skeletons. ELLIOT: Yeah well she’s an archeological dig. Did she tell you about her daughter? (51). During this encounter, two conceptions of community meet: the online communities that emerged in the digital age and the traditional institution of family that Christopher Perricone considers as a classical tragic theme: “It is essential to Aristotle’s idea of tragedy . . . that it be a family affair.”[26] Perricone argues that the principle of cooperation and support in the family is routinely violated in Greek drama. He writes: “In tragic families, mothers . . . kill their children. Fathers . . . kill their children. Sons routinely kill their fathers. Brothers and sisters . . . kill each other . . . . Tragedy, insofar as it is implicitly a family affair, should not happen. Family members should cooperate.”[27] In Water by the Spoonful, Elliot’s mother did not offer support because she left her small children to their own devices when they fell sick with the stomach flu, an error in judgement that ends in the death of Elliot’s younger sister. Instead of following the doctor’s orders to “give . . . [the] kids a spoonful of water every five minutes,” she leaves them alone to take drugs (52). Neglecting the easiest task leads to tragedy, as Elliot points out: “But you couldn’t stick to something simple like that. You couldn’t sit still like that. You had to have your thing. That’s where I stop remembering” (52). During the confrontation in the café, the mother’s attempt to reinvent herself online fails. In the end, both mother and son are trapped in a cycle of suffering and trauma caused by their respective share in another person’s loss of life. The hamartia becomes a flaw that is passed on from one generation to another. For Perricone, “the ultimate cause of tragedy—is that tragedy hits a Darwinian ‘nerve.’ That ‘nerve’ is the power of the family and the place of the family in the human condition . . . . Think of tragedy as the Darwinian cautionary tale, par excellence.”[28] Along these lines, Water by the Spoonful taps into the classic material of Greek tragedy and reconfigures it for contemporary purposes. In The Happiest Song Plays Last, tragedy becomes a universal matter for several families because of Elliot’s involvement in the war and his hamartia. “Our son is marked. He is going to inherit this,” says Elliot’s pregnant girlfriend Shar, when she learns about the killing of Taarek Taleb (84). The mark of tragedy that she fears her child will inherit echoes the devastation of the remaining family in Iraq. According to a letter that Elliot shares with her, the son who witnesses the violent death of his father does not talk anymore. In the letter, Ali, whom he asked to find the man’s family and to give them the passport that has been in his possession over the years, describes the wife’s account of the situation: “American soldier shoots him in face. He is pretending surprise. American soldier spits on body, she says. American soldier takes wallet and runs away” (83). The roles of father and husband in her account personalize the previously unnamed Iraqi civilian and turn the haunting ghost into a fully fleshed out human being. At the same time, the main protagonist, Elliot, becomes an anonymous American soldier whose actions in this role expose the demise of human ethics in times of war. “I can’t get rid of this,” Elliot says, referring to both the passport and the act itself, after reading the letter (84). The hamartia cannot be redeemed and the resulting human connection between the families is irrevocably marked by tragedy. Conclusion: Tragic Resonances in Contemporary Drama The reconceptualization of tragedy lies at the heart of Hudes’s dramatic conception of an experimental exploration of the sensible. The Elliot Trilogy serves as a resounding echo chamber between classical drama and a reconfiguration that recognizes the contemporary specificities of the human condition in the twenty-first century. The multiplication and overlap of voices, spaces, and their conjunction with supernatural or spiritual forces invoke haunting echoes that resonate back and forth from one play to another, between each character and the stories they share with their family, and between classical tragic material and contemporary theater. As Robert Andreach concludes in his book Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theater: “If Aristotelian form is dead, a new order of forms can restore the genre to life.”[29] In the Elliot Trilogy, the echoes of a tragic past reverberate in the present and spheres that seem incompatible at first sight reveal their permeability and expose the frailty of the human existence. Overall, Hudes’s playwriting is proof for the ongoing relevance of the tragic in the twenty-first century and for the genre’s extensive capacity to change. Nathalie Aghoro is Assistant Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. She earned her doctorate with a PhD thesis on conceptions of voice and sound in contemporary American novels by Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jennifer Egan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. She is the co-editor of the JCDE special issue on Theatre and Mobility (with Kerstin Schmidt) and her publications include essays on postmodern novels, contemporary literature, and Afrofuturism in music. [1] George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (2004): 2–3. [2] Anne García-Romero, The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 161. [3] Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Outstanding Broadway Dramas and Comedies: Pulitzer Prize Winning Theater Productions (Zürich: LIT, 2013), 194. [4] Oregon Shakespeare Festival, “Playwright Notes: Leaving a Legacy,” 7:25, posted on 27 October 2014, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YphF3Qe6M54. [5] Ibid . [6] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2011), 12–13. [7] Steiner, “‘Tragedy’: Reconsidered,” 4. [8] Ibid. , 2–3. In this sense, apolis characterizes the hero as a subject devoid of a place in the world. [9] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. [10] Ibid., 12. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid., 14. [13] Ibid., 17–18. [14] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 36. (emphasis original) [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid., 37. [17] Paul Raimond Daniels, Nietzsche and “The Birth of Tragedy” (London: Routledge, 2013), 76. [18] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 37. [19] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 12. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [20] García-Romero, “Fugue, Hip Hop and Soap Opera: Transcultural Connections and Theatrical Experimentation in Twenty-First Century US Latina Playwriting,” Latin American Theatre Review 43, no. 1 (2009): 88. [21] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 18. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [22] Rancière, The Birth of Tragedy, 19. [23] Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Happiest Song Plays Last (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 85. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [24] García-Romero, The Fornes Frame, 6. [26] Christopher Perricone, “Tragedy: A Lesson in Survival,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 1 (2010): 76. [27] Ibid. , 81. [28] Ibid. , 82. [29] Robert J Andreach, Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham: University Press of America, 2014), 174. "Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy" by Nathalie Aghoro ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre" by Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler "Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003)" by Konstantinos Blatanis "Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy" by Nathalie Aghoro "'Take Caroline Away': Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change" by Joanna Mansbridge "The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America" by Julia Rössler "Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a ‘Lesbian Suicide Musical’" by Maureen McDonnell www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References 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.

Kelly I. Aliano Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano By Published on December 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF QUEERING DRAG: REDEFINING THE DISCOURSE OF GENDER BENDING. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. The cultural visibility and prevalence of drag performance has changed dramatically in the fifteen years since the premiere of the television program RuPaul’s Drag Race. Indeed, drag is more commonly presented in the popular culture sphere, as well as more commonly targeted by conservative attacks, than perhaps ever before. Because of this increased cultural significance, there is a renewed need to consider drag from a scholarly perspective. Meredith Heller’s Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending takes up this challenge, offering insight into “the scope of drag practice” (xi) and providing new strategies for discussing drag. Heller’s work is a useful resource for furthering the work of critically engaging drag as a performative and artistic medium that is distinctly queer. Heller reinforces the notion of queer as “not align[ing] with hegemonic structures and expectations” (6), so it can remain a valuable and expansive theoretical framework for discussing performance. Heller’s discussion here pushes beyond other definitions of drag, such as Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood’s in The Drag Queen Anthology , that situate it merely as a performance that one undertakes to convince spectators that they are an individual of the opposing gender. Instead, Heller asks us to conceptualize drag as a discursive practice that includes those witnessing the practice as well as those performing it. Heller’s analysis offers us a new framework for thinking about drag by highlighting the limitations of current language to discuss the practice to use it to consider a more expansive range of performance modes while providing “new definitional guidelines for naming an act as gender-bending” (6). This new perspective centers what a body communicates as opposed to presumptions about said body itself. Queering Drag considers drag as being “what performers do rather than who they are” (17-18). Heller admirably contends with the extensive literature on drag, such as the work of J. Halberstam, Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, and Esther Newton. She then offers a meaningful critique of how language has heretofore been used to discuss the practice without merely dismissing some of the field’s key voices. The lens Heller provides allows for a more comprehensive array of performances to be claimed as queer. However, there is a possibility that such a widely encompassing perspective will undercut the legacy of specifically queer-identified performance modes. Heller intentionally chose examples that have “been linguistically coded or archived as done by women or as a women’s practice” (11) because of the ways in which this might challenge the previously established dominant narrative of drag. To implement this new theorizing of drag, Heller considers “four types of US-based gender-bending”: “male impersonation, sexless mythical characters, queer butchness, and contemporary drag kinging” (33). The examples take us through popular entertainment of the nineteenth century to El Teatro Campesino to the Jewel Box Revue to a variety of community spaces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries incorporating drag king performance. The examples, taken together, offer an interesting discussion of drag that puts women performers–broadly defined–at the center of that practice. The strict framework for performance examples here also offers an opportunity for future scholarship to consider how Heller’s framework might apply to other forms of performance claimed or defined as drag. The studies within individual chapters historicize their subjects well. Chapter 2, which explores performers in vaudeville and variety shows, considers the impact of drag king acts explicitly done for financial gain, for example, as opposed to those covered in the subsequent chapters that were more concerned with “identity politics, civil rights, or community affiliation” (72). It provides meaningful insight into the lived experiences of these figures alongside their popularity on stage. In the next chapter, on El Teatro Campesino, Heller considers the women members of the company and the ways in which their choice to perform in gender-bending projects allowed them to find “empowerment… without wholly acquiescing to unwanted sexual and gender positions” (78). This analysis centers on so-called “sexless” roles, which were by their very nature separate from the gendered identities of the performers. The discussion considers the racialized experience of gender for these performers, a concept expanded in the next chapter on Black queer performers, particularly those active in the Jewel Box Revue. Heller sees the “butch” presentation of these women as being in direct defiance of cisgender norms and “a public signifier of… queer sexual desire” (116). Chapter 5 builds on this discussion, centering smaller-scale presentations of drag king performance, with an emphasis on defining the practice as “fundamentally marked by performers’ intents to express identity queerness or highlight oppressive identity norms” (164). This is a useful framework for considering how to apply Heller’s theories beyond the examples she includes in this volume: we must center the performer’s goal with the performance, not the nature of what we perceive as being performed. Each chapter, on its own, offers a worthwhile and well-analyzed case study, although the book would benefit from a stronger thread connecting the disparate examples across the chapters. Still, Queering Drag offers diverse examples of gender-bending performance and provides a valuable framework for analyzing other examples of drag performance. In highlighting the book’s potential limitations in her conclusion, Heller wisely notes “that it is the very quality of being undefined, unnamed, and unintelligible that makes queer performance queer” (194). Nonetheless, Queering Drag provides a useful theoretical framework and compelling examples from over a century and is thus a valuable entry into the discussion of queer performance. It brings concepts from gender and sexuality theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault into conversation with the rich history of theorizations of drag performance. Then it updates those concepts for our contemporary moment. Heller’s scholarship allows us to contend with the complexities of gender-bent performance by dialoguing about gender in ways that successfully challenge discourses of binary oppositions and instead embrace “the many ways people do gender” (199). This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References About The Authors KELLY I. ALIANO is the author of Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History (McFarland, 2019); The Performance of Video Games (McFarland, 2022); and Immersive Storytelling and Spectatorship in Theatre, Museums, and Video Games (Routledge, 2025). She teaches in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College and is the Manager of Education Special Projects at The New York Historical. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Christen Mandracchia Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined Christen Mandracchia By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The DemocraticRepublic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furnitureand a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old carbattery powers the lights and audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the cornerof the room. ([1]) How might you approach these opening stage directions from Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Ruined ? Would you start by picturing specific pieces of furniture? Does the quality and type of sound come to mind first? How does your own positionality inform these choices? As a theatre and performance scholar who also serves as a production manager, designer, and professor, I am rarely able to separate a scholarly reading from the material conditions of production. Thus, I approach these stage directions through many different lenses. For example, as a sound designer, I notice that the first specific thing Nottage mentions is the “sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest” followed by a reference to an audio system that is plugged into “an old car battery.” These details would impact technical and artistic choices I might make. Similarly, as a lighting designer, I notice that the same battery powers the lights, which means that a production would likely need practical lighting instruments to be hung around the set, in addition to the stage lights. A props-centered approach is particularly compelling because Nottage lists “makeshift furniture” – a phrase which sparks a larger conversation, not just about the logistics of acquiring or building these objects for the stage, but one which hails the production team into the world of the play and into the minds of the characters. Therein lies the challenge. Ruined is a 2011 drama which tells the story of Mama Nadi, a Mother Courage-like figure who owns and operates the described bar in the Congolese rain forest. Her patrons are often miners of the mineral coltan, used in cellular phones, and soldiers on both sides of a bloody civil war. What does “makeshift furniture” look like in the world of this play? What objects are available to these characters, and where do these objects come from? What were these objects originally intended for and what does their second life as “makeshift furniture” reveal about the objectives, survival, innovation, and pleasure of the characters? When members of a production team must put themselves in the place of the characters to make artistic decisions, other aspects of our positionalities manifest themselves as assets or limits in this theatrical process. For example, how would my experiences as a white-ethnic, middle-class, and queer theatre scholar/practitioner in the United States help or hinder my ability to access the world of the play and the lived experiences of the characters to make well-informed, ethical, and dramaturgically accurate production decisions? I begin with this discussion of props because I contend that delving into the specific material histories of objects in the text provides new avenues of nuance and complexity that can help bridge the gap between Western scholarly, practical, and personal lived experiences and those of the characters. An article like “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty establishes what is at stake when Western knowledge production relies on archetypes instead of the material realities of the “third world” — especially women. She describes this archetype of the “average third world woman” as falling into gendered stereotypes such as sexual constraint, and “third world” stereotypes of “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.” ( [2] ) She then argues that the victim narrative, in particular, reduces the complexities of the lives of “third world” women to socioeconomic or sexual terms, reinforcing the sexist stereotype of women as weak. ( [3] ) In focusing on the material objects listed in a play like Ruined , through an application of material culture theory as a methodology, this article outlines how Western theatre makers and scholars can approach plays set in the “third world” in a way that Mohanty argues would be more grounded in the “material and ideological power structures” which shape these women’s lives. ( [4] ) Toward this end, Ruined is a useful vehicle for the application of a material culture reading precisely because the play was created with the intent to “sustain the complexity” of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, knowing that her Western “first-world” audience would only know about the conflict through fragmented news clips. ( [5] ) Nottage wrote the play based on ethnographic testimony of real women who survived the war, but she also uses specifically-named material objects in the text to ground the character’s larger given circumstances in material reality. In the play’s first descriptive paragraphs, referenced above, Nottage paints a picture of a place that is “ worn ” but “ cheerful ,” “ rundown ” but “ tropical ”—evoking a comfortable place more than a war zone. As a play about what Mohanty terms the “third world” written for a “first world” audience, Nottage does not fully immerse the audience in the horrors of war immediately. I use the phrase “third world” in this context throughout this paper because it is the word that Mohanty uses to describe the groups of women who fall under this Western label. “Third world,” in its immediate context, refers to the Cold War language which identified the “first world” as the capitalist nations, who were in opposition to the Soviet Union and the expansion of communism. As Mohanty details, this term has taken on more cultural meanings than its technical use from the Cold War era—so that even words like “Western” are tied to the division between “first” and “third” world. I use the term, knowing that it is outdated and problematic in many ways, but also knowing that many of the perceptions associated with this word still exist. I use it with the knowledge that it is a cultural touchstone, conjuring a specific iconography which I hope to complicate. Hence, I will keep it in quotations to highlight the fact that it is a construction. The first allusion to violence happens five lines into the first scene, where Mama Nadi exclaims to her stock supplier Christian, a “ perpetually cheerful traveling salesman ” that she has been expecting him for three weeks. Christian explains that “Every two kilometers a boy with a Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling.” ( [6] ) Nottage begins to reveal the larger given circumstances of the play through specific mentions of an object: the Russian-made and distributed Kalashnikov, often referred to in American lexicon as an “AK.” ( [7] ) In his book on gun history aptly titled The Gun , CJ Chivers informs readers that More than six decades after its design and initial distribution, more than fifty national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies. But its fuller terrain lies outside the sphere of conventional force. The Kalashnikov [culturally] marks the guerilla, the terrorist, the child soldier, the dictator, and the thug — all of whom have found it to be a ready equalizer against morally or materially superior foes. ( [8] ) Because the AK, especially the infamous AK-47, is often wielded by the NATO members’ military opponents, it is often viewed, in the American cultural archive, as a “bad guy” weapon. Conversely, it is often seen by those who wield them as a symbol of defiance against colonial powers and Western, capitalist values. For the characters in the first scene of Ruined , it represents their position as both citizens of a post-colonial, “third world” country and their vulnerability to violence at the hands of their own countrymen — thus complicating the “bad guy/good guy” or “Western/Anti-Western” binaries. Nottage’s specific mention of the Kalashnikov and other objects in the script serves as what the Combahee River Collective calls “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” ( [9] ) Nottage’s ability to “sustain the complexity” of many topics has earned her much critical acclaim and scholarly attention. According to data from American Theatre , Nottage was the most produced playwright for the 2022-2023 theatre season in the United States. ( [10] ) Her play Clyde’s earned the top spot as the most produced play, with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat at number five. Intimate Apparel was the most produced play of the 2005-2006 season and the fifth most-produced play of the 2006-2007 season. ( [11] ) Ruined held the fourth spot in the 2010-2011 season. Poignantly, Intimate Apparel returned to the top-ten list in 2016-2017, and Sweat was second in the 2018-2019 season before returning to the list for 2022-2023. The data suggests that Nottage’s plays have enjoyed many “lives” beyond their initial premiere dates. As Nottage’s work continues to weave in and out of America’s top ten lists, it is necessary for scholarship to reexamine her work and the body of scholarly and dramaturgical literature dedicated to her plays. Each new “life” evidences a relevance or usefulness to public discourse in the United States on political issues of national interest including immigration, deindustrialization, globalization, and incarceration. Likewise, as national discourses now include robust discussions of the environmental and moral ethics of mining minerals in “third world” countries for electric vehicle batteries, Ruined offers readers and spectators a material methodology that can help to circumvent many of the traps of homogenization, reduction, or “Othering” that can too-often arise in public discourses on the “third world” and its women. Third World Feminism and Material Culture Theory Cultural theorist Celia Lury defines material culture as “ a culture of the use or appropriation of objects or things. ” ( [12] ) She continues: “The first half of the term — ‘material’ — points to the significance of stuff, of things in everyday practices, while the second half —‘ culture’ — indicates that this attention to the materials of everyday life is combined with a concern with the cultural, with norms, values and practices.” ( [13] ) A material culture theory reading of Nottage’s script follows what Mohanty insists that Western beholders should do every time we encounter stories of women in the “third world.” Material culture theory is an interdisciplinary way of analyzing the various ways that objects are connected to larger given circumstances and power dynamics. For marginalized groups who might be absent from the written archive, material culture theory is a way to give voice to the voiceless, or to highlight the everyday lives of people who never wrote about themselves. Material culture theory, however, is not to be confused with materialism or the Marxist tradition of historic materialism, which often only regards material objects in terms of their means of production, consumption, and the role they play in exploitation. In centering the systems of oppression in a discussion on “third world” Black women, there is a danger of falling into the “archetypal victim” that Mohanty warns against. Material culture theory considers the role that objects play in these negotiations: its production — particularly the unseen labor that goes into making it and maintaining it — but also its intended function, the ways that it participates in the creation of self-identity, its special relationships to people and other objects, and how these meanings change over time. ( [14] ) A study of objects in the script reveals the interlocking oppressions which affect the characters’ everyday lives, but also how these objects can be used as sites of agency, survival, resistance, or other negotiations of power within that structure. The play’s original director, Kate Whoriskey, states, “As a director committed to staging complexity, my task is to counter the drama with humor, spirit and wit, and to treat the stories collected in Central Africa with the understanding that at every moment the Congolese are determined to survive.” ( [15] ) I am interested in the way that role that objects play in the leveraging of these dramatic moments in favor of survival, as reflective of the way that real women in the Congo, such as the ones that this play is based on, do the same. Furthermore, material culture theory resists the anti-materialism (victim/passive) narrative that suggests that consumers are manipulated or subordinated into purchasing or gathering things. The production and consumption of material objects can just as much oppress an individual as it can empower one. Like “third world” feminism, material culture theory demands that a methodology be used to consider the individual circumstances of an object’s relationship to a person, time, and place to “sustain the complexity,” as Nottage would say. I’d like to push the conversation beyond mere survival into one of joy and pleasure. Mohanty warns that confining the “third world” woman to a survival narrative can perpetuate their image as “archetypal victims,” and “freezes” them into “objects-who-defend themselves.” ( [16] ) This essay thus considers how material objects can be used as both a means of survival and pleasure. This positioning comes in direct response to critics who have chosen to praise the play’s portrayal of sexual violence but decry the fact that Nottage wrote a romantic ending for her principle leads. Other scholars, such as Jeff Paden, have defended the play’s romantic ending in the name of its political potency. ( [17] ) Is the ending of a Black/postcolonial play predetermined to be sad or ambiguous? If so, who determines this? It is possible that this ending disturbed critics because it challenged preconceived Western notions of what the “third world” is supposed to be. And perhaps the justification of “third world” characters’ pleasure determined by its political efficacy. In the context of this paper, “third world” feminism manifests itself as both Black feminism and postcolonial feminism with an emphasis on self-definition, and how material objects are used to that end. A material culture theory reading of the text that considers how these objects contribute to the world-making that Nottage employs insists that the objects in the script are more than a props list. They are a means understanding the complex world contexts that a production has taken on the responsibility to portray. Fanta, Don’t You Wanna? The field of material culture theory has a plethora of methods for analyzing these relationships. Many are in the form of a series of questions which can be applied to an object. This section will use the questions developed by Igor Kopytoff to go through the objects in the script for Ruined to identify the characters’ material circumstances, which reveal their position in larger systems and “interlocking oppressions.” While detailing the material circumstances and synthesis of oppression is only a first step, it is a vital one. Kopytoff approaches the above considerations of a material object as a “cultural biography” of a thing. “In doing the biography of a thing,” he says, “one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized?” ( [18] ) Kopytoff is working within an anthropological framework, however, this paper is not an anthropological treatment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While the characters and events of the play are based on ethnographic testimony from real women from the DRC, Ruined is ultimately a theatrical script, and the material objects in this play exist within the larger given circumstances that Nottage has created for the stage. In this material culture reading, anthropology is replaced with script analysis and dramaturgical research, although the same questions that Kopytoff asks are used. Consider the opening stage directions of the play: “ A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The Democratic Republic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furniture and a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old car battery powers the audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the corner of the room .” ( [19] ) These stage directions establish the immediate location of the play: a small mining town in the Ituri rain forest. But they also emphasize that the owner of the bar/brothel, who is about to be introduced as “ Mama Nadi, early forties, an attractive woman with an arrogant stride and majestic air ,” has recycled and repurposed items beyond their original functions. ( [20] ) She has put “a lot of effort” into curating these objects in a way that produces pleasure for her and her customers. The cultural biographies of the “ makeshift furniture ,” “ washtubs ,” and “ car battery ” have changed with time and with a new owner, and their positioning in this space speaks to Mama Nadi’s larger given circumstances as well as the ways that she uses objects to create her own space within those circumstances. Before Nottage mentions the Kalashnikov, she notes that Christian is drinking a Fanta soda. ( [21] ) Like the Kalashnikov, Fanta has a collective cultural meaning in “first world” material culture. While it would be difficult to impossible to track each individual audience member’s knowledge, recognition, and response to these objects in the script, Fanta’s massive American marketing campaign in the early 2000s offers clues to the audience’s possible associations. The 2001 Fanta television commercial, featuring the tropically themed female group of four, the Fantanas, and their catchy, Latinx-inspired, double-entendre jingle “Fanta, Don’t You Wanna” branded the soda as a fun and sexy party drink, associated with the Global South, where it was already incredibly popular. ( [22] ) At first glance, Christian’s choice to order a soda in a bar, specifically a Fanta, may evoke such cultural associations with fun and pleasure. The cultural biography of Fanta can serve to connect the image of the smiling African salesman character to the “first world” audience and help us understand the relationship between our material culture and the characters’. Because Fanta is specific, its biography is easier to trace as a first example. ( [23] ) The first question that Kopytoff would ask about a bottle of Fanta is, “Where does the thing come from and who made it?” A quick Google search can tell me that “Fanta is a brand of fruit-flavored carbonated drinks created by The Coca-Cola Company and marketed globally.” ( [24] ) However, Kopytoff’s question forces one to search deeper for the unseen labor and processes which created the beverage and brought it to Christian’s hands in Mama Nadi’s bar. Fanta’s presence in this space is evidence of globalization. The Coca-Cola Company is an American corporation, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, which works with local bottling partners all over the world. ( [25] ) In Africa, at the time that the play was written, the largest partner was SABMiller, a British brewing company based in London. ( [26] ) The bottling and brewing plants would be in African countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Comoros, Mayotte, Swaziland, Botswana and Zambia — but not the Democratic Republic of Congo. ( [27] ) In the DRC, the Coca-Cola bottling company is the Barlima Brewery, founded by Belgian businessmen during colonial occupation and owned, since 1986, by the Dutch Heineken Corporation. ( [28] ) The list of Coca-Cola products bottled at Barlima does not include Fanta, nor is it listed as being distributed in the DRC. Thus, the Fanta was made by African workers in plants owned by the Dutch, in partnership with an American company, and brought to Mama Nadi’s bar by the black market. ( [29] ) Like the exchange of the Kalashnikov rifles outside of conventional forces, Mama Nadi’s business exists outside of the standard market. She is simultaneously an avid capitalist and a disruptor of capitalist markets, defying simple or clean categories. By asking one simple question of a stage direction on the first page of the script, this methodology has yielded valuable information on the given circumstances of the play and the post-colonial, racial, and capitalist power dynamics of which the characters find themselves. Material Culture as Survival A strictly materialist reading of these circumstances related to Fanta would highlight the role that these systems play in oppressing characters like Mama Nadi. For example, the dialogue of the first scene explains that the movement of goods such as Fanta is difficult due to rebel checkpoints and taxes. A few lines after discussing the joys of his soda, Christian exclaims the quote from earlier about the Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling: “Toll, tax, tariff. They invent reasons to lighten your load.” ([30]) The material objects cannot be separated from the larger given circumstances of the piece. For example, Mama pours herself a Primus beer while Christian drinks his Fanta. Primus beer is brewed in the same Barlima Brewry which partners with Coca-Cola and is owned by the Dutch Heineken Group. Unlike Fanta, which does not distribute in the DRC, Primus has exclusivity deals with bars all over the country, and Heineken pays roughly one million dollars to the rebels to pass their checkpoints so that the beer can be distributed. ([31]) The connections between Heineken and the armed conflict in the DRC has yet to be explored in its entirety. Olivier van Beemen’s explosive book Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed exposes the company’s ties to corruption, sexual violence, human rights violations, and even genocide in the 1990s. ([32]) A material culture reading acknowledges these systems of oppression, but also asks what the object means for the characters themselves, thus centering them in the narrative, and not the multinational corporations. Here, for example, Primus beer is a significant portion of Mama’s revenue. When Mr. Harari discusses the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining and armed “two-bit militias battling for the keys to hell,” Mama responds to these factors by declaring, “True, chérie, but someone must provide them with beer and distractions.” ( [33] ) Primus is such a large part of Mama’s business that the parrot she keeps in the bar ends the play by squawking, “Mama! Primus! Mama! Primus!” ( [34] ) For Mama, her bar is more than a business, it is survival for her and the girls in her employment as prostitutes. Mama’s bar is established as a safe zone in the first scene when Christian brings his niece Sophie to work there: “I told my family I’d find a place for her . . . And here at least I know she’ll be safe. Fed.” ( [35] ) This fact is stated again in the second act when Mama asserts, “My girls, Emilene, Mazima, Josephine, ask them, they’d rather be here, than back out there in their villages where they are taken without regard. They’re safer with me than in their own homes.” ( [36] ) She describes how the interlocking oppressions which connect natural resources, multinational corporations, beer, and armed conflict also protect her: beer makes the soldiers happy and they protect her business. “Who would protect my business if [the Commander] turned on me?” she says. ( [37] ) This is emphasized when Mr. Harari exclaims to Mama, “Just, be careful, where will I drink if anything happens to you?” ( [38] ) The line emphasizes the fact that her bar is the only one in the area. By selling beer in the rainforest, she meets supply and demand for pleasure in their bleak circumstances. In this way, her business is useful to forces that would otherwise destroy her and the women she protects. Her usefulness, and therefore her financial and physical security, is symbiotically tied to Primus beer. A reading which only focuses on the means by which Primus is produced, distributed, and tied to rebel groups misses the complex material circumstances which tie it to the characters’ survival. Kopytoff asserts that a “cultural biography” of an object must consider the perspective by which one assesses an object. ( [39] ) Does one read the value of Primus beer based on how much Heineken profits from it, how much rebels profit from it, or how much Mama profits from it? The answer is to consider all of them, but to center Mama’s perspective to determine how the object is culturally marked within the world of Nottage’s script. What does her world look like without Fanta or Primus? Thanks to a report by The Economist in 2018, there is little need for speculation. In between 2009 — when Ruined was researched and written — and 2018, Heineken was forced to close two of its breweries in the DRC due to international pressures over their ties to Barlima Brewing Co. and business practices in those regions. The article explains that since 2016, “In western Congo, Angolan beer in cans—less tasty but cheaper than Primus or Tembo—has flooded the market. It is not sold at cost since the smugglers’ main aim is to acquire dollars to trade on the black market in Angola.” ( [40] ) The article also reports that “violence is worsening.” Imagining that this happened while Mama is trying to run her business, she would have to pay more money for beer, which is described as being lower quality. Furthermore, the commercial branding of Primus within the script, and in reality, is of the upmost importance. Kopytoff’s final question asks, “What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” ( [41] ) Both The Economist and Olivier van Beeman discuss how Primus is ingrained in Congolese culture as large sponsors of the music industry, and how Heineken sponsors campus fashion shows at universities, free nights in dance clubs, and music and sporting events. ( [42] ) This gendered meaning of the beer, and its connection to the music industry, is evident in Mama Nadi’s bar where she and Sophie sing songs about beer and about warriors. ( [43] ) In the script, when soldiers enter her bar, they immediately ask for one or two bottles of Primus, and at other times refer to themselves as “warriors” or perform hyper-masculinity. ( [44] ) What would happen if Mama told them that she does not have Primus beer in her stock? Because so much of her survival depends on the happiness of her customers, a negation of the culturally significant pleasure of drinking Primus beer could potentially result in the bar’s value decreasing. Again, the connection between Primus beer, the countries commercial and cultural institutions, and cultural markers for masculinity “sustains the complexity” of the material conditions of the characters’ lives as it also raises the stakes for what would happen if Primus were unavailable to Mama’s bar. The same can be said for mentions of the mineral coltan in the script, which is the one material object that has dominated many discourses in dramaturgy packets. From the first scene, Nottage establishes the importance of this object when Christian says, “All along the road people are talking about how this red dirt is rich with coltan.” ( [45] ) As the scenes progress, the audience is informed of the impact that coltan mining has had on the Congo, and the human rights violations which are connected to the mining and selling of this mineral for electronic devices. In fact, much of the first two scenes is dedicated to explaining this exposition, signaling that this material object is the lynchpin which connects the local economy, the armed conflict, and the sexual violence perpetrated against women. Nottage has positioned the action of the play a few months after coltan had been discovered in the rainforest. Mama says, “Six months ago it was just more black dirt,” ( [46] ) Mr. Harari informs Mama that, “in this damnable age of the mobile phone it's become quite the precious ore...” ( [47] ) Christian establishes that there are large groups of miners coming to the area: “Suddenly everyone has a shovel, and wants to stake a claim since that boastful pygmy dug up his fortune in the reserve. I guarantee there will be twice as many miners here by September.” ( [48] ) This makes Mama Nadi happy, because it means that she will have more customers, however, the character Salima connects the coltan mining to the armed conflict and atrocities, recounting how “fifteen Hema men were shot dead and buried in their own mining pit, in mud so thick it swallow them right into the ground without mercy. He say one man stuff the coltan into his mouth to keep the soldiers from stealing his hard work, and they split his belly open with a machete. ‘It’ll show him for stealing,’ he say, bragging like I should be congratulating him.” ( [49] ) Like Primus, the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining are clear, but so is the fact that Mama’s business depends on it. “Me, I thank God for deep dirty holes like Yaka-yaka,” Mama says of the local mine. ( [50] ) Since Ruined premiered in 2009, dramaturgy packets, study guides, and program notes have addressed the issue of conflict minerals, as they appear in the play, but most fail to address their importance to the characters’ survival. In a way, these dramaturgs have performed the first part of Kopytoff’s methodology on cell phones and other electronic devices that the audience might own, but do not complete the “cultural biography.” For example, Charlie Payne of the Almeida Theatre in London suggests a practical exercise for teachers and students titled “There’s no blood on my mobile!” He instructs his audience to read the context articles he has provided and “Brainstorm the supply chain, or ‘conveyor belt’, of coltan — how does it reach the consumer and what are the consequences of mobile phone consumerism in the West? Now think about this physically. Create six, eightbeat phrases — three relating to the use of coltan and three highlighting its impact in the DRC. Now try playing these all together — a literal conveyer belt from the mines to the consumer.” ( [51] ) Connected to a 2011 production, Berkely Rep Magazine featured a section entitled, “Coltan: From the Congo to you,” reporting that “In the 1990s and early 2000s, coltan emerged as a globally significant commodity essential to the production of digital technology. As world demand for mobile phones, laptops, PlayStations, and digital cameras exploded, tech industries came to increasingly rely on coltan from the Congo, which has an estimated 80% of the world’s reserves.” ( [52] ) A 2011 study guide from Arena Stage cites a United Nations study which reports that, “all parties involved in the conflict have been involved in the mining and sale of coltan. The money rebels and militias receive from these sales helps them buy more weapons and supplies for the war.” ( [53] ) These studies position the audience in relation to the events in the play, but in focusing on making the interlocking oppressions of coltan, cell phones, rebel militias, and sexual violence the sole narrative of the dramaturgy, it centers the victim narrative without adding the nuances of how coltan mining has become a means of survival for women in the DRC. As with Primus beer, the importance of coltan to survival in the DRC was highlighted in the real-world aftermath of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, section 1502, which requited “companies trading on U.S. securities exchanges to determine through supply-chain due diligence whether or not their products contain conflict minerals from DRC or neighboring countries, and report their findings annually to the SEC [Securities Exchange Commission].” ( [54] ) The Washington Post reported that, “In the fall of 2010, two months after the law’s signing, Congo’s government halted mining for six months — even at facilities not controlled by armed groups. The move had tremendous repercussions in a country where, by some estimates, a sixth of the 70 million inhabitants depend on artisanal mining.” ( [55] ) By 2014, the negative effects were felt in the Congo, where out of the nation’s hundreds of mines, only a handful were “tagged” as “conflict free.” ( [56] ) While the law was passed in an effort to curtail the stimulant role of the mining in armed conflicts, a follow up article from 2018 reports that “militias in eastern Congo have only proliferated. Miners are still working in pitiful conditions with little investment into tools and infrastructure. Much evidence points to the reality that minerals coming from mines controlled by militias are still making their way into the global market.” ( [57] ) While Ruined and the aforementioned dramaturgical packets were written without the hindsight of post-Dodd-Frank legislation, Mama Nadi’s lines suggest the immediate importance of the mine to her own survival. When Christian informs her that the violence is intensifying with the disappearance of a white pastor, her first instinctual response is to ask, “What about Yaka-yaka mine? Has the fighting scared off the miners?” ( [58] ) She is more worried about the mine closing than she is about the missing pastor. This is an example of how knowing the material circumstances, and having the hindsight of what happens when those circumstances are changed by external forces, can help contextualize and inform character objectives and value systems. Mama is putting her survival and the survival of the women in her care first in her priorities by caring about the mine’s closure. In “sustaining the complexity” of these objects in the characters’ lives, Nottage withholds the catharsis of an easy solution to the interplay of multinational corporations and violence in “third world” countries. Instead, she chooses to focus on the way that her characters not only survive, but find joy in their circumstances, and this endeavor is closely tied to material objects. Material Culture as Pleasure The importance of objects like Primus and coltan to the immediate survival of the women in the play informs the way that the characters interact with these objects and others which are listed like cigarettes and soap. ( [59] ) However, character interactions with objects are also informed by pleasure as well, and it is important to note that the beer drinking soldiers are not the only characters who derive pleasure from material objects in the script. While the men in the script enjoy a large amount of dominance and power over female pleasure in the context of this play, they do not have a monopoly on it, and they are not able to have full control over it. Unlike the archetypal victims that Mohanty describes, Nottage’s characters share joy and pleasure with male characters and enjoy pleasures of their own. The play’s opening line chooses to focus on Christian’s pleasure as he drinks his soda: “Ah. Cold. The only cold Fanta in twenty-five kilometers. You don’t know how good this tastes.” ( [60] ) The stage directions follow with, “Mama flashes a warm flirtatious smile, then pours herself a Primus beer.” ( [61] ) Knowing the complex relationship between their circumstances, the Fanta, and the Primus, it is worth noting that these characters not only profit from the sale of these objects, but they share in the pleasure of them as well. If a bottle of Fanta, for example, has made its way to Mama Nadi’s bar through a more complicated route, due to the fact that it is not distributed in the DRC, it might be considered something rare or special for the characters – signifying moments that are worth noting to the reader, viewer, in a character analysis by an actor, or in direction of the play. Christian’s line emphasizes the scarcity of Fanta, Mama’s own innovation in finding a way to refrigerate the soda in the middle of the rainforest, and Christian’s sensory enjoyment of the object. Her flirtatiousness is a recognition of Christian’s satisfaction with the Fanta before she pours herself a beverage so that she can share in the same kind of joy. “You sure you don’t want a beer?” Mama asks. “You know me better than that, chérie, I haven’t had a drop of liquor in four years,” Christian replies. The stage directions emphasize that Mama’s next line “It’s cold” is delivered “teasing.” ( [62] ) The objects become part of an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. This dynamic manifests itself with lipstick a few pages later: MAMA And my lipstick? CHRISTIAN Your lipstick? Aye! Did you ask me for lipstick? MAMA Of course, I did, you idiot!... Leave me alone, you’re too predictable. ( Turns away, dismissive ) CHRISTIAN Where are you going? Hey, hey what are you doing? ( Teasingly ) Chérie, I know you wanted me to forget, so you could yell at me, but you won’t get the pleasure this time. ( Christian taunts her with the lipstick. Mama resists the urge to smile .) MAMA Oh shut up and give it to me. ( He passes her the lipstick.) ( [63] ) Not only do Christian and Mama enjoy the objects individually, but the Fanta, the beer, and the lipstick are incorporated into their dynamic of pleasure. Harkening back to Kopytoff’s final questions, (“What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?”), Fanta’s ideal career is to provide such sensory joy. The connection between beverages and flirtation is a common theme in Fanta marketing, when considering the way that the object’s career is culturally marked — or mark eted . ( [64] ) Therefore, its erotic meaning in the encounter between Christian and Mama Nadi is not necessarily contrary to its original meaning; but the raised stakes of the object’s presence in Mama Nadi’s bar signals that this encounter with the two characters is more than a reproduction of a Coca-Cola commercial. Their shared moment over two drinks indicates an early connection between the two, which will ultimately culminate in the controversial romantic ending where the two characters agree to a courtship. This ending was met with distain from critics who believed that the romantic ending undercut the tragedy of sexual violence and war present in the rest of the play, or worse, disrupted its realism. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the ending “well shaped” and “sentimental,” ultimately deciding that “because of its artistic caution, ‘Ruined’ is likely to reach audiences averse to more adventurous, confrontational theater.” ( [65] ) Brantley’s back-handed compliment implies that Nottage’s ending is not risky enough for the subject of “third world” war. He says, “The play isn’t a form-shattering, soul-jolting shocker like Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted,’ another and more innovative study in wartime atrocities.” His strong implication is that sentimentality appeals to the lowest common denominator of audiences, who appreciate conventional happy endings. Robert Feldberg of The Herald News asserts that “Nottage succumbs to a desire to project hope and happiness both of which she’s established as extremely unlikely by having Christian playfully woo the reluctant Mama Nadi in a scene set out of an old-fashioned romantic comedy. It’s too trivial, a cuddly ending to an otherwise resonant, deeply felt evening of theatre.” ( [66] ) Jill Dolan, on her blog The Feminist Spectator , critiques the ending similarly by stating “Suddenly, the play becomes a heterosexual romance, in which Mama and her girls are redeemed by the love of a good man.” For Dolan, the heteronormativity of their relationship and the “reintegrating the nuclear family…compromises the rigorous, clear-eyed story Ruined otherwise tells.” ( [67] ) However, something that may seem “conventional” in the context of Western drama (i.e. a romantic ending) takes on new meaning in the circumstances of the play: a Fanta isn’t just a regular soda, and flirting over it is more than a reproduction of commercial images. What does a romantic ending mean in the material context of the characters? To speak directly to Dolan’s point, the circumstances of the play complicate the sexual component of the “heterosexual romance” between Mama Nadi and Christian. Mama reveals in the final scene that she is “ruined,” which means that she has been sexually abused to the point where she can no longer have children. ( [68] ) The specific details of this are left out of the play. It is unclear as to whether this factor limits her ability to have children or her ability to have penetrative sex entirely. The other “ruined” character, Sophie, has been raped with a bayonet — another stark reference to the Kalashnikov — leaving her unable to walk without pain, let alone have intercourse. ( [69] ) Despite the vague implications for Mama’s status as “ruined”, at the very least, it disrupts the “conventional” correlation between heterosexuality and procreation. Mama Nadi and Christian may be a male/female couple, but there is very little that is “normative” about their relationship. The happiness of this ending does not erase the circumstances which complicate it. Nor is it out of place, as these reviews imply. The connection between these two characters has been established since their first page encounter with the Fanta. A reading that centers what the objects mean to the characters suggests that Mama Nadi and Christian’s relationship is “erotic,” but not necessarily sexual — drawing from Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which cites the erotic as “providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” ( [70] ) From the beginning of the play, Mama Nadi and Christian are joined by their love of material objects. Christian sells objects, Mama buys them, and this shared passion for things provides them with an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. As Lorde says, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” ( [71] ) Throughout the play, Mama Nadi carefully weighs each situation in favor of her own joy and pleasure. For Mama, material objects are extensions of herself. She says, “There must always be a part of you this war can’t touch.” ( [72] ) In this moment, she is talking about a raw diamond that a miner traded to her for four beers and one of her sex workers. Although the audience does not yet know that Mama Nadi is “ruined,” the fact that she equates a material object with the one part of herself that the war cannot touch is significant given the fact that her body has been violated. For Mama, the objects are extensions of her “self” as described by psychologist and material culture theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s essay “Why We Need Things.” According to him, the human psyche and sense of identity is vague, and material things help ground people by acting as touchstones. For Csikszentmihalyi, the objects perform: “They do so first by demonstrating the owner’s power, vital erotic energy and place in the social hierarchy.” ( [73] ) For Mama Nadi, the material objects around her represent the power that she has gained within the “interlocking” systems of oppression. She exclaims, “I didn’t come here as Mama Nadi, I found her the same way miners find their wealth in the muck. I stumbled off of that road without two twigs to start a fire. I turned a basket of sweets and soggy biscuits into a business. I don’t give a damn what any of you think. This is my place, Mama Nadi’s.” ( [74] ) Thus, everything in the bar is an extension of herself and plays a role in her self-definition — or re-definition. Therefore, the stage direction in the beginning that says that “a lot of effort” has gone into making the bar look cheerful suggests that pleasure is important for the character as well, and that these objects that she surrounds herself with speak to more than survival. Lorde describes the “erotic” in a similar way; that it is something internal [read: psychological and spiritual] and not physical. Although she and Csikszentmihalyi are writing from different disciplines, and are separated by age, gender, race, and nationality, both write about the erotic, and Lorde uses material objects to describe what happens inside her “self”: During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. . . I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience. ( [75] ) Thus, she, like Mama Nadi equates a material object with her own internal vital energy. Mama’s raw diamond can be taken away, but no one can take away what it represents: the fact that she has not only survived being “ruined” but has also prospered, thrived, and found joy. Decolonizing Efforts in American Theatre As American theatre, in both academia and the industry, commits itself to anti-racism and decolonization practices, let us not forget Patricia Hill Collins’s foundational text “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought,” in which she pays homage to the long tradition of resisting negative images of Black women and moving towards self-definition as independence, self-determination, self-reliance, and survival. ( [76] ) A material culture theory reading of Ruined yields significant information on the character’s material circumstances, interlocking oppressions, survival tactics, and pleasures. Each of these forces is connected to the other, and material objects are deeply interwoven into these dynamics. However, discussions of survival and pleasure are often left out of Western assessments of “third world” women, including those surrounding works of theatre like Ruined , as shown by dramaturgical and critical academic archives. In doing so, these conversations run the risk of reinforcing victim archetypes as discussed by Mohanty’s work, which can be potentially counter-productive to anti-racist and anti-colonial efforts. Material culture theory is a methodology that can be applied to both scholarly and practical theatrical projects and evidences the ways that scholarly methods are useful and relevant to the production process. In this case, material culture theory can be used not only for the props list, but also for the places where material objects intersect with scenic dressing, costuming, practical lighting instruments, sound effect and music choices, and, of course, directing and acting choices. What kind of objects decorate the set described in the opening stage directions? Where do they come from and who made them? What do they mean to the characters? What are the characters wearing and how did those clothes come into their possession? What kind of lights did Mama Nadi use to make her bar look “cheerful”? What would be available to her? How would sound be distorted if the equipment was powered by a car battery that was also powering the lights? These are many questions that designers already ask themselves based on the design processes. These are already the kinds of conversations that take place at production meetings. Material culture theory can help ensure that the answers to these questions are culturally specific, accurate, and precise. This is especially true when engaging with marginalized groups who are often omitted from or misrepresented written archives. What story do the objects tell? How do people in these groups use objects in everyday life towards self-definition? The importance of self-definition is also articulated by Mohanty’s work on decolonizing images of the “third world” woman in white, Western feminist hegemonies, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which critiques the role of the Western imagination in the formation of the Other. Smith says, “I say that because like many other writers I would argue that 'we', indigenous peoples, people 'of color', the Other, however we are named, have a presence in the Western imagination, in its fiber and texture, in its sense of itself, in its language, in its silences and shadows, its margins and intersections.” ( [77] ) While Mohanty’s work is primarily a critique against academic constructions of the “third world,” Smith’s is an indictment of Western imagination for the role that it played in justifying the imperial exploitation of the “third world,” indigenous people, and people of the African diaspora for centuries. In the case of Ruined , and other theatrical representations of Black women, particularly those who live in what is considered the “third world,” material culture theory avoids the assumptions that are made in the Western imagination — and the historical baggage that comes with it – and allows one to study how the characters use material objects to define themselves. Both are vital decolonizing processes for the portrayal, or “re-presentation”, as Mohanty calls it, of Black, “third world” women on the American stage. References 1. Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 5. 2. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 3. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 200), 338. 4. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 345. 5. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 6. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 7. The Kalashnikov, like the designation between the “first”, “second,” and “third world”, is a product of the Cold War, and most-often culturally associated, by Americans, with conflicts that arose as results of those international tensions and their global aftermath. 8. C. J.,Chivers, The Gun . (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9. 9. The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement."Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 271-80, 271. 10. Nicole Rosky, “Lynn Nottage's CLYDE'S Tops List of Most-Produced Play of the Season,” Broadwayworld.com , September 23, 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Lynn-Nottage-CLYDES-Tops-List-of-Most-Produced-Play-of-the-Season-20220923. 11. American Theatre Editors, “Offscript: Most-Produced WithLynn Nottage & Lauren Gunderson,” American Theatre, September 27, 2022. https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/09/27/offscript-most-produced-with-lynn-nottage-lauren-gunderson/. 12. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture . 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. 13. Lury, Consumer Culture, 9. 14. Lury, Consumer Culture, 21-22. 15. Nottage, Ruined, xi. 16. Mohanty, 339. 17. Jeff Paden, “Hybridity of form and political potentiality in Ruined,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016),145-159. 18. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66. 19. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 20. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 21. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 22. Fanta was marketed globally before it was marketed in the US due to fears that it would compete too heavily with Coca-Cola. After enjoying some popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Fanta—along with other sodas—lost popularity to its sister orange soda brand Minute Maid as consumers became more interested in heathy foods and drinks. Fanta had been a bigger market item globally, especially in Africa and South America. Because of the orange soda’s popularity in Latin America,The Journal Record reported in 2001 that Fanta was being reintroduced in American markets through “Hispanic-heavy test markets in Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Sales jumped from 24.4 million cases in 2000 to 42.2 million last year, according to Beverage Digest. The jump was due to the rollout in test markets.” In 2002, the iconic Fantanas commercial was released nationally in a huge campaign,which was revived in 2004, 2006, and so on. The Fantanas became very culturally recognizable in the US, and were even featured in satires on MadTV and Family Guy. It is possible that collective memory of this marketing campaign would be accessible to “first world” audiences of Ruined in the 2010s. Admin, “Remember Fanta?: Business World,”The Journal Record, March 6, 2002, Accessed October 26, 2023,https://journalrecord.com/2002/03/06/remember-fanta-business-world/. 23. Washtubs and batteries are a bit vague. If this happens while doing a material culture reading of a play, especiallyone which takes place in a “third world” country, I recommend doing as much research as possible. In the event thatresearch fails, and a“first world” theatre maker must fill in the “gaps”, so-to-speak with their imaginations, it isimportant to remember the aforementioned “baggage” regarding Western imaginations of “third world” locationsand peoples. 24. “Fanta,” Wikipedia.org . Accessed October 30, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta. 25. "The Coca-Cola System,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Our Company,” Accessed October 30, 2018.https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-system. 26. “Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Begins Operations,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Press Releases,” Accessed October 30,2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 27. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 28. Maik Dünnbier, “Big Alcohol and The War In Congo,” in Alcohol Industry, Corporate Consumption Complex, Obstacle To Development, Sustainable Development , November 2013. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/. 29. One aspect of the play, which is interesting considering the fact that Nottage writes for a first-world audience, isthe fact that there are no representatives of the first-world that ever appear onstage. Mama and Christian mention a white pastor missionary, a Belgian shopkeeper in Bunia, and Mama talks about “blue helmets”, UN peacekeeping forces in the final scene. The only physical presence of the first-world comes in the form of imported goods or the cultural remnants of the Belgian colonization, in the form of the French language and racial divide between blacks and whites. There are several possible reasons as to why Nottage has made the choice to keep the more fortunate first-world population out of her story, but the most powerful statement that arises from their absence is, of course, their absence. Nottage makes a point that there is little to no intervention from the outside world, and there is a sense of abandonment throughout the play. 30. Nottage, Ruined, 10. 31.“How Heineken beer survives in Congo Brewers are rare colonial-era holdouts in a notorious trouble spot.” The Economist. April 21, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo. 32. Olivier van Beemen, Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed, (United Kingdom: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2021). 33. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 34. Nottage, Ruined, 102. 35. Nottage, Ruined , 15. 36. Nottage, Ruined, 86. 37. Nottage, Ruined , 85. 38. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 39. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,”68. 40. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . 41. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 67. 42. Van Beeman, 59. 43. Nottage, Ruined, 181-124. 44. Nottage, Ruined, 28, 42, 81. 45. Nottage, Ruined, 13. 46. Nottage, Ruined , 25. 47. Nottage, Ruined, 25. 48. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 49. Nottage, Ruined , 31. 50. Nottage, Ruined, 41. 51. Charlie Payne, “Ruined Study Guide.” London: Almeida Projects, 2010. Accessed October 2018, https://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/uploads/RUINED,_STUDY_GUIDE.pdf. 52. Rachel Steinburg, “Web of Violence Untangling ‘Africa’s World War,’” The Berkeley Rep Magazine 5, no. 1 (2010-2011), 23. Accessed October 2018, https://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/pdf/program-ru.pdf. 53. Julia DePalma, “Arena’s Page Study Guide.” Arena Stage. 2011, 4. Accessed October 2018. https://www.arenastage.org/globalassets/education/school-programs/study-guide--ruined.pdf. 54. Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, “Dodd-Frank 1502 and the Congo Crisis,” Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies, August 22, 2017. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dodd-frank-1502-and-congo-crisis. 55. Sudarsan Raghavan, “How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless,”The Washington Post, November 30, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 56. Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, one of the ministers of mines, told The Washington Post, “As of October [2014], there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 here in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” as conflict-free.”Raghavan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 57. Laura Kasinof, “An ugly truth behind ‘ethical consumerism’”The Washington Post. April 19, 2018. AccessedDecember 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea84da645e7. 58. Nottage, Ruined, 40. 59. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 60. Nottage, Ruined, 5-6. 61. The interconnectedness of Fanta, Primus, the armed conflict, the movement of goods intensifies Mama and Christian’s brief moment of flirtation over the cold soda, followed by the pouring of beer. Dünnbier, http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/and 62. Nottage, Ruined, 6. 63. Nottage, Ruined , 6-7. 64. Fanta’s advertising campaign in the early 2000s featured a group of flirtatious women called the Fantanas who would sing a song called “Wanta Fanta” and seduce men into drinking the soda in various tropical scenarios. 65. Ben Brantley, “War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window,”The New York Times, February 11, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/theater/reviews/11bran.html. 66. Paden, 145. 67. Jill Dolan, “Ruined, by Lynn Nottage.” The Feminist Spectator, March 13, 2009. Nov 4, 2018. http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2009/03/16/ruined-by-lynn-nottage/. 68. Nottage, Ruined , 12. 69. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 70. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56. 71. Nottage, Ruined, 57. 72. Nottage, Ruined , 53. 73. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture . Ed. Lubar, Steven D, and W. D Kingery, (SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1993), 23. 74. Nottage, Ruined , 86. 75. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. 76. She cites Maria Stewart writing in 1833. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” and “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought,” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd editions (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]), 1. 77. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 14. About The Authors Christen Mandracchia is an Assistant Professor and Production Manager in West Chester University’s Department of Theatre and Dance. She earned her doctorate in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research emphasizes material histories of theatrical labor, with a special emphasis on theatre professionals who venture into non-theatrical fields. Areas of research also include theatre architecture, queer theatre history, and musical theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Liwaa Yazji | A collection of poems from Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. < Back Three Poems Liwaa Yazji Download PDF This collection of three poems was written in 2015 by the Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu

Book Reviews Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Performance and Pedagogy Book Reviews By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Donatella Galella, Editor The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era By Jonathan Shandell Reviewed by Jennie Youssef Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer Reviewed by DeRon S. Williams Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín Reviewed by Javier Hurtado A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams Edited by Katherine Weiss Reviewed by Shane Strawbridge Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization By Judith Hamera Reviewed by Patrick McKelvey Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 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.

Benjamin Miller 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.

EYO is a traditional festival performance, arranged and choreographed by Taiwo Aloba. EYO is a theatrical work incorporating multiple artistic mediums and elevated by the element of live singing and dance. Audience members will be immersed in an environment of symphonic Yoruba traditional music and movements. The EYO festival is a cultural symbolism that is well inculcated in the traditions and values of the people of Lagos. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE EYO Taiwo Aloba Theater, Dance, Performance Art Yorùbá 90 minutes 3:00PM EST Sunday, October 15, 2023 Culture Lab LIC, 46th Avenue, Queens, NY, USA Reserve Seats EYO is a traditional festival performance, arranged and choreographed by Taiwo Aloba. EYO is a theatrical work incorporating multiple artistic mediums and elevated by the element of live singing and dance. Audience members will be immersed in an environment of symphonic Yoruba traditional music and movements. The EYO festival is a cultural symbolism that is well inculcated in the traditions and values of the people of Lagos. This project was developed as a part of Culture Lab LIC's 2023 Emergence Artist Residency. This project is supported by funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, Statewide Community Regrants Program (formerly the Decentralization program) with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and administered by Flushing Town Hall. Content / Trigger Description: Fog Taiwo Aloba is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist originally from Nigeria. She was educated at Lagos State University in Lagos, New York Film Academy in New York, and Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire. She is a member of the Dramatist Guild and a USRSA Certified Run Streaker. Culture Lab LIC is a 501(c)(3) formed to be the arts and culture umbrella for Western Queens. We present local, national, and international art of all genres, while supporting New York artists and other nonprofits by providing space, resources and a sense of community. Operating out of a 12,000 square foot converted warehouse, Culture Lab LIC hosts two fine art galleries, an 80 seat theater, classroom space, an 18,000 square foot outdoor venue, and a robust residency program. Culture Lab LIC is dedicated to upholding, equity, diversity and inclusion across all our platforms. www.TaiwoAloba.com , @modelvoss, www.culturelablic.org , @culturelablic 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 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence By Published on January 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec. Julie Burelle. Performance Works, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019; 232 pp. Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States. Laura L. Mielke. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019; 296 pp. Issues that surrounded Black and Indigenous sovereignty in the mid-nineteenth century are under scrutiny again as we enter the mid-twenty-first. The summer of 2020 makes this vividly apparent: A global health crisis has exposed disparities of income and access to health care across racial and ethnic lines. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is gaining momentum while an increasingly tyrannical government works to suppress the freedom of speech and right to assemble for those who would peacefully protest anti-Black racism and police brutality. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a 3-million-acre territory in Eastern Oklahoma is, after all, the rightful land of the Muskogee (Creek) people and is therefore exempt from Oklahoma state law. In this context, Julie Burelle’s Encounters on Contested Lands and Laura L. Mielke’s Provocative Eloquence, though different in critical approach and aesthetic content, invite reflection upon legacies of conquest and genocide in the United States and Canada that continue to impede the realization of social justice now. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec is an important contribution to scholarship about performance in and of the Americas. Burelle’s performance studies method allows multiple embodied storytelling genres to be read as integral to the narrative clash between the French Québécois de souche (“the white descendants of early settlers from France, who still speak French and understand themselves… as settlers no more, colonized by the British first and, later, by the Anglo-Canadians, and rightfully belonging to the territory of Québec”) and the Indigenous peoples who reside in what is now the province of Québec (6). Burelle articulates her own positionality as French Québécois de souche throughout her criticism of Euro-Canada’s claims to nationhood and territory. Relying on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of “objective violence,” she interprets French Québec’s history of settler colonialism as it pertains to performances surrounding Canada’s Indian Act (1876), and as its damaging social contract persists into the present. Burelle claims, “[r]ace, with whiteness as its ultimate arbiter, is the unstable terrain on which settler-colonial anxieties are performed through a pas de deux between abjection and incorporation” (12). The performance examples she cites demonstrate that French Canadians’ minoritization claims rest upon acts of erasure, ignorance, or consumption of Indigenous presence, resistance, and ancestry. Burelle organizes the book’s intersectional histories around the “Oka Crisis” of 1990, in which the Mohawk people of Kanehsatà:ke defended the destruction of tribal lands by a predominantly white, francophone country club community. Burelle reads this conflict as key to understanding the fluidity of the Québécois de souche’s claims to cultural marginalization, conveniently invoked when contesting Anglo-Canada’s dominance over Québec but obscured when an alliance with Anglo-Canada would preserve French-Canadian claims over Indigenous lands. Burelle begins with an analysis of Alexis Martin’s Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France (The Invention of Central Heating in New France, 2012-2014), a play that poses paradoxical French Québécois de souche claims of abjection and what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang refer to as “settler moves to innocence” (169). Burelle historiographically frames Martin’s epic as part of the white settler-colonial legacy of Marc Lescarbot’s 1606 Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France. She surmises, “Invention falls short of its reconciliatory endeavor and echoes in disturbing ways the willful offering of the land” once performed by white actors in redface for Lescarbot’s legendary conquest drama about ‘New France’ (27). Burelle further probes protestations of French-Canadian innocence in Chapter 2, “Les Racines Imaginaires/Mythical Métissages.” Through close readings of films by Euro-Canadians that examine indigeneity, Burelle charts the violence embedded French Québécois de souche affect to what she dubs a “felt Nativeness,” “never problematizing how this desire to possess Nativeness, to absorb it, is… inherently settler-colonial” (58). In this chapter, Burelle explores the many iterations of “métis, métissé, and métissage,” terms that broadly refer to racial and ethnic mixing, but each possessing a nuanced interpretation when it comes to various Canadian and Indigenous identities, rendering Métis and métis studies distinct foci of Canadian identities and politics (59). With the films discussed in Chapter 3 – Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993, Alanis Obomsawin), Mesnak (2012, Yves Sioui Durand), and the Wapikoni Mobile project – Burelle gives voice to Indigenous filmmakers, at once revealing the objective violence implicit to the history of Canada’s Indian Act and affirming authentic representations of Indigenous culture. Chapter 4, “Endurance/Enduring Performance,” engages Indigenous women’s performances that articulate gender-based violence as an irrefutable component of Canada’s genocidal legacy. La Marche Amun (2010), conceived and organized by Michèle Taïna and Viviane Michel, was “led by a group of Innu women to demand an end to the gendered discrimination contained in the Indian Act” (21). This processional performance, situated along a “rural highway” in 2010, eerily reflected the concurrent murders of Indigenous women along Canada’s Highway 16, most of which remain under-investigated and unsolved (125). Burelle’s analysis of the endurance-beading performance, Indian Act (1999-2002), organized by Nadia Myre (Anishinaabe) for which she and 250 participants of European and Indigenous descent covered an annotated copy of the Indian Act with intricate beadwork. The final piece, many pages of which are unfinished, suggests that much work remains to be done in the ongoing processes of reconciliation and repatriation among the peoples who enact Canada’s “colonial present tense and tense colonial present” (4). North American genocidal legacies come into equally sharp focus in Laura Mielke’s Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States, a timely book that reframes US oratory traditions as enmeshed with abolitionism and infused with violence. Mielke considers speech acts of all kinds as she interrogates the connection between embodied action and intentional utterance. She draws from a rich array of theatrical, dramatic, oratory, legislative, and print narratives to craft a meticulous case for the power of words to incite change. Theatre, theatricality and drama inform each portion of her argument that “the antislavery speech readily drew upon theatrical forms and provocations of antislavery speech made their way back to the stage” (24). Mielke’s method is “interperformative and intertextual” (21). She considers dramatic texts and performatic contexts for each oratorical figure as she disrupts popular understandings of familiar figures from the political, melodramatic, and Shakespearean stages of the mid-nineteenth century (21). This is perhaps most evident in Chapter 1, “Edwin Forrest and Heroic Oratory.” In her analysis of Forrest’s 1838 Independence Day Oration, Mielke illustrates Forrest’s political speech as having been understood not just for its political content and delivery style, but also for its Roachian “afterglow” caused by Forrest’s embodiment of his own ideas. For audiences, memories of the actor’s famous “heroic” stage roles such as the slave rebellion leader Spartacus (1831) may have blended with the words of the speech, perhaps lending Forrest a more abolitionist tone than words alone would have conveyed (53). Mielke’s notion of “dramatic suasion” is most clearly defined in a chapter dedicated to the dramatic readings of William Wells Brown and Mary Webb. She argues that “[d]ramatic suasion, as developed by Webb and Wells Brown…, transferred the rhetoric at the heart of Garrisonian abolitionism into a genre… associated with rebellious and retributive violence and into a performative mode” (82). As enacted by the free Black bodies of Webb and Wells Brown, abolitionist narratives shifted the national conversation in the mid-nineteenth century from the implicitly anti-abolitionist question of what the US would do with a population of free Black people, to “the real question… ‘what to do with the masters’” (82). While political histories pin Mielke’s argument in chronological sequence, the event that anchors her thesis most evocatively is the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the US Congress floor by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. In Chapter 3, Mielke compares the event with the tableau, “Southern Chivalry – Argument versus Club’s” by John L. Magee (1856) and then considers three theatrical adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp in light of increasingly brutal resistance to the abolitionist movement. As she teases out the violent undercurrents of melodramatic forms such as the sensation scene and blackface minstrelsy, attuned to the physical violence threatened and represented onstage in all three productions, Mielke infers, “[i]t was the fear of antislavery speech’s incitement of forcible resistance that led to a very different manifestation of provocative eloquence: the vicious suppression of eloquence by resistant auditors” (84). Mielke artfully unpacks Portia’s famous “Quality of Mercy” monologue for its rhetorical threat of violence, used to alternately suppress or incite violence that in turn either perpetuated the practice of slavery or resisted it. Mielke’s analysis of Portia’s speech, and its numerous deployments in the antebellum era, helps the reader to understand the US as it is currently embroiled in an unfinished history of racial violence that simmers in words and inevitably manifests as physical brutality. Re-reading this book amidst the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement during the summer of 2020, I was brought to consider the ways that Mielke’s oratorical subjects have themselves become cultural and rhetorical touchpoints in our ongoing struggles towards social justice. By examining antislavery texts, Mielke reveals the violence that haunts even the most pacifist of entreaties. Her choice to conclude with abolitionist John Brown’s execution and the sway it held for actor John Wilkes Booth towards violently anti-abolitionist ends suggests that the question of whether or not violent action is necessary to dismantle systems of racism and oppression in the US is yet to be settled. Read together, these books deepen our grasp of the violence in which hegemonic North American concepts of citizenship, sovereignty, and suffrage are entrenched. Objective violence embedded in settler-colonial legislation compounded with the implied and enacted violence surrounding abolitionist speech echo across the continent while the struggle for social justice endures. Vivian Appler College of Charleston 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.

Watch GIANNI by Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The idea of GIANNI (originally: dzsanni) emerges from the vision of amalgamating theatre, film, and digital art to give rise to the innovative genre of Live Film. In the performance, we bring Puccini’s classical opera to the stage as a theatrical play set in a lavish scenery. Simultaneously, we are live-producing — recording, editing, and streaming — a film of the ongoing play onto a dimmable canvas integrated into the scenery. The artists employ voiceless lip-syncs to synchronize with the original opera in Italian, while subtitles are streamed onto the screen. The interplay of various art forms, genre characteristics, and cutting-edge technologies creates a dynamic and exquisite experience. GIANNI opens up new experimental avenues in the realms of performing arts, film production, and worldwide distribution of theatre. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents GIANNI At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Theater, Film, Mime, Multimedia, Opera, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language Italian, with English subtitles Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2023 The idea of GIANNI (originally: dzsanni) emerges from the vision of amalgamating theatre, film, and digital art to give rise to the innovative genre of Live Film. In the performance, we bring Puccini’s classical opera to the stage as a theatrical play set in a lavish scenery. Simultaneously, we are live-producing — recording, editing, and streaming — a film of the ongoing play onto a dimmable canvas integrated into the scenery. The artists employ voiceless lip-syncs to synchronize with the original opera in Italian, while subtitles are streamed onto the screen. The interplay of various art forms, genre characteristics, and cutting-edge technologies creates a dynamic and exquisite experience. GIANNI opens up new experimental avenues in the realms of performing arts, film production, and worldwide distribution of theatre. TEAM & CAST: Performers: Gianni Schicchi —— Gergely Váradi Lauretta —— Natalja Maas Rinuccio —— Manuel Krstanovic Zita, La Vecchia —— Dominika Rezes Gherardo —— Sebastian Huber Nella, Maestro Spinelloccio —— Stefani Matkovic Betto di Signa —— Aki Tougiannidis Simone —— Mihály Bánki Marco, Ser Amantio di Nicolao —— Florian Dehmel La Ciesca —— Silvia Passera Buoso Donati —— Stephen Crane / Creative technicians: Technical operations, stream, and camera Patrik Macsuka Soma Varga Lázár Todoroff / Set design and costumes: Rebeka Zita Artim, Kudar Máté, Renáta Balogh / Director, Editor: Dániel Máté Sándor About The Artist(s) We are a group of young theatre artists and creative technicians with the ambition of creating a distinctive artistic language in theatre. In 2020, our studies at SZFE, the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest got disrupted by the pandemic and the politically motivated ‘model changing’ of the institution. In response, we founded an association called Budapesti Skizo Group in 2022, renting our own creative space in the old factory building of 4K (Kobanya Contemporary Cultural Center), Budapest. Since 2020, our group has created two live film performances: Budapesti Skizo and dzsanni (later: GIANNI). Budapesti Skizo was played on 20 m² in an apartment during the pandemic, from where we live streamed the performance on YouTube. In contrast, dzsanni premiered for an audience of 400+ people in a 250 m² storage room, complemented by the vast inner yard of the abandoned salami factory. The production involved 14 actors, a 60-piece symphony orchestra, 12 opera singers, and a technical crew of 5 people. After the initial premiere of dzsanni in June 2022, we hosted the Live Film performance an additional 13 times in our studio at 4K for a predominantly young audience of 60-80 people. To offset our rental costs, given the lack of funding, we collaborated with external partners to provide a more comprehensive cultural experience, including beer and wine tasting events, as well as a book reading. In addition to the live performances, we released the recording of dzsanni on a theatrical streaming platform called eTheatre between 27 and 30 October 2022. Moreover, we organized two screenings in Germany one of them at SETT2023. In 2023, László Bagossy, the artistic director of Theater tribühne, invited us to create GIANNI, the second version of dzsanni, tailored for German audiences in Stuttgart. This marks a significant milestone for our group, as, after three years of continuous work and development, we have had the opportunity to experiment and expand our technical apparatus within a professional framework. This advancement allows us to perform, record, and broadcast in full synchronization to any part of the world. The result of our cooperation is a theatre repertoire piece in the spring term program of Theater tribühne. Or partnership with László Bagossy is characterised by the Renaissance Workshop method, fostering mentor-student relationships and autonomous group work among creative contributors with diverse knowledge and physical locations — all united by a collective creative vision. As part of this working method, our group participated in the creation of 100 Songs at Theater tri-bühne in October 2023. Get in touch with the artist(s) sandordanmate@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/der_grosse_gianni/ https://www.instagram.com/budapesti_skizo_csoport/ https://segalfilmfestival.org/budapestian-schizo-by-daniel-mate-sandor/ 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.

Watch Genocide and Movements by Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The setting up of a solo performance, the outbreak of revolt, the collective clamor of the marches. Art, organization and rage against the genocide of black people. An audiovisual manifesto recorded between 2008 and 2016, in the two cities with the greatest black presence in Brazil The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Genocide and Movements At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Discussion, Documentary, Performance Art This film will be screened in-person on May 17th. About The Film Country Brazil Language Portuguese Running Time 60 minutes Year of Release 2021 The setting up of a solo performance, the outbreak of revolt, the collective clamor of the marches. Art, organization and rage against the genocide of black people. An audiovisual manifesto recorded between 2008 and 2016, in the two cities with the greatest black presence in Brazil CAST/PEOPLE INTERVIEWED: Gustavo Melo Cerqueira Ágatha Oliveira Rodrigo dos Santos Luis Carlos de Alencar Hilton Cobra Joel Zito Araújo Val Da Mata Lio Nzumbi Hamilton Borges dos Santos Angelo Flávio Vilma Reis Onisajé Syrup Jesiel Oliveira Fred Aganju Caroline Amanda Borges Andreia Beatriz dos Santos Christen A. Smith Antonio Borgens /// Directors: Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Solo performance: Gustavo Melo Cerqueira Screenplay: Luis Carlos de Alencar and Ricardo Gomes Production: Couro de Rato Executive producer: Vladimir Seixas Photography: Marcel Gonnet Wainmayer Camera: Igor Caiê do Amaral Consulting: Lena Azevedo and Sandra Carvalho Editing: Ricardo Gomes Direct sound: Couro de Rato Assistant director: Aline Frey, Gláucia Marinho and Patrícia Freitas Graphic arts and videography: Couro de Rato Poster art: Maia Moon Sound design, mixing and original soundtrack: Thiago Sobral Original music: film REAJA - DJ GUG Declamation: Cíntia Guedes Artistic supervision: Marcel Gonnet Wainmayer Body Preparation: Agatha Oliveira Collaboration: Rodrigo de Odé, Hilton Cobra and Joel Zito Araújo Spaces: Ngoma School of Capoeira Angola, Theater of the Oppressed Center and Vila Velha Theater About The Artist(s) ANDREIA BEATRIZ: - Debuting Director, Doctor at Lemos Brito Penitentiary, in Bahia, Specialist in Family and Community Medicine, Master in Public Health. Coordinator of the Political Organization React or Be Dead, Co-founder of the Winnie Mandela Quilombist Community School. Author of the book “Olhar por entre grares, lives in poems”, published by Reaja Editora (2020) of which she is co-founder. HAMILTON BORGES: Hamilton Borges - Debuting Director. Born and raised in Curuzu, Salvador City in Bahia. His knowledge comes from his black wrestling and emotional interaction with the women in his family, especially his paternal grandmother. He conceived and integrates the “React or it will be dead” and the Winnie Mandela School. Writer of “General Theory of Failure”, “Salvador, tomb city”, “Ariel's black book” and “Libido, oil palm and melanin”. Luis Carlos de Alencar IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3439398/ Director, screenwriter, researcher. Partner of the production company Couro de Rato. Directed by the short Homem Invisíveis, Best International Doc at the Trans Stellar Film Festival-Detroit/USA; award at the Mix Brasil Festival; best direction - DIGO - International Film Festival of Sexual and Gender Diversity - GO and Festival de Inhapim - MG; Best Documentary - Festival Cine Tamoio and Festival de Jaraguá do Sul; Best Regional Short at the Rio LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Directed Contagem Regressiva, Best Doc and Best Soundtrack at Rio WF 2016; directed the doc Bombadeira, taken to more than 30 national and foreign festivals, RedeTrans award - 10 years of Bombadeira, for the contribution of the work to the transsexual community. Director, with Vladimir Seixas, of the series Corpos Periféricos (6 episodes), shown by ESPN. As Assistant Director, he acted in 21 works, including feature documentaries, telefilms and 6 TV series. Post-Graduate in Cinema and Audiovisual at M_EIA, Cape Verde Institute of Art; Postgraduate in Communication and Image at PUC-Rio; Graduated in Law from UFBA. Get in touch with the artist(s) lcfdaf@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/reajaouseramorta/ https://reajanasruas.blogspot.com/ https://www.instagram.com/couroderato/ http://couroderato.com.br/ 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.

Watch WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA by Magdalene Remoundou at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Actors, directors, theatre theorists demonstrate the man that reconfigured the Art of Theatre. An account on the world renowned director and theatre theorist Eugenio Barba’s unique approach to the theatrical art. In July, 2019, Εugenio Barba was conferred a honorary doctorate at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Peloponnese. A three day conference to the prominent theatre practitioner was held concurrently at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. At the same time, Teatret ODIN’s troupe staged legendary performances. Moreover, Teatret ODIN’s actors, but also Εugenio Barba himself, carried out some of the acclaimed workshops of ODIN Teatret. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Magdalene Remoundou Theater This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 18th. About The Film Country Greece Language Greek, English Running Time 62 minutes Year of Release 2020 Actors, directors, theatre theorists demonstrate the man that reconfigured the Art of Theatre. An account on the world renowned director and theatre theorist Eugenio Barba’s unique approach to the theatrical art. In July, 2019, Εugenio Barba was conferred a honorary doctorate at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Peloponnese. A three day conference to the prominent theatre practitioner was held concurrently at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. At the same time, Teatret ODIN’s troupe staged legendary performances. Moreover, Teatret ODIN’s actors, but also Εugenio Barba himself, carried out some of the acclaimed workshops of ODIN Teatret. Selection and participation in the following International Film Festivals: Film Arte Festival -March 2021 London Greek Film Festival- June 2021 Toronto International Women Film Festival -June 2021 Cannes International Cinema Festival -July 2021 Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival - June 2021 West Side Mountains Doc Festival - October 2021 Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival - November 2021 Berlin lndie Film Festival - December 2021 London International Monthly Film Festival - January 2022 Tokyo Lift- Off Film Festival - April 2022 Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival January 2023 International Epidaurus Film Festival - November 2022 Awards and nominations (if any): Film Arte Festival- March 2021 -Semifinalist London Greek Film Festival - June 2021- Finalist London International Monthly Film Festival January 2022 -Finalist West Side Mountains Doc Festival - October 2021-Honorable Mention Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival November 2021- Honorable Mention Berlin lndie Film Festival - December 2021- Best Director Documentary Award International Epidaurus Film Festival - November 2022-Honorable Mention About The Artist(s) Magdalini Remoundou is TV Director, Director, Script writer, and Production Manager for over thirty years in various Audiovisual Productions: TV shows, TV series (sitcom, comedies, soap opera), live shows, theatrical plays, broadcast news, documentaries. Also she has been Production Manager in theatrical and music productions in open and close venues, since 1990-todate. Magdalini Remoundou is certified tutor for adults in Film and Media studies, she is Dean of Faculty of Culture & Communication Studies in Metropolitan College in Athens since 2012, Programme Leader of the BA Media Production/ Film Directing since 2002. Also, she was official examiner of Greek Ministry of Education regarding the Diploma Examinations for the Film and TV Directing and Audiovisual Production Management. Get in touch with the artist(s) harris@rgbstudios.gr and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/magdalini.remoundou/, https://rgbstudios.gr/?lang=el 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.

Derek Miller 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.

Michael Y. Bennett Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Michael Y. Bennett By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF James Purdy (1914-2009)—a prolific American writer of fiction, drama, poetry, and essays—has been known almost exclusively as a novelist, recognized for his early portrayals of gay characters and themes. Accordingly, scholarship has focused almost entirely on his well-respected novels. Purdy’s most notable contribution to the theatre is indirect, by way of adaptation of his novel, Malcolm (1959), by Edward Albee in 1966. This article considers two of Purdy’s minor plays that span a large swath of his career. Why Purdy now? And why two of his minor plays? There has been a recent turn in Purdy scholarship that has been gathering steam to examine his plays, which have been mostly ignored by academia. In addition to the publication of James Purdy: Selected Plays in 2009, since 2000, four of the seven articles published on Purdy have been about his plays. Douglas Blair Turnbaugh documented Purdy’s career as a playwright and recounts how Purdy told Turnbaugh that he “would just as soon write plays as novels.”[1] Though Turnbaugh does not comment on this statement, this suggests that Purdy scholars should give his plays continued prominence. Turnbaugh claims that Purdy has an inherent theatricality and a flair for dramatic dialogue.[2] This is particularly evident in Albee’s adaptation of Malcolm. Similarly, Matthew Stadler writes, “Talk, in Purdy’s world, is the instrument of revelation.”[3] Purdy does not dwell on scene-setting exposition, character background, or speculative psychological depth.[4] Purdy focuses, instead, on “the awkwardness and abruptness of real speech.”[5] Like Stadler, Michael Feingold argues that Purdy does not pay much attention to plot.[6] Feingold discusses Purdy’s non-traditional dramatic style, which is characterized by anecdotal drama, and explains how the plays are about “why life is so full of suffering and why human beings cause each other so much pain.”[7] Purdy’s reputation as a playwright has historically suffered for two reasons. First, the success of his novels has turned the finite amount of attention towards his novels (and, therefore, largely away from his plays). And, second, what scholarship that has been written about Purdy’s plays has focused almost solely on the structure of his plays (and, largely, in comparison to the structure of his novels). While it is important that academic journals have begun to publish work on Purdy’s plays, the fact that these articles do not really consider the content of the plays, has not done much to further his reputation as a serious playwright to be studied . Besides his prolific output of novels (and poems), James Purdy wrote, in total, eleven full-length plays and twenty shorter plays during his many-decade career. While many of Purdy’s plays were produced in non-notable theatres with limited runs—between the 1966 publication of his first short play, Mr. Cough Syrup and the Phantom Sex, and the 2009 publication of his fifth collection of plays, Selected Plays, published only months after Purdy’s death—, most of Purdy’s plays were published either in book collections or in literary journals/magazines during his lifetime.Unlike other scholars, I do not focus on structure, but instead, read his two plays about circuses and clowns through the idea of “clowning around,” playing off of the well-studied and complex idea of the carnivalesque, as theorized by Mikhail Bhaktin. This essay focuses on one of Purdy’s earlier published plays, A Day After the Fair (written in the early 1970s and first published in 1977), and one of his plays first published in a recent anthology, The Paradise Circus (written in 1991 and published in 2009). Though their dates of publication vary by almost thirty years, interestingly enough, both of these plays revolve around the circus. The figure of the clown haunts the pages, offering a unique opportunity to assess a change in Purdy’s thinking with similar characters occupying similar environments in both plays. While reading these plays, we may ask, what is a clown? and what is a circus? This line of inquiry gets us far; however, there is a much larger issue at stake when we examine the figure of the clown: Purdy’s characters only become themselves when they don the mask of another. Using the figure of the clown in such a manner is a sophisticated technique to explore this (above) idea—an idea that is not entirely without precedent in the history of theatre (e.g., becoming the “brother” in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan and “Bunburying” in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest). In the earlier play, A Day After the Fair, as Joseph Skerrett says in “James Purdy and the Works: Love and Tragedy in Five Novels,” tragedy is “played out against a backdrop of more than vaguely symbolic chaos in the natural order and/or disruption of the social order”[8] as the younger destroys the older in order to reverse the hierarchy. Love is a dangerous and destructive force here, as in Purdy’s earlier novels, because the characters cannot conceive or pursue it purely.[9] However, in the later play, The Paradise Circus, though the social order is disrupted in the beginning of the play as Arthur sells his sons and Arthur is incapable of pursuing love in the correct manner, the boys come back and the witch doctor becomes the doctor once more—restoring the social order—and Arthur does learn how to love, even though he quickly dies thereafter. Circuses are scary places in Purdy’s early works: the clowns are outcasts, and their makeup cannot hide the pain. However, by the time we get much later in his career in The Paradise Circus, life, in the end, can produce smiles. As these two plays represent his earlier and later career and both contain clowns, they offer a unique opportunity to see Purdy contemplate similar ideas and characters, but arrive at a different conclusion, demonstrating a fundamental change in Purdy’s outlook over the years. In interpreting the content of these two plays by Purdy through investigating the complex characters of the clowns, this essay aims to legitimate Purdy as a playwright and deserving of further scholarly inquiry. In A Day After the Fair, there are two grown-up brothers who are clowns. The older brother, however, will not let the younger very innocent brother assume the role of a clown (not letting him put on his makeup or costume), because the older brother feels as though he is the master clown. Like the younger brother’s lover who is a hired killer, the younger brother must become a killer, must become cold and calculating like his older brother. Only in killing his older brother, can the younger brother put on his makeup and finally become a clown. Like The Good Person of Szechwan, the previously-innocent younger brother must don another personality to live the life that he wants. The Paradise Circus, set in 1919, is about the relationship between a father and his two sons. Arthur Rawlings is mourning the death of his son Rainforth, a captain in WWI. Arthur forsakes his two younger sons, Joel and Gregory, because they do not live up to the memory of their older, now dead, brother. Joel and Gregory spend their lives working on merry-go-round wooden horses. When Senor Onofrio of the Paradise Circus meets the two boys, he propositions Arthur, who is known to be a miser. For ten thousand dollars, Onofrio will buy the two boys for the circus. If it does not work out and the boys return, he will have to return the money. At first, Arthur is shocked, but then he reasons that his sons do not love him as much as Rainforth did and agrees to the deal. After a number of years, he misses his son and wants them to return. Spurning the advice of the country doctor, Arthur turns to a witch doctor, Alda Pennington, for advice. She convinces Arthur that he must burn the ten thousand dollars, which he does. A little later the two sons miss home and run away from the circus and return home. They have grown up and claim to have hearts of stone when their father greets them again. Onofrio comes to Arthur to get his money back, but when Arthur tells him that Alda burnt it, Onofrio goes to Alda. Alda tells him that ever since he bought those boys he has not been able to perform with women. Alda says that if he ever wants his manhood back, he must leave town, forget the money and never return. Soon after Joel goes to Alda to find out if his father really burnt the money. She gives the remaining ashes to Joel. By the time Joel returns he is too late to hear what his dying father said to Gregory. Arthur told Gregory that he loves them and his dying wish was to see the stone removed from their hearts. Both sons are touched and they have appeared to regain their emotions, ending the play in an embrace. Many of Purdy’s other plays also feature types/variations of complex role-reversals. Dangerous Moonlight (unpublished to date) is a hauntingly sadistic, cold, and calculating play about making the best of a no-win situation. The action between mother and daughter, who have grown up in the lap of luxury, revolves around Val Noble, a Stanley Kowalski-like brute who lacks even the pride that Stanley exhibited in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Val is merely satisfied and accepts who he is—a veritable animal, a practical beast, whose needs are quite basic: first sustenance (taking the form of a large roast of beef) and then sex. By the end of the play, the three have made an agreement that the daughter will remain Val’s wife, while the mother will take the place of the daughter and become Val’s lover. In True (1977), Chester, a thirteen year old boy who witnessed his brother commit a murder ends up killing his brother, to demonstrate to him that he is not a liar and is true; that, “he will not grow up to be like his brother.” Here, Chester must become his brother, a killer, in order to become himself. Or Jack, in Down the Starry River (unpublished to date), is a washed-up drag performer. By the end of the play, Jack discovers that in order to make himself happy, he needs his costume to become his daily outfit; he needs to wear dresses not as an act, but in order to be himself. Donald Pease writes that Purdy laces his fiction with orphans, abandoned children, foundlings and outcasts.[10] In A Day After the Fair, the two brother-clowns are circus folk: certainly societal outcasts. Joel and Gregory in The Paradise Circus, are symbolically orphaned as Arthur sells them to the circus. The play A Day After the Fair has a pessimistic ending as the younger brother can only turn to violence in order to become what he wants. This holds true with what Pease writes when he says that there is an irreconcilable gap in their world and the world that cannot “adopt” them.[11] However, there is a very different ending in The Paradise Circus. The two brothers, who were symbolically orphaned, are reunited with their father at the end of the play as each party seems to forgive and love the other. This focus on outcasts and innocents is found throughout Purdy scholarship. Part of the reason for this reoccurring theme is that, as Skerrett documents, as a gay man, Purdy identified with a socially marginalized race. In an interview Skerrett cites in “James Purdy and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Purdy—aligning and/or identifying himself with what he sees as a powerless and stigmatized member of society—discusses that in dealing with his landlord, he felt like an oppressed black person: “They treat you like an old nigger tramp. . . . I feel like an old nigger after I've talked with him. I just feel like saying, ‘Well, white boss, you sho got to me.’”[12] Purdy expressed the same sense of oppression when he talked to Christopher Lane in a 1998 interview based on his sexuality. Purdy felt that his lack of recognition, stemmed from his perception of The New York Times as homophobic.[13] Reed Woodhouse writes how Purdy also felt personally attacked by members of the gay movement for not being “gay enough.”[14] Because of this, Purdy could most likely identify with his characters, and as Frank Baldanza says in “James Purdy on the Corruption of Innocents,” “A prominent feature in the microcosm of James Purdy's six novels and numerous short stories is the relationship between a young innocent and the corrupt adult world in which he must make his way.”[15] The social outcast and orphan figure prominently in his two plays that I discuss here. In A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus, Purdy captures the human in the guise of a clown-suit. In order to live life, one must clown around in a world that we know to be a circus. Like a clown, Purdy’s characters must assume another self in order to be true to their own selves. In order for Purdy’s characters to live the lives that they want, they must assume the role of another: they must become another to become oneself. Though full of obvious play and humor, Purdy’s circuses, however, are no laughing matter. These transformations are painful to all involved; even clown makeup cannot hide the pain, and when the clowns fall, or get hit on the head, they really get hurt. In makeup, clown performers exaggerate their bodily expressions, and clowns take on almost universal guises. It is an easy leap to imagine a modern day circus as a Bhaktinian carnival: The body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of the words, because it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.[16] It is the body of the clown that becomes the focal point and not the speech. We focus on their makeup and actions. And it is in their action that the clowns grow and renew themselves. Clowns operate through degradation, but also by overcoming degradation until they do it correctly. As Bhaktin says, “the material bodily principle is a triumphant, festive principle.”[17] In the face of degradation, clowns triumph over folly. Bhaktin explains how regeneration comes out of degradation: Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.[18] At the moment when Purdy’s characters face degradation are they renewed. By permanently donning the mask of another, by degrading themselves and reducing their existence to a new bodily existence, by directly dealing with their orphaned status, they become themselves. The short play A Day After the Fair begins appropriately with the scene being set: “A dilapidated unfurnished room in a lonely city near which loom up enormous skyscrapers and bridges.”[19] Immediately we think of the degradation that the two clown-brothers, Neil and Arnold, encounter every time they look out of the window. Their surroundings are indicative of success and human progress, though of the lonely sort, and the two live in a dilapidated room, reflecting their failures and the process of continual worsening conditions. The play begins with Neil playing cards by himself and wishing that he is allowed to once again put on his clown suit, which his older brother, Arnold, forbids. Instead of listening to Arnold, Neil puts on the clown makeup: “I’ll put on my Clown’s face too, though Arnold’s forbidden it. . . . And it will make me lose the blues. . . . ” (3). There is something about his ordinary state that saddens Neil, and this may be in part due to. Maybe part of it is the reminder of his poverty-stricken state. The assumption of the carnivalesque being cheers him up, but also makes him feel more like himself. “I was a Clown just like him,” Neil states (3). For reasons not entirely clear to the audience, Neil was stripped of his Clown title by the Clown Master. Neil and Arnold come from a family of clowns: I said I was a clown at heart, and I need to live with Arnold. . . . We are the only clowns! My father was a clown, and his father. And before him my great grandfather was a juggler. We have always followed the circus. (5) They have a heritage, but Neil’s clown identity was stripped away. Neil is in the precarious position of both returning to his old identity—one that no longer exists—and creating a new identity. The plot of the play is a series of complex love triangles. Oswin is married to Elga, who promised Neil’s mother to take care of Neil, but Oswin loves Neil, offering to take Neil away from his overbearing older brother, Arnold. Neil loves Oswin, but also feels the same, at least obedient, love for his brother, Arnold. Elga is in love with both Arnold and Oswin (and has a weird motherly love for Neil). Arnold is in love with Elga, but has a demanding love for Neil. And wrapped up in this series of intertwining love triangles, the Clown Master seems to have had relations with all of the characters, too. The basic action of the play has Oswin, in some sort of revenge for Arnold, kill the Clown Master. Meanwhile, Neil poisons Elga and in turn, Neil kills Arnold. The love triangles afford the characters the ability to take on different roles, ones not determined by obligation. Oswin is obliged to be Elga’s husband, but Neil offers Oswin the possibility of being a lover. For Elga, too, she is obliged to be Oswin’s wife, but Arnold offers her the possibility of being a lover, as well. Neil is Arnold’s brother, but Oswin also offers Neil the possibility of being a lover. In a sense, all characters are trying to become lovers, trying to shed their obligatory mates. These characters become emboldened through love and held back by obligation. In assuming the roles of lover these characters can be free of the parts of themselves that is wrapped up in obligation. But it is not just the idea of taking on another role that frees the characters from obligation. Instead, the assumption of these other roles is only successful with an accompanying degradation. As Bhaktin says, it is only through degradation that there can be a birth. Actually, in the case of Oswin, there is a rebirth. Oswin is described as an assassin, and Oswin is in a similar situation as Neil. In assuming the role of assassin, Oswin is returning to an old identity that no longer exists. Does he return to an old self, or is he reinventing himself once more by once again becoming an assassin? It is an obligatory act, though. Arnold, through force and persuasion convinces Oswin to assassinate the Clown Master. For Oswin, killing the Clown Master, and literally degrading his body as he cuts out his tongue, frees Oswin of Arnold’s overbearing demands. Once Oswin accomplishes this task, he expects to find himself free to pursue Neil. Through assuming the role of an old/new self, degradation is allowed to occur, paving the way for freedom from obligation. The ultimate act of degradation and birth or rebirth comes from Neil’s character. Neil’s obligation to his brother is the one most firmly established. One can always divorce a wife, but a brother will always be a brother. By killing Arnold, Neil destroys part of his natural-born lineage as a clown. Like Oswin, Neil cuts out Arnold’s tongue: this degradation raises the question of whether Neil is returning to clownhood or is reinventing himself as a clown . But what it, ultimately, determines is that Neil will be the only clown. He assumes the privileged position of that title. And, finally, in the murder of his brother, Neil becomes the overbearing brute that his brother was, bullying Oswin. Neil, in freeing himself from his brother, has, in part, assumed the role of his brother. What is it about being a clown that metaphorically fits the play? First off, clowns represent both social outcasts and misfits. Not being satisfied with their role as outsiders, they yearn to become a part of society. However, clowns have a subversive means of achieving their desired goals, and they are successful through roundabout ways. For instance, they stumble until they find a certain, usually wacky, method of success. For Neil, degradation offers a way of subverting the natural order of birth and hierarchy. By toppling his brother, Neil is able to assume his old/new true and free self. The Paradise Circus opens up with an author questioning Arthur about his son, Rainforth. The author is writing a book about soldiers from the American Revolution up until WWI. Rainforth received many citations and won many medals and, as the author says, deserves to be in the book. Arthur describes Rainforth only in opposition to his two younger sons. He says, “My two youngest boys can’t hold a candle to their brother, that’s certain . . .They’re retarded boys. Never finished school . . .”[20] Arthur really has nothing to tell the author about his son except about his name: “The world wants everything ordinary. And both his name and character were extraordinary. Rainforth was right for him, whether people like it or not” (88). This sets up a classic case of a parent favoring one child and forsaking others. As a result of Arthur’s preferential treatment, his two sons, obviously, are detached from him. And because the boys are detached from Arthur, he agrees to “sell” his sons. The rest of the play, then, concerns Arthur’s attempt to buy back his sons’ love. The situation is simple; the resolution is complex. Before Arthur “sells” his sons to Onofrio, he meets with the family doctor, Dr. Hallam. Dr. Hallam is both the raisonneur, the critical outside observer, and a confidant to Arthur, much like James Herne’s famous homeopathic doctor, Dr. Larkin, in his classic play, Margaret Fleming (1890). Hallam correctly diagnoses the problem: Sometimes young men can get sick for sheer want of a little encouragement and downright affection, Rawlings. . . . And all they hear from you, if you will pardon my frankness, is a steady diet of praises for Rainforth. (91) If Arthur could follow Hallam’s simple prescription, the conflict in the play could have been avoided. But the memory of Arthur’s perfect son haunts him. In the face of Rainforth’s supposed perfection, everybody would be a disappointment. As soon as Onofrio offers to “buy” his sons, Arthur hits upon this point: “they have been a bitter disappointment to me, both of them” (95). And so three years have past and Arthur is dying to see his sons. It is not for another year until he actually sees them. Hallam warns Arthur how much they have changed. They have grown beards and have become much stronger even though they still use Arthur’s last name. Their meeting is short and polite. As Joel says, “we weren’t sure you would want to see us” (103). After the boys leave, Arthur tells Hallam, “I wouldn’t have knowed them from Adam” (103). The boys have transformed and indeed look like the “first son.” The boys have taken on a “magisterial” aura (102), and have supplanted Rainforth in might and in Arthur’s mind. Arthur’s sole preoccupation, which used to be his “grief for Rainforth” (96), is getting his two sons to love him. Arthur cannot accept the prescription that Dr. Hallam gives him. Because of Arthur’s unwillingness, or inability, to follow the doctor’s orders,we get the first of two degradations that produce growth. In Purdy’s circus, even the raisonneur and confidant must don a different guise. The “doctor” becomes a “witch” in order to be a doctor. Arthur says that he has had enough of doctors and decides to visit the local witch doctor to see if she can help him get his sons back. The traditional remedy for the situation, giving his children encouragement and showing more love, gives way to an untraditional remedy from an untraditional healer, a witch doctor. The audience must be weary of Alda Pennington before she even says a word. The stage directions read, Antique furniture everywhere, beautiful carpets and mirrors. Fresh flowers. An air of restrained wealth and comfort, not the house one would associate with a midwife or “witch.” (104) We know that Alda must be good at what she does, or at least good enough to trick people out of their money and make enough to buy antique furniture and beautiful carpets. But we might also look at it in another way. This is a person in touch with reality. We do not see the normal collection of ghastly thingamabobs that a “witch” would collect. Instead her decorations are sensible, even refined. She has one foot in magic, but the other is in a life of privilege. Her magic, then, is less foreign. And the pills that she prescribes are easier to follow than if she was a prototypical witch doctor. Like Dr. Hallam, she is both raisonneur and confidant. She quickly assesses the situation: RAWLINGS: They did come to see me . . . But without wanting to . . . They were cold as the brook after snowfall . . . Hardly said a word. ALDA: Just as they were trained. (106) After years of paternal neglect, Joel and Gregory naturally have nothing to say to him. They were, in fact, trained not to love Arthur. Dr. Hallam’s medicine would have worked it seems, if Arthur worked in usual ways. But he sold his boys. And an unusual medicine is needed to remedy that. Alda tells him, The very first thing you must do in order to regain your hold on life and in fact bring back the boys you have lost, is to burn Onofrio’s money . . . Here, before my eyes . . . (109) Alda, then, becomes a carnivalesqe doctor, one who deals in performance and bodily gestures. Her medicine is one of exaggerated excess, where the action is degrading and almost self-destructive. But these actions are done to regain a hold of one’s life. It is not enough that Arthur gets rid of the money. Alda tells him that he cannot donate the “blood money” to charity (34). He must burn it. He must symbolically rid himself of the “bargain” that was reached with Onofrio, who freed him of his sons, and will thereby free him from his own guilt, actions and despair. Arthur’s change as initiated by Alda, leads to the second of two degradations. Arthur must burn his own fortune and that of his sons’. Arthur is a miser, who, in part, defines himself by his money. He must destroy that part of himself. Alda says, “I would have staked everything on your not returning” (114). She thinks it impossible for him to take on this challenge. “I thought you at least would go on being yourself, resisting everything and everybody, that not even the lightning would touch your pride” (114). By becoming another, by becoming the opposite of a miser, one who would literally burn his own money, Arthur has become the man he always could be, a good father. In this destruction, something burns anew. When Arthur burns the money, he burns the intangible to make room for the tangible, his sons. Once the two degradations take place, that is, the degradation of a doctor to a “witch doctor” and Arthur burning his precious money, the end of the play features the rebirth of the Arthur. Arthur, paradoxically, is dying. But there is still time for this new Arthur to make an impact on the lives of his sons. And with this, Dr. Hallam returns. Now that the unnatural deed of selling his sons has been remedied by the unnatural act of burning the money, traditional medicine can once again take over. On his deathbed, Arthur says to Hallam, Greg and Joel. What can I say, what can I give them. HALLAM: You want my opinion? RAWLINGS: Oh I suppose, though your opinions always take the wind out of my sails . . . Well, go on give it to me, give me your unvarnished say, so why don’t you, though, I’ll probably choke on the words when I hear them. HALLAM: (pacing the room, his head lowered) I can only tell you what I think I’d say if I had two fine boys like you have, if also I had done to them what you have done. RAWLINGS: Sold them like cattle you said once. HALLAM: Did I now? Ah, well . . . RAWLINGS: And what would you say if you was in my stead, Doc. HALLAM: I would say . . . (hesitates) I would hope one day they would find it in their hearts to overlook my failings, and that when they were my age they would understand how hard it is to tell those we love how much we love them. (143) And this is exactly what Arthur tells Gregory (Joel was at Alda’s at the time). Even in the act of dying, something is reborn, not just in Arthur’s heart, but the stones are lifted from the hearts of his sons. As the Passover saying goes, “Our story begins with degradation, our telling ends with glory.” As evidenced by these two plays, maybe there was a softening in Purdy’s heart over the course of the years. A Day After the Fair is utterly pessimistic and tragic. However, there are signs of hope and the possibility of love, albeit brief, at the end of The Paradise Circus. In Purdy’s early novels and plays, there are numerous instances of “orphans” as societal outcasts who will never fit in and will always grasp for the love of family. This holds true in A Day After the Fair. The tale of the orphan is, as Frank Baldanza says in “Playing House for Keeps with James Purdy,” “a recurrent Ur-fable of the lonely, desperate orphan, cut off from any family intercourse in childhood, who spends his brief career ‘playing house’ with intense, doomed seriousness, frustrated in his search for metaphorical family relationships that will provide the authority, security, and warmth of familial feeling.”[21] But The Paradise Circus is different. Most of the play follows this same pattern, but forgiveness and love are ultimately shared among the characters at the end. However, maybe the more elegant way to explain this shift is to return to the idea of Bhaktin’s carnivalesque. Early in his career, Purdy hurled his orphans “down to the lower reproductive stratum.” There, in the “fruitful earth and the womb,” Purdy’s orphans could incubate and experience a “new birth,” so that years later these orphans are “continually growing and renewed.” MICHAEL Y. BENNETT is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he teaches courses on modern drama. He is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to the Absurd (forthcoming 2015); Narrating the Past through Theatre (2012); Words, Space, and the Audience (2012); and Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011/Pb 2013). He is the editor of Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays (forthcoming 2015); with Benjamin D. Carson, Eugene O'Neill's One-Act Plays: New Critical Perspectives, (2012/Pb 2014); and Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome (2011). In addition, he is also Editor of The Edward Albee Review. NOTES Though much expanded here in this essay, some of the arguments about clowns and, especially, the section on The Paradise Circus come from my short article “Clowning Around in James Purdy’s The Paradise Circus,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 38.3 (May 2008): 7-10. Earlier versions of this chapter were also presented at two conferences: “Clowning Around in James Purdy’s The Paradise Circus.” 16th Annual American Literature Association Conference. Boston, May 28, 2005 and “Role-Reversals in Purdy’s A Day After the Fair.” 18th Annual American Literature Association Conference. Boston, May 26, 2007. [1] Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, “James Purdy: Playwright,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 73. [2] Ibid. 73-74. [3] Matthew Stadler, “The Theater of Real Speech,” The James White Review 17.1 (Winter 2000): 7. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid. [6] Michael Feingold, “The Basic Question: James Purdy’s Plays,” The James White Review 17.1 (Winter 2000): 40. [7] Ibid. 40-41. [8] Joseph Taylor Skerrett, Jr., “James Purdy and the Works: Love and Tragedy in Five Novels,” Twentieth Century Literature 15.1 (April 1969): 25. [9] Ibid. 26. [10] Donald Pease, “False Starts and Wounded Allegories in the Abandoned House of Fiction of James Purdy,” Twentieth Century Literature 28.3 (Fall 1982): 335. [11] Ibid. 335-36. [12] Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., “James Purdy and the Black Mask of Humanity.” MELUS 6.2 (Summer 1979): 81. [13] Christopher Lane, “Out with James Purdy: An Interview,” Critique 40.1 (Fall 1998): 72. [14] Reed Woodhouse, “James Purdy (Re)visited,” Harvard Gay Lesbian Review 2.2 (Spring 1995): 16. [15] Frank Baldanza, “James Purdy on the Corruption of Innocents,” Contemporary Literature 15.3 (Summer 1974): 315. [16] Mikhail Bhaktin, Rabelais and His World, Trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 47. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid. [19] James Purdy, “A Day After the Fair,” in Two Plays (Dallas: New London Press, 1979) 3. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [20] James Purdy, “The Paradise Circus,” in Selected Plays (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publishers, 2009), 87. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [21] Frank Baldanza, “Playing House for Keeps with James Purdy,” Contemporary Literature 11.4 (Autumn 1970): 488. "James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus" by Michael Y. Bennett ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 1 (Winter 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: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents: "Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom” by Jordan Schildcrout "Just Saying Our Goodbyes: Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11" by Michelle Dvoskin James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus" by Michael Y. Bennett “Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama" by Andrea Harris 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.

Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The education and training of young scientists includes the acquisition of a large and technical vocabulary, understanding a variety of experimental approaches, and application of statistics and mathematical models to analyze experimental and observational results.[1] Small wonder then, that young scientists often miss the larger point that science is a process of imperfect model building. That is, students don’t understand that effective communication of scientific discoveries to all audiences must include colorful metaphor and models, and that these models aid understanding without doing harm to the scientific enterprise. We describe here our adaptation of theatric improvisation techniques to build students’ science communication skills in an undergraduate life science curriculum at Lawrence University. These techniques have been informed by, but significantly modified from, a program for graduate education at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. As the Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges would have us understand, perfect scientific models are useless. He wrote, In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it.[2] Undergraduate students, who are just at the start of their scientific training, have instead a view that science is a process of learning about reality so that, eventually, we will understand perfectly the nuances of even the messiest biological systems. They often think that we are in the business of making perfect maps of the world and they are loath to relinquish this view. Though all our students read Borges in our required freshman course, science students usually maintain their view that the accuracy of science is so critical that their communication of a scientific understanding of the world must include a great deal of detail delivered with a high degree of accuracy. They try to communicate scientific vocabulary, the degree of imperfection of current scientific understanding, and the methods by which scientists arrived at their conclusions. While all this detail is needed for students to build their own understanding of scientific results, or for the communication of science to professional scientists, students hold fast to this method of communication in all cases, thus obscuring both the beauty and truth of science. Perhaps an example is in order. When a student wished to explain how genes get used differently in different parts of our bodies, she said, “Tissue-specific patterns of gene expression are created by cell-specific transcription factors binding to DNA sequence motifs upstream of the start site of transcription.” Did you roll your eyes? We did! While what she said was terrific if she were talking to a group of molecular geneticists, anyone else’s eyes would appropriately glaze over. Our goal is to have her ask: “Did you ever wonder why your pancreas makes insulin, but your eyeball doesn’t?” Then she could explain that both the pancreas and the eyeball contain the instructions (a gene) to make insulin, but only in the pancreas does the on/off switch for insulin production get flipped to the ‘on’ position. Do we really need to know that only certain cells of the pancreas do this? Do we need to know what genes are made of? No! If she really wanted to explain the on/off switches, she could describe the DNA sequences as musical notes and their particular order as musical motifs, and she could demonstrate how these switches can vary, much as the opening theme to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony varies throughout the piece. Is it ‘dumbing it down’ to use these metaphors? Also, no! We have learned to be explicit in saying to our students that we are not ‘dumbing down’ the science – we are making it accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows. Goals This then, is our goal for graduating life science majors: yes, they learn a technical vocabulary, experimental design, data analysis, and scientific writing, but they also learn that scientific models are already imperfect, so using a metaphor or an evocative description is a wonderful way to distill and communicate scientific information to a lay audience. We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues that audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and we want our students to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. To accomplish our goal of facilitating effective and clear science communication, we designed a capstone course in our undergraduate life science curriculum in which we use theatrical improvisation as the main tool to improve oral communication of science. The capstone course enrolls 40-50 biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience majors in their senior year at Lawrence University. Lawrence University, located in Appleton, Wisconsin, is a private liberal arts college enrolling 1500 undergraduates. The college has a strong tradition of individualized learning[3] that has shown great success in stimulating student interest in, and mastery of, disciplinary research. Small group research projects are an integral part of the biology curriculum from the very first introductory course through the upper level, and many students individually elect to undertake research with a faculty mentor. We have consciously constructed our curricula to build students’ creative and technical science skills, including hypothesis development, experimental design and execution, data analysis, and oral and written dissemination of results. We couple hands-on research with course content so that students receive integrated, practical instruction in the application of scientific methodology and concepts. In 2011, the faculty of the college voted to include a required ‘Senior Experience’ with every major and allowed each department or program to design their own experience for senior students. Life science faculty designed a capstone course that would directly address students’ needs to communicate science beyond a specialized scientific community and that would allow students to dive deeply into a biological topic of their choosing, whether as lab or field research or as literature review or distillation of a biological topic for a lay audience. Our biology capstone course facilitates the transition from the life of a student to the life of a professional. Our explicit goals for the students are the following: (1) direct a project and produce a substantial paper written for a scientific audience, (2) understand ethics in the life sciences, (3) acquire skills to reach and teach non-scientific audiences about one’s project. Students begin their capstone course with their topic chosen and, in many cases, research or off-campus activity completed. The course is therefore reserved for the production of several papers on the student’s topic and multiple types of oral communication about their project. Students are primed with a deep understanding of some small area of biology and, since they chose their own topics, hopefully a great deal of enthusiasm for disseminating their understanding of this topic. Oral Communication in Science It is important to state here that even professional oral communication in the sciences is much more free form than it is in the arts and humanities. Thus, the link between theatrical improvisation and scientific communication is not as distinct as one might initially think. Scientific conference presentations, for example, always include visual aids and are never read. Speakers are expected to deliver either memorized or extemporaneous prose while using visual aids as an organizational guide. Such professional presentations are jargon-heavy and detailed. Our undergraduates learn professional presentation skills throughout their life science curriculum and are acculturated into a biological way of understanding and describing the world. Our goal in the capstone course is to expand those skills to include distillation of complex material to create engaging presentations for broader audiences. We, as a society and as individuals, need a clear understanding of biological concepts in order to make wise and safe decisions about our healthcare and our environment. For example, individuals and political entities need to decide about whether to eat farmed or wild seafood, comprehend the effects of our exercise regimens on our descendants, or accommodate an endangered thistle on the beach. The efficacy of a doctor explaining treatment or a researcher testifying in a Congressional hearing depends on clear, accessible communication. Thus, we work on student distillation of science for audiences that range from the students in the room (whose expertise ranges from ecology to neuroscience), to the college’s (non-scientist) President, to one’s grandparents, or to people in an elevator with them. Well-known American actor Alan Alda and the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University inaugurated a program in 2009 using improvisation exercises to teach graduate students in the sciences to respond to, and interact with, their audiences when speaking about their scientific work. Their initial students volunteered from many of Stony Brook University’s graduate and professional programs for a semester-long program. The changes in the graduate students’ ability to relate more naturally to their audiences brought to life subjects ranging from optics to molecular biology. In an interview published in The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, author Kelly Walsh wrote: “To facilitate objectivity, Alda explain[ed], ‘you have emotion trained out of you when you're writing science for other scientists in your field.’ But communicating science to broader audiences requires the opposite approach because, as Mr. Alda [said], ‘people like me, ordinary people, rely on story and emotion.’”[4] Early publicity from the Stony Brook program began to circulate in science communication circles just as we at Lawrence University began our pilot life science capstone course for a few undergraduate students. Encouraged by Stony Brook’s success, we tried using theatrical improvisation to improve the communication skills of undergraduates. Our early goals for our students included breaking down communication barriers and giving students permission to drop the jargon when describing their work. As summarized by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, “Mild to moderate short-term stressors enhance memory. This makes sense, in that this is the sort of optimal stress that we would call ‘stimulation’ – alert and focused.”[5] He later states that “the sympathetic nervous system pulls this off by indirectly arousing the hippocampus into a more alert, activated state, facilitating memory consolidation.”[6] If the neuroscience is right, our students should internalize better the lessons of science communication in the heightened alert state induced by improvisation games. Early Attempts at Improvisation with Undergraduate Scientists Lawrence theater faculty member Kathy Privatt introduced us to Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater, teaching us to use a few exercises, including Play Ball and Mirror. Undertaking these exercises, let alone the idea of leading students through them, was uncomfortable and awkward for us. Professional scientists do not typically engage in physical improvisation, though we do have experience with mental versions. We swallowed our fears and jumped into using the exercises as a way to loosen rigid, nervous, and stultifying student presentation styles. We initially presented the exercises as our American theater-based colleagues had indicated was appropriate for theater students, with minimal preliminary instructions plus a bit of Spolin’s side-coaching. In the first two years of our undergraduate course, the students only half-heartedly took part in improvisation exercises. We estimate that the leaders’ energy exceeded the total of that put forth by our students. Some students responded with outright hostility and derision. Their body language and grumblings said, “This is stupid. I shouldn’t have to do this!” We wondered whether we were on the right track or whether undergraduate students lacked the necessary motivation to use these exercises as they were intended. We also struggled to fit all our goals in the allotted 36 hours of instruction. Improvisation was therefore tucked into odd 10-minute corners of class time. Students delighted in moving about but not in learning to interact with their audience. Although instructors participated alongside the students to persuade them that the activities were not below our dignity and were valuable, students still did not relate the exercises to communication skills we addressed in other lessons. We did note, however, that most students responded very favorably to a discussion of body language and its impact on oral communication. We mentioned research that had shown measurable results of changing one’s body posture while speaking, but we did not cite any particular study. The least expressive student of our initial class departed immediately after this discussion for an Ivy League graduate school tour and interview, and returned amazed that open limbs, leaning forward, and smiling had made the process easier and the response of the school warmer. We had our first student-provided clue as to how to make improvisation palatable. Science students are further motivated when we connect the need for body language and facial expression to the fact that their audience imitates emotional behaviors (e.g., excitement) unconsciously in response to the emotional body language of a speaker.[7] In the summer of 2011, the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University began a summer institute for theater instructors, university administrators, and science faculty to learn more about science communication. Among the colleges represented, only Lawrence University was planning a program solely for undergraduates. We returned from the summer institute even more convinced of the value of Spolin’s improvisation games as a tool to help our students speak with their audiences, rather than at them and we vowed to increase the amount of time in our class devoted to these exercises. What We’ve Learned about using Improvisation with Young Scientists We have learned that one cannot just jump into improvisation with a scientific audience and expect the desired results. The barrier to doing improvisation is just too high and the students are trying to be too analytic to allow the necessary playful mindset. While theater students expect that they must transmit both information and emotion to their audience, science students feel emotion doesn’t belong in science. We therefore use science-specific modifications to open students’ minds to the benefits of improvisatory sessions. We begin with a video from Stony Brook that demonstrates how improvisation can improve science communication by graduate students.[8] Students immediately recognize the problems with the graduate students’ presentations done prior to improvisation, and they recognize themselves in this position! They are then a bit better primed to accept improvisation as a tool. We bookend improvisation sessions with explicit exposition of the goals of the exercises and a frank discussion of how students felt during and after the improvisation exercise. In particular, we find that it helps to connect the improvisational activity to human physiology. For example, use of Amy Cuddy’s excellent TED talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”[9] is well received because Dr. Cuddy explains the effect of body posture on physiology as well as on the reception of the content of one’s communication. Early in our next course iterations, we implemented several small exercises that involve minimal speaking. The first exercise is a silent improvisation called Exposure.[10] We modified this initial improvisational game from one half of the group standing in front as the other half sits as the audience, to both halves of the class facing one another across the room, first just staring at each other, and then coached to count the blue shirts. As the two halves of the class face one another, inevitably someone begins to fold in on himself, or another person tries to turn away, or yet another starts to laugh. Left alone, as instructed by Spolin, the behavior will devolve into a group giggle. These signature attitudes of discomfort and lack of confidence, of being undignified, have been a plague in past years. Our perfectionist students fear being judged, in no small part because their presentations involve a grade, and being found inadequate will not (they think) get them into medical school or a research program. So as each behavior manifests itself, we address it. Their reflection on and discussion of Exposure have proved more meaningful than the activity itself and set a pattern of reflecting on why we undertake each specific activity. Exposure has proved to be the first time many students recognize the roots of stage fright, but as science students, they need to name and analyze aspects verbally. We ask the students what makes these reactions surface. We then describe each as a normal psychological reaction to stress. When we can talk about cortisol and other stress hormone levels, we are on comfortable, biological ground, and students become more receptive to physical improvisation as a way to reduce stress in oral communication. Instructors also emphasize that we need to know why we are speaking in front of an audience, what our role and purposes are, and what we mean to do. We emphasize that the point of our improvisations is not to become actors or entertainers, but to grow to become more responsive communicators, for no communication occurs unless two or more people share a common idea. We want students to use the exercises to gain valuable insights to communicating with more clarity and to be more responsive to audiences’ non-verbal feedback. The discussions with our students helped us better realize the purpose of our improvisational work and, in turn, better articulate its goals to future students. We also realized that we needed to start our biology students at an earlier stage of the theatrical process. We begin each year now with an activity we call Audience. Improvisation Exercises that Work with Scientists Audience The students are seated in a lecture room. They are instructed to close their eyes. This is done to reduce self-consciousness while imagining, and to simultaneously accentuate the emotional and physical states. Closed eyes also reduce that urge to giggle or feel foolish. Next we say: “Imagine yourself in an overly warm and stuffy room listening to a very boring lecture. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you don’t quite understand, using words you cannot quite catch. How do you hold your arms and hands? The voice is a monotone, droning on, buzzing along with no variation in pitch or rate or intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” At this point, the entire class is usually slumped back in their seats, legs extended, many heads are lolling, a great many have their arms crossed, some may even have put their heads down on their desks. We then ask: “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We begin to discuss defensive and distancing body language that demonstrates where the audience members are emotionally and perhaps intellectually. Next: “Please rise, stretch, and reseat yourself, for another day comes. Today’s speaker is animated, clearly one of the most knowledgeable experts in the world. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you never realized mattered so significantly. New terminology is introduced gradually and only as needed. The words are connected to concepts you already know. How do you hold your arms and hands? The speaker’s voice conveys meaning with variation in pitch and rate and intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” This time postures are erect, many students are leaning forward, their faces are relaxed, and some are even smiling! “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We also ask: “Which audience do you want to speak to? Why?” Students need to hear very explicitly that any talk or presentation is two-way communication. Although only one person may be speaking, everyone is involved in sharing a common idea. An audience contributes to the success of a speaker when it collectively shows interest or enthusiasm, or can, through disinterest or antagonism, make the speaker’s job more difficult. This activity sets up the importance of watching one’s audience while speaking and communicating as an audience member. Each student is only a presenter for five percent of the class time, but part of the audience for all the rest. Some realize for the first time that they can gauge the success of their talks by postures of their audiences, watching for confusion or comprehension and changing their own delivery to meet the needs of that audience. The class changed attitudes about the usefulness of the remainder of the improvisation activities! Mirror Following implementation of Audience and Exposure, with students ready for something more active, it is a natural progression to move on to Mirror[11]. In this exercise, pairs of students face each other, and all the students facing west, for example, are designated the first leader. Each leader is coached to move one limb slowly, and the other student is told to mirror all movements and facial expressions. When the inevitable giggling begins, the instructor stops the exercise and then asks, “Why are we doing this exercise? How does it connect to the previous exercises?” We hope that students will see that public speaking is a two-way communication between the audience and the speaker, and we hope they will concentrate on providing and receiving feedback when it is their turn at public speaking. We then continue the exercise, asking for complete silence, and adding another limb to the movement, speeding things up, changing leaders, and eventually leading and following simultaneously (Figure 1). Figure 1. Leaderless mirroring as students explore two-way communication. (Image courtesy of C.L.Duckert.) Mirror is a great place to introduce some of the key neuroscience behind communication that convinces our students. Mirror neurons were discovered in the late 1980s by a team from the University of Parma.[12] These neurons are active in our brains and the brains of animals as we engage our attention, watch, act, or imagine another being performing some action.[13] We activate mirror neurons when we smile and make faces at babies and delight in their response. We continue to use them throughout our lives, not only to learn new things but also to interpret the emotions of others. Cuddy remarks, “In everyday life, this mimicry is so subtle and quick (it takes one-third of a second) that … it allows us to feel and understand other people’s emotions.”[14] When people use Botox to reduce facial wrinkles, they also impair their ability to smile or frown or mimic others, and as a result, fare less well when interpreting the emotional states of those others.[15] Our students’ mimicry of each other’s postures and gestures is crucial “in the collaborative process of creating a mutually shared understanding.”[16] They then realize that their enthusiasm while speaking will be mirrored by their audience, thereby increasing audience receptivity. Play Ball Our most successful active improvisation is Play Ball, which students easily understand as relevant to public speaking.[17] Instead of plunging into this game immediately, we ask two student athletes to be the first participants, and the first ball throw announced is from their sport. After a toss or two, we ask for a defensive or a scoring move. We then ask them about the changes in their bodies and postures and why they made those changes. We ask how the recipient of the throw altered her stance or hand position. It quickly becomes clear to the audience that the goal of this exercise is to respond appropriately to the actions of one’s partner. Next, half of the class is lined up on each side of the room, and students make eye contact with their partners. Now, as our class enters into ball play (with the instructor calling out ‘throw a baseball,’ ‘throw a bowling ball’), they use their entire bodies and change stances, throwing with different arm movements and strength for various ball types. After instructors chastise the group if balls change size between catch and throw, soon the students’ bodies make meaning evident and they prepare the recipient for whatever is coming next. Faces look up as both their eyes and their understanding widen once the ball toss changes from lobbing water balloons or ping-pong balls, to “throw an insult” or “deliver a compliment.” Recipients flinch or throw their arms wide. Student discussion has emphasized the teamwork aspect of communication, where success depends on reading each other’s physical and emotional states. We add how every speaker must watch their audience reaction for confusion or comprehension so as to adjust the pace, depth, and detail of explanations. The deliverer and recipient influence one another, whether in the improvisation or in public speaking or teaching. Students realize that communication involves anticipation, intent, reception, and reaction to concrete actions and metaphoric ideas. They begin to notice how their most effective science communication requires continual non-verbal monitoring of their audience to ensure comprehension. Transformation of Objects[18] If our students have a favorite, it is Transformation of Objects. Participants conjure objects from empty space. In our version, the objects must be pieces of equipment they would use doing their work or research in the life sciences, including equipment whose purpose or function may be unknown to them. Students are placed in a large circle, facing inward silently. An object is created and used by the first person and passed to the next person who repeats the use. The receiver then morphs the piece of equipment into another, uses it and passes it on. Students usually start with the very familiar -- microscopes, binoculars, pipetters -- but soon they are trying to stump one another. Less familiar equipment such as a mist net for trapping bats or a fraction collector for protein purification is handed off to the consternation of the next person. Surely we have all had to use something by rote that we did not really comprehend. Students have acted out explosions and failures, eureka moments, and malfunctioning equipment. This entirely silent exercise forces students to focus on describing things without words, a risky undertaking for students who have spent four years honing verbal and written descriptions of science. Taking risks visually, in front of a group of people, gives students permission to take what seems to them like oral risks when presenting their science. They are more willing to be informal, to use descriptive language, and even to use their bodies to describe how they did an experiment, to indicate the behavior of an animal, or to illustrate how two molecules interact. They get the idea that communication is much more than words. In short, they become more comfortable, even playful, in front of their peers! Bumper Sticker, a Written Improvisation After these initial improvisations, some barriers have been broken down, and students feel that the next important exercise is so much easier than it would have been without improvisation. We call this exercise Bumper Sticker. Students are asked to create a two to four word ‘bumper sticker,’ or a tweet that describes their project in 140 characters. Students are given time to think for a bit on their own and then they write their slogan on the board to be examined by the class. The subjects of their projects are precise and detailed. To communicate, we must first answer why should anyone else care? “ABT-737 resistant and BIM-SAHB sensitive cells ” becomes “I kill cancer.” “Hereditary pancreatitis…so rare it is painful” is easier for anyone to understand than “the p16v mutation of human cationic trypsinogen (PRSSI) gene and hereditary pancreatitis.” We could be intrigued by “Let Buddha change your brain” to consider “the underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation on the hippocampus and frontal gray matter.” “Got Guts?” and “Polly want a forest” can move us to action more than “surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” and “behavioral changes in psittacines in modern Neotropical contexts.” Now we are beginning to communicate our science! What Do I Do for a Living?[19] + How Old Am I?[20] + Where?[21]= What’s Going On? Lastly, we use activities that cast students as performers and audience. The object is to have the audience identify what is going on. A scientist’s activities and collaboration with co-workers often requires coordinating actions in time or sequence. Spolin’s three games focus attention on behaviors that identify character as well as action. We use the three in combination, not to understand any specific aspect of life science directly, but to motivate students to learn how to assist audiences in understanding by using timing, pace, and the more nuanced aspects of body language. The students easily become self-conscious and stiff, with some even refusing to participate, but group activities ease the awkward feelings by reducing the attention focused on any single person. Simultaneously, injection of humor keeps student interest up and tensions down. We found it useful to break up close associates in the class by dividing the students randomly into groups, each assigned one of the defined activities performed in the order below. 1. Watching a tennis match – simultaneous identical individual actions 2. Getting on a passenger jet – sequential individual actions with different roles 3. Launching a canoe - coordinated actions in unison 4. Doing laundry at the laundromat – distinct individual actions in parallel 5. Carrying a 3m x 3m pane of glass – unfamiliar coordinated action in parallel Unbeknown to the groups, each small activity becomes more difficult to portray, from the tennis match to carrying the pane of glass. After three to five minutes, each group presents their short, wordless play. The rest of the class guesses the activity, but we also describe how we knew what was happening in each scene. The students do not react to this as criticism or evaluation, but recognize that they are unraveling a puzzle as the performers struggle to communicate their intentions clearly. Although there is some concern initially, students rise to each challenge as they learn from the performances of the earlier groups even as each scene becomes more challenging. By the end, students are relaxed and feeling successful, recognizing that they often attune their actions to those of lab mates and partners as well as to less participatory audiences. Science Café, an Oral Science Improvisation To this point, all improvisational activities are performed silently, but we and our students also need to speak. Biologists are often asked to explain concepts to family, friends, even strangers met while running errands. Agriculture, the environment, and medicine are in the news and in our lives. Biological terms such as DNA, evolution, and genetics surround us. We want our students to be willing and ready to engage in public dialogue about science; thus we have invented an exercise we named Science Café in which students must explain biological terms to non-biologists without using jargon. Alan Alda speaks of the "curse of knowledge, the cognitive bias that makes it difficult to think or talk about a familiar subject as if from a position of unfamiliarity.”[22] In Science Café, we work extemporaneously to explain basic biological terms to intelligent strangers. Students have either the role of explainer or questioner, both drawn from a collection of possibilities in a jar (examples in Figure 2). The term to be defined and the role of the questioner are announced to the audience. The explainer must describe the term to the questioner, who then asks a clarifying question that a person in that role would want to know. The explainer must respond using terminology or metaphors appropriate to the questioner. Initially, our students prefer to act as the questioner rather than the explainer. But soon they realize that thinking inside the mind of a non-biologist is also hard work. Also, we found that student explainers felt that they were “dumbing down” material when speaking with those outside the field. We countered this tendency by ensuring that questioners were identified as highly educated in other fields or in positions of power. Students are not graded on their content or performance, but we use the definitions the students develop to help assess our departmental efficacy in teaching key biological concepts. Terms to Explain Roles of Questioners Autotroph The president of the college DNA Your grandmother Endergonic reaction An orchestra conductor Gene An investment banker Transcription A human resources manager Trophic level cascade An electronics engineer Figure 2. A sampling of Science Café Components Results Over the six years we have been running the capstone course, we have become more comfortable with the inclusion of improvisation, better able to articulate its goals and utility, and student presentations have improved remarkably. If we have learned anything in our experiments with improvisation in a science course, it is that our students are more willing to participate when the scientific rationale behind arts techniques is considered. The more frequently we can identify and name, discuss, and analyze phenomena, the more willing they are to embrace these methods. The neurological, physiological, and behavioral aspects of improvisation belong in a biology class. The improvisational exercises we adopted remind us that we live among many intelligent and curious non-scientists. Sharing why we care, accessing the emotion behind our inquiry, can connect us with others. Current student Terese Swords writes that she “noticed [her] explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen” as she “can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor explanations to a wide array of audiences.”[23] Curiosity, awe, and wonder draw scientists into our fields. Our search can never prove anything absolutely true, so we employ precisely developed tools to answer narrowly defined questions about detailed phenomena. Recent graduate Konstantinos Vlachos provided this explanation of the importance of improvisation in our course: Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It's not that we don't want to share our work, it's that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills.[24] We have found that discussion of the goals and utility of improvisation is key to its acceptance by undergraduate science students. Interrupting an activity to discuss, re-focus, or analyze our physiological and behavioral responses places it in a familiar context. Importantly, improvisation has become a more featured component of the course; it is started on the first day and is continued throughout the term with increasing expectations of student participation. An unintended consequence of students’ rising comfort with science communication is that student projects have become increasingly multi-media and less traditional. We have had student projects culminate in videos, art projects, games, music, and even one play script and public reading! The culminating event of our Senior Experience course is BioFest – a mix of posters, videos, and demonstrations of each student’s senior project. In 30-minute increments, one-quarter of the class presents their work to anyone who walks by. Younger students are encouraged to attend as the room buzzes energetically with friends and colleagues from all disciplines visiting the students’ presentations. Family members fly in from across the country; mentors from the campus and the community come to see the results. Posters, as seen at any conference, predominate, but some students bring along research tools or organisms they have investigated (Figure 3). Figure 3. Poster presenters display confidence and approachability while presenting the science adapted to their audiences. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Some students even stage their projects. A book on what happens after death is displayed against a crime scene tape outlining a body, staging the project’s scientific title, “The breakdown of decomposition: the processes involved as influenced by environmental processes”). Audience participation is encouraged. A website, part of the project “Therapeutic efficacy of spp in treating cancers,” displays the pharmaceutical benefits of Navajo tea, a traditional medicine, as visitors sip tea samples. An amateur winemaker tastes the results of a student’s vintages made from wild yeasts growing on grapes (“Identification and characterization of wild yeasts”). In the afore-mentioned project, “Surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” there is action in the real world: a Wikipedia page describing intestinal transplants already has 1500+ hits, and visitors are able to sign up to be organ donors. Lawrence University’s Vice-President of Development speaks with the student who analyzed current and projected climate change on species growing on university property (“Bjorklunden bioclimate envelope models -- their practice and utility”). Athletes watch a video about biofeedback effects on hockey performance (“The role of biofeedback in autogenic training on physiological indices and athletic performance”). We watch with pride as our students talk with whoever comes by, answering questions and sharing their enthusiasm (Figure 4). In our first years, this was a staid and serious event. In the past three years, the room has erupted in chatter, laughter, and questions. Students and faculty are disappointed that they can’t possibly visit each student’s presentation in the time allowed. Parents and administrators attend and are impressed with our students’ enthusiastic and accessible presentations of their work. We are convinced that improvisation has improved our students’ ability and willingness to communicate their scientific know-how immeasurably. The Senior Experience course in biology has capped students’ undergraduate science training with projects of their own design, and helped them become better science communicators, obtain jobs, and find their professional passions. Figure 4. Students must be prepared to speak with any audience as they come by. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Appendix What Our Students Say We have solicited reactions to capstone improvisation from a sample of recent Lawrence University graduates. “You will not always know the knowledge level of your audience and have to be ready to either simplify or elaborate. Additionally, it is hard to know what kinds of questions will be asked after you have finished and because of this you have to be ready to improvise in order to communicate the information to your audience.” Nick Randall, Class of 2013 “When a student or colleague asks a question, and you give a response that does not follow the context of the question, they are not going to understand the answer. Much like improv, you need to stay within the context given.” David Cordie, Class of 2013 “I had such an extreme fear of public speaking that I struggled to raise my hand to answer a professor's simple question in a small class of people I knew well. When I found out we were doing improv in my science class I was very surprised. The improv techniques and speaking skills I learned in this class pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone. Fast forward a few months after graduation to my first presentation in a temporary job. Using the skills I learned in class, I wowed the upper management. Before I knew it, I was well known as a great speaker, solicited by people I barely knew for communication advice, and invited to present at several workshops. It was at one of these talks that my boss and our partners realized they needed to keep me longer than originally planned because of the work I was showcasing and my ability to excite our partners into action. I strongly believe that without the communication skills I learned in class, I would not have gotten the job I have now, and I would have been less successful and had far fewer opportunities to promote my work and engage others. I think this was the most important class I ever took.” Maria De Laundreau, Class of 2013 “Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It's not that we don't want to share our work, it's that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others that we don't want to make them uncomfortable. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills. It helped me to be ready to respond more effectively to the variety of reactions that an audience may have during public speeches. But most importantly it taught me not to be afraid of failure and criticism. After all as a young scientist, I have a lot room for improvement, which makes occasional failure and criticism an inevitable part of my career. Bio 650 showed me how to respond thoughtfully in this criticism, thus reaching my ultimate goal, which is to learn and share effectively how life works!” Konstantinos Vlacho, Class of 2015 “Initially I was horrified to participate in improv, but even after doing it for only a couple weeks, I have noticed my explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen. I am much more confident in job interviews and feel that I can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor my explanations to a wide array of audiences. I can now say that I am completely comfortable [with] public speaking (even about topics I am unsure of) and it is all thanks to my biology major.” Terese Swords, Class of 2016 Summary of Oral Communication Activities Audience (our own invention) Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda Exposure Amy Cuddy’s TEDTalk Self-Introductions (name & project title) Mirror Play Ball Bumper Sticker production 12-minute oral scientific presentation of student project & relevant background Transformation of Objects What’s Going On? Science Café BioFest Elizabeth A. De Stasio is the Raymond H. Herzog Professor of Science and Professor of Biology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She earned her PhD in Biology and Medicine at Brown University working in the area of molecular biology and did post-doctoral training in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is currently collaborating with researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and at Rutgers University to understand which genes are used to make functioning nerve cells. She is devoted to making science accessible to all students through her courses in introductory biology and genetics, and a course for non-majors she calls Biotechnology and Society. Cindy L. Duckert is a Lecturer in Biology and Senior Experience Facilitator at Lawrence University and the Senior Museum Educator at the Weis Earth Science Museum in Menasha, Wisconsin. Her career began as an engineer (California Institute of Technology) building airplanes at Lockheed and making toothpaste tube material more efficiently at American Can Company when she realized that explaining technical things to non-technical people is her forté. The discovery that interpreting one field of study to another is an unusual skill came as mid-career surprise. She taught K-12 teachers how to do real science in their classrooms with the JASON Project’s online courses and thousands of visitors to the Experimental Aircraft Association Museum what keeps airplanes in the air. [1] We thank Alan Alda first and foremost for his vision of improving science communication. We thank the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University for providing evidence that improvisation works wonderfully to free the stories and remind us why science intrigued us in the first place and for the concept of distillation that enables students to see that accuracy, brevity, and clarity are not the same as dumbing down science. We thank Kathy Privatt of the Lawrence University theater faculty for the choice of activities winnowed from another realm. And we thank our co-teachers of the capstone course for their patience and wisdom; without you the course wouldn’t have evolved as it has: Bart De Stasio, Kimberly Dickson, Alyssa Hakes, Brian Piasecki, Jodi Sedlock, and Nancy Wall. We thank our students both for their trust in us and for their willingness to grow and add a playful enthusiasm to imbue their science. [2] Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 325. [3] E. A. De Stasio, M. Ansfield, P. Cohen, and T. Spurgin, “Curricular responses to ‘electronically tethered’ students: Individualized learning across the curriculum,” Liberal Education 95, no. 4 (2009): 46-52. [4] Kelly M. Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language,“ The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, October 6, 2015. http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Detail.aspx?cid=d77626ca-e830-47da-a546-7fbeab1846f1. [5] Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 2011. [6] Ibid, 2011. [7] Beatrice de Gelder, “Towards the Neurobiology of Emotional Body Language.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 (March 2006): 242-49. [8] School of Journalism, Stony Brook University, Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda (2010) http://www.youtube.comwatch ?v=JtdyA7SibG8. (5:24-8:38 in particular). [9] Amy Cuddy, Your Body Shapes Who You Are, TEDGlobal, (June 2012) http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are. [10] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 53. [11] Ibid., 61-63. [12] G. Di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Understanding motor events: a neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research, 91 (1992): 176-80. [13] Marco Del Giudice, Valeria Manera and Christian Keysers, “Programmed to learn? The ontogeny of mirror neurons,” Developmental Science 12, no. 2 (March 2009): 350-63. [14] Amy Cuddy, Presence (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 179. [15] Eddie North-Hager, “Botox Impairs Ability to Understand Emotions” (6 June 2011) https://news.usc.edu/28407/Botox-Impairs-Ability-to-Understand-Emotions/ [16]Judith Holler and Katie Wilkin. “Co-Speech Gesture Mimicry in the Process of Collaborative Referring During Face-to-Face Dialogue.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 35, no. 2 (June 2011): 133-53. [17] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for Theater, 64. [18] Ibid., 82. [19] Ibid., 74. [20] Ibid., 69. [21] Ibid., 88. [22] Kelly Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language.” [23] Personal communication with the authors. [24] Personal communication with the authors. “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Imrpovisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ©2016 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: James Armstrong 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: “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls” by Bradley Stephenson “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon” by Vivian Appler “iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters” by George Pate and Libby Ricardo 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.