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What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Academia and NYC Performance Tomi M Tsunoda, Daniel Irizarry, Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot 4:30PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? Featuring Tomi M Tsunoda , Daniel Irizarry , Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot. Content / Trigger Description: Tomi Tsunoda has spent most of her career as a director, deviser, designer, and producer of independent performance, developing sustainable systems for performing artists to self-produce work outside of institutional contexts. This included the creation of Breedingground Productions, which shepherded more than 200 projects over the course of ten years. She is one of 17 artists worldwide who are certified in all levels and disciplines to teach Soundpainting, the universal sign language for live composition created by jazz composer Walter Thompson. Her current projects combine both practical and critical work in dramaturgy, progressive arts pedagogy, fiber art, literary non-fiction, eco-philosophy, and facilitation, putting these fields into conversation as a way to address sustainable practice and systemic change. Tomi is currently serving as Chair of Undergraduate Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, having previously served as Director for Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Head of the Theater Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, Education Director for the Powerhouse Training Program at Vassar College, and as faculty and guest artist at several additional schools and conservatories. Daniel Irizarry is a Puerto Rican born International Experimental Theatre director, actor/performer and educator based in NYC. His work embraces highly stylized visceral acting, pataphysics, a celebration of GERMS & consensual audience participation. He is the Artistic Director of One-Eighth Theater and full time Lecturer at MIT Music & Theatre Arts. In his most recent work, he directed and performed the final project for the historic closing of the New Ohio Theatre titled, ‘Ultra Left Violence’ written by Robert Lyons. Other notable credits directed and performed; The Maids by Jose Rivera (New York Times Critics pick); UBU by Adam Szymkowicz (Time Out NY Critics pick), world premiere of Busu by Mishima at Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, YOVO by Robert Lyons in NYC, Poland, Cuba, South Korea & My Onliness by Robert Lyons at New Ohio Theatre in NYC (One of the best performances Off-Broadway in 2022 by Theatermania and nominated for a 2023 HOLA award for best Outstanding performance by a lead actor. Over his career he has directed, performed and taught in Turkey, India, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Italy, Romania, UK, Colombia, among others. Most notably at: Folkwang University in Germany, Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and Seoul Institute of the Arts in South Korea. He holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University, a BA in Drama at The Universidad de Puerto Rico where he has returned to teach at both. Solana Chehtman is a cultural producer and engagement curator born in Buenos Aires and based in New York City since 2012. She is currently the Director of Artist Programs at Joan Mitchell Foundation, where she supports artists with unrestricted funding and professional development through the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, as well as in their long term career stewardship via the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) program. In the past decade, Solana has partnered with a wide range of cultural organizations across the performing and visual arts to create new opportunities for artists and avenues for public participation in the arts. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as inaugural Director of Creative Practice and Social Impact at The Shed, and as Vice President of Public Engagement at Friends of the High Line. Solana received a BA in international studies at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and holds an EdM in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was an adjunct Professor at the MA in Arts Administration at Baruch College, City University of New York between 2018 and 2021. Alexis Jemal, LCSW, LCADC, MA, JD, PhD, associate professor at Silberman School of Social Work-Hunter College, is a critical-radical so(ul)cial worker (practitioner, scholar, researcher, educator), social entrepreneur, and artivist who specializes in racial justice, radical healing, wellness, and liberation. Dr. Jemal grounds her research and scholarship in her Critical Transformative Potential Framework that develops critical consciousness and taps into radical imagination to convert consciousness into action that heals and transforms people, relationships, and environments to support everyone’s humanity to the fullest extent possible. This framework guides the development and implementation of multi-(from the molecular to the macro) level, holistic, socio-cultural, psychosocial, bio-behavioral health interventions that incorporate clinical practice, advocacy, and community and cultural organizing. She teaches courses at the master’s level in clinical practice, critical social work practice, and human behavior, and at the doctoral level in arts-based, participatory action, intervention research and public scholarship. Sylvaine Guyot is Professor of French Literature, Thought & Culture at NYU, New York, since 2021. At Harvard University, Guyot acted as the Chair for TDM Theater, Dance & Media next to her tenure at the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. As a theatre director, she co-founded La Troupe (Harvard) and Le Théâtre de l’homme qui marche (Paris, France). She is currently developing a lecture-performance on understudied early modern female writing. Her research interests focus on seventeenth-century tragedy and spectacle culture, the history of the body and emotions, the politics of performing arts, and the formation of cultural institutions. Publications include Racine et le corps tragique (PUF, 2014) and Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 (MIT Press, 2021). She is a coleader of the Comédie-Française Registers Project. She has also published articles on contemporary docu-plays that tell the stories of the under- and unrepresented. Photo credits: Tomi Tsunoda. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Daniel Irizarry. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Solana Chehtman. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Alexis Jemal. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

KT Shorb Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed KT Shorb By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF by kt shorb The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 34, Number 2 (Spring 2022) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center A disembodied voice announces, “Places for T.L.M.,” prompting the two women holding fans to usher a man between them. The three unfurl their battered fans and begin waving them in rictus as the voice says, “Standby for telecast transmission in 5…4…3…” A jaunty introduction cues the three to bob up and down with the beat, while the two other ensemble members lie across their bunks desultorily fanning themselves. They sing, “Three little maids from school are we / Pert as a school-girl well can be…”[1] They bob and giggle behind their fans. They shuffle around the small stage in single-file, bowing and cow-towing. The music ends and the disembodied voice says, “Cut.” The ensemble members rub the forced smiles off their faces, and the man who evidently subbed in for a missing woman ensemble member nods approvingly to himself (Fig. 1). [caption id="attachment_4380" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] Fig. 1. Q-mates perform “Three Little Maids.” Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative.[/caption] The Mikado: Reclaimed (Reclaimed)[2] uses the 1885 W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan operetta The Mikado: Or the Town of Titipu as source material to criticize anti-Asian racism inherent in both the text and present day yellowface productions. Set in a near future ravaged by a global viral pandemic, Reclaimed depicts life in an internment camp for people of Asian descent who have been deemed “carriers” of the virus. “Q-mates (short for ‘quarantine inmates’)” are forced to perform song and dance numbers portraying “happy camp life” in the national livecast, “Virus Times Live!” Produced by the Austin-based Generic Ensemble Company (GenEnCo) in partnership with The VORTEX, Reclaimed was directed by me and devised by a mostly-Asian American ensemble. Four years after closing this show, the so-called “Chinese Virus” of COVID–19 quarantines millions across the world, as anti-Asian violence escalates alongside protest against state-sanctioned anti-Black violence after the murder of George Floyd. In 2016, we could not have consciously anticipated COVID–19 and its accompanying scapegoating of Asian bodies as carriers of disease. Yet, unconsciously, we did. Through the creative devising process, collaborators not only divined elements of the future but also developed a community of resistive care that concatenated a COVID–19 futurity with a carceral past. To invite this community of resistive care, we enacted reappropriation through strategies of reparative creativity, seduction of stereotype, and feeling yellow. In this practice-as-research article, I provide the background to the impetus of Reclaimed followed by a synopsis of the show. Citing literature by Asian Americanist performance scholars, I show how our creative process interwove critical race theory with aesthetic considerations, leading to a project-specific process I call “reappropriation.” Finally, I reflect on how our process provided an opportunity for racial healing amongst the collaborators. Background and Genesis The Mikado has been produced in yellowface nearly every year since it debuted in 1885. A satire about British aristocracy set in a perceived-exotic locale, a “Japan” where flirting is illegal, the plot of Mikado is a ridiculous farce. Few elements signal a “real” Japan, like the “Mikado,” a rarely-used moniker for the Japanese Emperor.[3] Most character and place names are derisive, nonsensical words such as “Yum-Yum,” “Nanki-poo,” and “Titipu.” As an Asian American performing artist racially traumatized by Mikado since being exposed to it in college, I expressed my opposition to it in every place I lived over the span of two decades—garnering little notice or support. The Asian American community response to the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s Mikado in 2014 sparked perhaps the first mainstream awareness of yellowface in this operetta as anti-Asian racism. When the production published publicity stills of white actors in yellowface, many local Asian American theatre artists expressed their long-held outrage. This led to Asian American-centered social media campaigns that spread to coverage by mainstream outlets such as the Seattle Times and NBC News. The yellowface Seattle production still opened, but many were put on notice. When New York Gilbert Sullivan Players (NYGASP) announced Mikado in 2015 with a yellowface production image, Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler sounded the call to respond.[4] I was part of a national groundswell of Asian Americans responding to Winkler’s call on Twitter that led to a postponement and re-imagining of the show in partnership with Asian American artists. In a moment of frustration and sheer bravado, I announced on Twitter that GenEnCo could do The Mikado in a thoughtful, anti-racist way. Our task was set. GenEnCo’s Reclaimed occurs in a larger context of multiple Asian American and Japanese treatments of Mikado. Doriz Baizley and Ken Narasaki’s 2007 The Mikado Project portrays an Asian American theatre company struggling through financial ruin by mounting a production of Mikado.[5] This play and the subsequent independent film based on it depict ambivalent Asian American actors critiquing the Orientalism of the original while embracing its musical elements and performing emotional and political acrobatics to justify the performance.[6] The Mikado Project manages to critique the racialized harm of yellowface as well as “camp plays” set during WWII Japanese American incarceration. The film starred Asian American veterans of stage and screen, including Erin Quill, who was also part of the Twitter groundswell around NYGASP in 2015. Quill has cultivated a “no-nonsense” persona leveling ongoing critiques of racism in New York theatre on her blog, fairyprincessdiaries.[7] Under the direction of Rick Shiomi in Minneapolis, Theatre Mu collaborated with Skylark Opera and set their Mikado in Edwardian England.[8] Shiomi’s 2013 production kept the broad narrative strokes as-is with significant cultural-political interventions. References to Japan were either excised or in a form of humorous wordplay; names and terms were changed to reflect early twentieth-century English mores. Perhaps most significantly, Shiomi cast Asian Americans in these English roles, thereby upending some historical baggage of yellowface. Meanwhile, The Chichibu Mikado (2006), directed by Kyoko Fujishiro and translated by Toru Sasakibara, was sung entirely in Japanese by a Japanese cast.[9] When the rural city Chichibu gained international fame as “The Town of Titipu” following the production, the residents of the city chose to believe it was based on their own town because Chichibu could also be transliterated to “Titibu,” although there is no concrete evidence that Gilbert and Sullivan had made such a connection. Re-contextualizing the plot through Japanese modern sensibilities mapped on Japanese proto-professional actor bodies speaking in Japanese, this version conveyed a means by which Japanese citizens could gain access to cosmopolitan trappings of Britain and other western contexts. These productions engaged in widely varying degrees of critique and deconstruction through adaptation. Our Reclaimed depicts the typical “day in the life” of quarantine inmates (or, Q-mates) incarcerated during a global pandemic. We follow the story of a Q-mate repeatedly summoned by a bell to change into a Lolicon outfit to perform non-consensual sex acts off-stage (JooHee) while she falls in love with another Q-mate (Rachel, Fig. 2). We witness denied physical autonomy by glowing red “chips” embedded in Q-mates’ arms that can shock and control them. Meanwhile, a surveillance state manifests in self-silenced soundscapes. Q-mates rarely speak, and when they do, it is in whispered Korean or Tagalog. When one Q-mate (Leng) speaks about freedom in English, her chip shocks everyone and then summarily impels her off-stage where her execution is broadcast for the entire cell-block to witness via video feed. Despite the draconian context, Q-mates enact the extraordinary, joyous, and mundane. Between bouts of boredom, they sing songs for one another to pass the time (“The Criminal Cried”) or to convey warnings or woe (“As Someday It May Happen,” “Here’s a How-de-do”) while periodically singing numbers for “Virus Times Live!” (“Miya Sama,” “Three Little Maids”). JooHee and Rachel join in an ad-hoc commitment ceremony (“On a Tree by a River”), which prompts a jealous Q-mate (Annie) to betray their affair to the authorities (“Alone and Yet Alive…Hearts Do Not Break”). When JooHee is summoned to perform sexual favors again, she refuses, leading instead to Rachel’s chip-shock removal and a subsequent beating, broadcast live. Rachel is released back to the cell-block, only to die in JooHee’s arms. During JooHee’s lament (“The Sun Whose Rays,” Fig. 3), the Q-mates in the entire cell-block signal to one another a refusal to continue the oppressive status quo. When the Q-mates are prompted to deliver another livecast, they abstain from song and instead reveal Rachel’s bloodied body. The show ends with a blackout and a “shock” sound, implying that everyone dies. [caption id="attachment_4381" align="aligncenter" width="606"] Figure 2. Lovers’ kiss. Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_4382" align="aligncenter" width="606"] Figure 3. Lamentation of a lover’s death. Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative.[/caption] Reparative Creativity, Feeling Yellow, and Reappropriation As Dorinne Kondo argues in Worldmaking, theatre artists, through performative acts, unmake and remake race.[10] Kondo calls such processes “reparative creativity,” saying they “[offer] a way to remake worlds counter to the affective violence of minoritarian life” while also imagining something else.[11] Creative projects allow us to examine pain and transform it into different—though related—new artifacts. She further describes how reparative creativity can revisit “histories of affective violence” that can address the complexities of facing that violence.[12] Through theatre, theatre artists of color create new meanings of race and its representations with and in response to audiences of color. Devising Reclaimed, then, was a process by which both historical and contemporary notions of race were made and unmade.[13] In both the rehearsal room and onstage we have the capacity to name and rectify the affective and physical violence inflicted upon our bodies and communities. Coming together to confront yellowface as Asian Americans who have experienced its violence forms a central part of what Donatella Galella calls “feeling yellow.”[14] Galella uses Sara Ahmed’s discourse on happiness to highlight how encounters with yellowface create dichotomies where those in power find entertainment and joy, while those “feeling yellow” have to either feign joy or hide a combination of rage, disappointment, and alienation. Galella identifies two ways that feeling yellow sparks utopic hope. One is through the “impishly gleeful” process of “making another person feel awful for their enjoyment of and complicity with racist musicals… This act redistributes pain more equitably.”[15] The other is through acts of solidarity and collectivity: “By feeling together, Asian Americans can foster solidarity and use their affect to move others just as they are moved.”[16] As an imagined, strategic, and politicized community, Asian Americans must overcome historical divisions of national origin and immigration status; such opportunities for coalition are empowering if rare. Here I note a significant paradox: Reclaimed undoes racial violence through reparative creativity while the narrative of the piece ends with all the characters dead. This collective death was chosen by the ensemble deliberately to address issues of (il)legibility of Asian Americans and anti-Asian racism in the context of Austin, Texas in 2016. The piece confronted the invisibilized racial harm enacted upon bodies of Asian descent in the form of yellowface. In laying bare the hidden, Reclaimed unmade the violence of this erasure. Depicting resistance to carceral violence narratively onstage also cultivated a culture of care in the rehearsal room. In addition, while the specific stereotypes contained in Mikado were aimed at what Josephine Lee calls a Japan of “pure invention,” the production employed a majority non-Japanese ensemble of Asian Americans who had differing stakes in “Japanese-ness” but similar stakes in generalized Orientalism.[17] Though we could not articulate it at the time, the collaborative team for Reclaimed sought a space of healing and repair that could connect ensemble members’ experience of harm with the audience. If Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado is a prime example of appropriation, Mikado: Reclaimed is that of reappropriation. Reappropriation, broadly, is a process whereby a community whose cultural legacy has been defaced through harmful misinterpretation takes an object of that misinterpretation and transmutes it into something that furthers an identitarian strategic project. Lee takes up reappropriation in her treatments of works by David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda where she notes the allure in the “excessiveness of the stereotype.”[18] She contends that reappropriation has the power to dissect stereotypes and its racialized histories, showing that it can have “the potential for its disruption.”[19] She goes further to illustrate that undoing the stereotype is not simple or easy, but the inherent theatrical power in the stereotype can serve as a potential tool for liberation. For the collaborators of Reclaimed and its audiences, reappropriation was a means of taking Orientalizing and white supremacist texts and transforming them. It was not reclamation. Reappropriation requires a breaking down of a text into components that still contain discernable referents to the original but re-create meanings different from—if not counter to—the text from which it draws. Keeping a musical number but setting it with different staging, design, and arrangement can not only excavate different implications from the original, but also reveal the political and cultural subject positions of those performing the reappropriation. Indirectness is key to how reappropriation works. To simply refute each element in the original would have repeated the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in relief, not transform it. We began the project by watching a recording of a yellowface production of The Mikado.[20] It left the cast angry. We fluctuated between revisiting the original and sharing childhood experiences of racial formation, not being taken seriously, and failed attempts at assimilation. From the super “woke” person who knew critical race theory to the “model minority” who announced that she “never encountered racism, just ignorance,” everyone expressed a sense of otherness they have felt in their lives. In order to mitigate the potential for re-traumatization, we devised a check-in/check-out process whereby collaborators could name what they wanted to “bring in from the world” or “leave in the rehearsal room.” We were committed to examining the pain as a means of healing. The actors’ initial anger brought on by having seen the original led to the ideas of overt resistance through visceral offense—eating Asian foods with strong smells such as durian or natto, enacting slasher fantasies on white effigies, and so on. We wanted to be, as Eve Oishi has called it, “Bad Asians.”[21] Our aversion, combined with knowledge of how Mikado is a part of popular culture, helped us narrow down the song list. While learning songs, we conducted parallel research. The “Muslim ban” had only been mentioned by one Republican candidate in passing during the 2016 primary campaign, and it frightened all of us, not just the sole Arab American member of the ensemble. It prompted us to examine images of Syrian refugees. These images felt familiar, echoing the detainment of people seeking asylum in border states. As Asian Americans confronting heightened yet casual racism in the form of yellowface, we were also keenly aware of how such representational violence could easily slip into yellow peril and detaining over 100,000 people of Japanese descent as potential enemy combatants. We realized that an internment camp was the requisite setting for our production. As the setting and tone became clearer, we began to imagine how we might find ourselves incarcerated again. Using the knowledge of a biologist in the cast, we created a detailed backstory around potential viral outbreaks that many scientists (rightly) considered inevitable. We then returned to the original operetta to poach as many elements as we could while homing in on what we wanted to say. Each actor chose a character they would emulate in devising their own character. We began criticizing subtler aspects of Mikado, such as the sexually-exploitative relationship between Yum-Yum and Ko-Ko and the casual treatment of death. One element specific to GenEnCo we deliberately included was a normalizing (but certainly not normative) existence of queer romance, sex, and friendship. GenEnCo was founded specifically to show bodies, aesthetics, and stories onstage that I—as a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Asian American—found to be everyday and “generic.” Our mission has always been to center queer people of color in our theatrical storytelling. I take inspiration from José Esteban Muñoz’s words that “[q]ueerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.”[22] And that “[b]rownness is already here. Brownness is vast, present, and vital.”[23] We did however make one major textual revision that mobilized reappropriation to transform meanings in the original. Most productions of Mikado update the lyrics in “As Someday It May Happen” to reflect the undesirable subjects in the zeitgeist. In Reclaimed, these revisions provide plot context, diegetic rules, and analysis of how anti-Asian racism manifests and provides an example of reparative creativity: There’s the Centers for Disease Control who sounded the alarm The epidemiologists, I’ve got them on the list! And the "cheap and chippy" chippers who installed these in our arms, Nanotechnologists, they never would be missed! Then the bigot who denounces with enthusiastic tone, Every race but his, and all religions but his own; And the Poo-Bah of the Quarantine, the boss man of “The Cage,” Who takes a shine to pretty girls who are less than half his age And the lovers of Chinoiserie, the Asian fetishists, I don’t think they’d be missed, I’m sure they’d not be missed![24] As we continued to create material, I asked the actors to explore mimicking white people performing yellowface. The actors were understandably disgusted at first. The disgust turned into ridicule, to rupture, then to catharsis. Through repetition of the original material, we somehow found a way to parse the past from the present, as if we were reverse engineering the racial trauma the original operetta symbolized. Rehearsing the classic earworm “Three Little Maids” was particularly informative. The song about three women “who, all unwary/ come from a ladies’ seminary” and who are “filled to the brim with girlish glee” is often performed with shuffling feet and giggles behind hands.[25] I associated this song with a falling-out with a white college friend. At first, as we rehearsed the piece, I was transported to my own past and the end of that friendship and the violent incidents around it. Due to the passing of time, I was able to manage potential emotional triggers. Partly to ground myself in the present, and partly in solidarity, I committed myself to learning all three sung parts with the actors. The repetition was at first very painful. Moving forward, however, my experience of the past began to shift. The pain became more manageable. Traumas slowly healed as the experiences of racial violence were merged with and overwritten by moments of being together as a community. We figured out a way to sing that very hurtful song while feeling yellow. The resistive care that GenEnCo created through reappropriation served as a balm to the ensemble. In hindsight, although one of the ensemble members was a trained psychologist, I would have provided more formal and robust mental health resources to examine racial trauma. That said, Reclaimed is an example of how employing reparative creativity and feeling yellow enabled minoritized theatre makers to transform both the art and the communal experience of racial trauma. kt shorb (they/them/their) is Assistant Professor of Acting and Directing at Allegheny College and the producing artistic director of the Generic Ensemble Company. Their current research focuses on anti-racist and anti-colonial rehearsal room practices and actor training. As a director, they focus on devised work by underrepresented communities and new play development as well as opera stage directing. kt is currently the Vice President for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters Artists. They will be joining Macalester College this fall. Deepest gratitude to Rick Shiomi who sent footage and score copies of his adaption of The Mikado. Many thanks to James McMaster, siri gurudev, Margaret Jumonville, Priya Raman, and Alexis Riley for giving me in-depth feedback on drafts of this article. [1] Arthur Sullivan W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado, Or, the Town of Titipu. (New York: G. Schirmer, 2002), 69. [2] Generic Ensemble Company, “The Mikado: Reclaimed,” Vimeo, 1 May 2016, https://vimeo.com/160895296. This performance featured the following actor-devisers: JooHee Ahn, Annie Kim Hedrick, Jonathan G. Itchon, Laura Khalil, Abigail Lucas, Rachel Steed, and Leng Wong. Additional collaborators on the workshop version of the piece were: Kanoa Michél Bailey, kubby, and Saray de Jesus Rosales. [3] Josephine Lee’s The Japan of Pure Invention provides an in-depth analysis of the myriad contexts of Mikado. Josephine D. Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan's the Mikado (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). [4] Leah Nanako Winkler, “‘The Mikado’ in Yellowface Is Coming to The Skirball Center of the Performing Arts and We Should Talk About It,” Leah Nanako Winkler (blog), 15 September 2015, https://leahnanako.com/2015/09/15/the-mikado-in-yellowface-is-coming-to-the-skirball-center-of-the-performing-arts-and-we-should-talk-about-it/. See also: Victor Maog and Leah Nanako Winkler, “Leah Nanako Winkler, The Mikado, and This American Moment,” Howlround Theatre Commons (blog), 7 October 2015, https://howlround.com/leah-nanako-winkler-mikado-and-american-moment/. [5] Doris Baizley and Ken Narasaki, The Mikado Project (New Play Exchange, 2007), accessed 2 February 2022. [6] The Mikado Project, directed by Chil Kong, featuring Tamlyn Tomita, Allen C. Liu, Erin Quill, and Ryun Yu (New Cyberian, 2010), DVD. [7] Quill, Erin. fairyprincessdiaries (blog), https://fairyprincessdiaries.com/. [8] Diep Tran, “Building a Better ‘Mikado,’ Minus the Yellowface,” American Theatre, 21 June 2021, https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/04/20/building-a-better-mikado-minus-the-yellowface/; Rick Shiomi, “Director Removes Racism and Yellowface from Minneapolis Staging of ‘the Mikado,’” Star Tribune, 8 March 2019, https://www.startribune.com/director-removes-racism-and-yellowface-from-minneapolis-staging-of-the-mikado/506842272/. [9] The Chichibu Mikado, directed by Kyoko Fujishiro, translated by Toru Sasakibara, International Gilbert Sullivan Festival, Buxton, Derbyshire, England, 1 August 2006. [10] Dorrine K. Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 25. [11] Ibid., 212. [12] Ibid., 212. [13] A note about tense: to differentiate between production and process, I refer to the performance in present tense and the process in past tense. [14] Donatella Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (2018): 67-77, http://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2018.0005. [15] Ibid., 74. [16] Ibid., 73. [17] Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention. [18] Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 91. [19] Ibid., 96. [20] The Mikado, DVD, directed by Brian MacDonald (Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1999). [21] Eve Oishi, “Bad Asians: New Media by Queer Asian American Artists,” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, eds. Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 221-241. [22] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. [23] José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 121-122. [24] The Mikado: Reclaimed. [25] Sullivan and Gilbert, 69-73. Guest Editor: Donatella Galella Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Emily Furlich Co-Managing Editor: Dahye Lee Guest Editorial Board: Arnab Banerji Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns Broderick Chow Chris A. Eng Esther Kim Lee Sean Metzger Christine Mok Stephen Sohn Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies" by Donatella Galella "Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance," by Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa "On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die" by Christine Mok "Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee's Cambodian Rock Band" by Jennifer Goodlander "The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee's The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band" by Kristin Leahey, with excerpts from an interview with Joseph Ngo "Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay" by Roger Tang "Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An 'Illumination of the Fault Lines' of Asian American Theatre" by Jenna Gerdsen "Randul Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words" by Baron Kelly "Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company's The Mikado: Reclaimed" by kt shorb "Dance Planets" by Al Evangelista "Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma" by Amy Mihyang Ginther "Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies" by Bindi Kang "Off-Yellow Time vs. Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education" by Daphne P. Lei "Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection" by Ariel Nereson www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bennet Schaber Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects Bennet Schaber By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 1 (Fall 2022) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center “[T]o reduce everything to terms of motion, to see everything passing into everything else by almost insensible gradations, to refuse to accept any firm line of demarcation… this running over of every art into every other art… in all the arts the principle of motion prevails over the principle of repose.”—Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts [1] “Repose is the property of dead things; with the living it is only a passing accident.”—Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of Today [2] “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?”—Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time [3] In 1934, Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954), celebrated stage designer and director, went to Hollywood. There he joined his friend, colleague and former Harvard classmate, producer Kenneth Macgowan, at RKO. At Harvard the two had both been students in George Pierce Baker’s famed English 47 playwriting workshop and later, in New York along with Eugene O’Neill, another Baker alumnus, formed the ‘triumvirate’ of Experimental Theatre Inc., producing over twenty plays in three seasons (1923-6) at the Provincetown Playhouse and Greenwich Village Theatre. These included two landmarks of the new movement in the North American theatre, O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1924) with Paul Robeson and Desire Under the Elms (1924) with Walter Huston, the latter designed and directed by Jones. Both plays would become motion pictures. Jones, like other practitioners of “the new stagecraft,” was celebrated for his use of color in costuming, stage architecture and lighting, and was so part of a “talent pool” courted not only by Broadway, but by the burgeoning retail industry and, of course, Hollywood. He was, then, one of the principals of what in 1928 the Saturday Evening Post called “The New Age of Color.” [4] Jones had come West to serve as “color designer,” a newly created position, for an experiment that turned out to be the first non-animated, three-color, Technicolor film, the Academy-Award winning short, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO 1934) (Fig. 1). For Jones it was, if words are to be believed, a dream come true. “Color has come to stay in pictures,” he wrote in Vanity Fair earlier in the year. “When this issue reaches the press I shall be in Hollywood where I hope to put some of my dreams into color—or properly speaking into Technicolor, for that is the name of the process in which I am interested.” [5] Fig. 1, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO, 1934). Frame grab.[/caption] A year later, Jones returned to the pages of Vanity Fair , this time to discuss his work as “artistic director” for Pioneer/RKO’s Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature-length Technicolor film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and, like La Cucaracha, produced by Macgowan (Fig. 2). [6] Fig. 2, Becky Sharp (Pioneer/RKO, 1935). Frame grab.[/caption] He enthused about the “advent of color in pictures” and situated it not only within the history of film—“images began to move… then they began to speak… now they are taking on all the colors of life…”—but within a world history at once aesthetic and speculative. Technicolor becomes for him a metonymy for technology itself, capable of reaching back to Homer and faithfully reproducing “the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn,” but also presaging a future in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round” and that will, finally, “make every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being.” Technicolor signaled a past, revivified in all of its chromatic intensity, and a future, anticipated in its full, living, even utopian dimensions. And he added, “I cannot say why this should be so. But it is the way things seem to be moving.” [7] Vividness and presence, movement and time: Color, or rather, Technicolor, was redolent with and suggestive of all of these. Indeed, color was suggestion itself. In Jones’s words, “it affects us emotionally; it means something to us.” Thus, he adduced an entire chromatic semiotics both natural and cultural: “Light bright colors make us feel gay. Dark sombre colors make us feel sad. We see red; we get the blues; we become purple with rage; green with envy… red and green make us think of Christmas….” In fact, this semiotics of color, bound to a strict but not inflexible set of rules and guidelines, would quickly transform into industrial standards for color films. [8] But if color required these kinds of formal, limiting and organizing procedures, it was because in it there was something else; and that something else, to Jones’s mind at least, would require “artists who will explore the infinite potentialities of the new medium.” That excess element, in order to be expressed, required an analogy that, in the long run, may have been no analogy at all: music. Beautiful color is pleasing to our eyes just as beautiful sound is pleasing to our ears. But, more than this, beautiful color, properly arranged and composed on the screen and flowing from sequence to sequence just as music flows from movement to movement, stirs our minds and emotions in the same way that music does. Color on the screen—mobile color, flowing color—is really a kind of visual music. Or rather, it is an art for which there is as yet no name. [9] Like music, “arranged and composed,” color, mobile and flowing, was a form of flux in excess of any informal patchwork or formal taxonomy of significations. Although immanent to its medium or support, it took on an independence of movement and vibration; and although an optical element of the film narrative, it transcended the order of representation of the fable. Clearly, it could “enhance the action of the drama” or become “an organic part of it….” But in principle, it was irreducible to the technical, regular and inexorable procession of the film machine or to the formal rhythms and progressions of the drama. A color of a dress? Of course. Of the sky? Yes. A metaphor? An association? Certainly. But also something simultaneously more material and more abstract, mobile, flowing. Perhaps this is why it had “no name.” Color, therefore, introduced, or re-introduced, a certain tension into the film that became even more apparent after the premiere of Becky Sharp . Color, like sound before it, re-asserted the cinema as what Rudolf Arnheim would call “an artistic composite,” with its variety of perceptual and formal registers always potentially at war with one another and themselves. [10] Forces of indeterminacy consistently threatened narrative and more general aesthetic coherence, technical feats of astonishment could overwhelm artistic restraint, perceptual and sensory independences could work below or above principles of integration, even the repetitive cycles of reels and frames were potentially at odds with the forward momentum of lengths of film. In short, there was a friction between what might be called avant-garde tendencies and conventional norms; and Jones’s work in theatre design was rooted in both camps. Color semiotics was one thing, mobile color was another. In addition, La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp were “demonstration” films, prototypes for the new three-color Technicolor process. And their need to highlight the process of color itself accentuated these tensions. The demonstration, meant to suggest a certain aesthetic and industrial teleology, in Jones’s words, “the way things seem to be moving,” also suggested its potential opposite, a kind of corrosive, vibrational undoing of that forward momentum. Reviewing the premiere at Radio City Music Hall for the New York Times , Andre Sennwald put his finger on many of these fundamental tensions while echoing Jones’s rhetoric. Although Becky Sharp ’s faults were “too numerous to earn it distinction as a screen drama,” as “an experiment it is a momentous event, and it may be that in a few years it will be regarded as equal in importance of the first talking pictures.” He added: This is not the coloration of natural life, but a vividly pigmented dream world of the artistic imagination. … [T]he most glaring technical fault is the poor definition in the long shots, which convert faces into blurred masses…. [T]here is also a tendency to provoke an after-image when the scene shifts abruptly to a quieter color combination…. At the moment it is impossible to view Becky Sharp without crowding the imagination so completely with color that the photoplay as a whole is almost meaningless. … The real secret of the film resides not in the general feeling of dissatisfaction which the spectator suffers when he leaves the Music Hall, but in the active excitement which he experiences during its scenes. [11] In short, the film’s “excessive demands on the eye” undermined “the film as a whole.” Blurred masses, after-images, active excitement, crowded imagination and the corrosion of meaning rendered nothing but dissatisfaction where conventional aesthetic norms and expectations were concerned. To rectify these alleged “faults” required “accustoming the eye” to color just as “we were obliged to accustom the ear to the first talkies.” What was at stake then, were both forms of perceptual acquaintance and aesthetic integration; the eye and the ear would require re-attunement before they could be made once again to harmonize. Thus, Sennwald took Jones’s vocabulary of dreams, aesthetic teleologies and visual music and gave them a specificity that Jones’s own rhetoric itself seemed to lack. Sound and color did not supplement a lack in the silent, monochrome image. They revivified and exacerbated an old and created and put into motion a new set of tensions, if not quite a new art or an art for which there was as yet no name. Inscribed, silently, in the demonstration were a set of avant-garde aspirations more fusional than integrative, psychologically or physiologically jarring rather than aesthetically pacifying. The sum of the film was exceeded by its parts; and these parts themselves bled through or overflowed into forms of indistinction that gave rise to, not integration, but a fusing of more… parts. Were there really after-images floating in the indeterminate spaces of cuts? Were human figures actually transforming into blurred blocs of pigment? Was this what Jones meant by mobile color? In fact, “mobile color” really did name something, and Jones once knew it, even if by 1935 he had perhaps forgotten. “Mobile color,” Stark Young, playwright and critic, wrote in 1922 in Theatre Arts Magazine , “is a new art and we have no images of speech for it…. But we sit before it with no sense of strangeness, though there may be some novelty. Like all true things in art it is recognizable. We realize its closeness to our dreams.” [12] Here again was the sublime feeling of inexpressibility; and here again were “dreams into color,” and not just in our heads. A year earlier, Young’s co-editor at Theatre Arts Magazine had also written with excitement about “mobile color,” Thomas Wilfred’s experiments with lumia , moving color projections. In the Theatre of Tomorrow , Kenneth Macgowan, Jones’s friend, colleague and the future producer of La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp at Pioneer/RKO, celebrated Wilfred’s clavilux , a console to create moving light projections and a new, luminous, environmental art, as a harbinger of a future, multi-media theatre (fig. 3). Fig. 3, Thomas Wilfred at the Clavilux Jr. (1930). Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.[/caption] Macgowan explained: In a laboratory on Long Island, Thomas Wilfrid [sic], a naturalized Dane, who is a machinist and a musician as well as artist, has perfected a “color organ” or “claviluse” [sic] which creates upon a plaster screen the most extraordinary, beautiful and moving progression of absolute shapes and colors. Upon a surface stained by light, develop, evolve and pass the most lovely and thrilling of bright shapes produced apparently by prisms and crystals…. Floating in three-dimensional space… they seem to turn inside-out into a fourth. The final effect is utterly apart from the theatre as we know it. It is more of some mystic philosophy of shapes and numbers, come to life, a religion of pure form sprung out of the void. [13] In Huntington, Long Island, Macgowan had attended the same, private clavilux demonstration about which Young wrote the next year. Present too were Theatre Arts Magazine ’s founder, Sheldon Cheney, photographer Francis Bruguière, and designer Hermann Rosse. Rosse, who also experimented with moving color projections, would go on to win an Oscar for artistic direction for the 1930 two-color, Technicolor musical revue, King of Jazz (Universal). Jones, who contributed texts and images to the Theatre Arts Magazine beginning with its inaugural issue, may have also attended the event. But if he was not present, he would have known and read of it and certainly attended later exhibitions. The rhetoric he later deployed à propos of Technicolor clearly echoed the rhetoric surrounding Wilfred’s lumia . Although now a rather forgotten art form, Wilfred’s invention and the performances he gave with it were a vibrant and relevant component of both the avant-garde art world and the popular culture of the twenties. [14] Painters, patrons and musicians all found mobile color provocative and intriguing, an “art of the future,” as Katherine Dreier described it to Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Leopold Stokowski and Marcel Duchamp. [15] Sheldon Cheney, the experimental theatre’s leading theorist and exponent in the USA, devoted an entire chapter of his A Primer of Modern Art (1924) to it; and his descriptions, and a series of photographs by Bruguière, amounted to both a verbal and visual essay on its significance and potential futures. Like Young and Macgowan, Cheney too found himself struggling to find an adequate or satisfactory vocabulary with which to describe and take account of this distinctly modern art. And like Young, he recognized immediately a potential contradiction between its hybrid origins and its ambitions toward abstraction. According to Cheney: It is too soon to build up a particularized theory for the art of mobile color; but this much must be said at the outset: it must be, like music, an abstract art. It will have a formal beauty of its own sort, distinctive, shaped by the limitations and possibilities of its medium, colored lights. But it will not ever (let us hope) get mixed up with the aim of representing nature. It would then—awful thought—become a sort of super-colored movie. As in music, where only the cheapest novelties of composition try definitely to imitate the sounds of nature, so in this new art there will be no effort to suggest objective reality. [16] Once again, the encounter with mobile color leads, with a kind of inevitability, to music and the cinema. And Wilfred’s own lexicon encouraged both these intermedial flights and their accompanying anxieties. The Clavilux, according to its creator, was a kind of “color organ,” and each light “composition” was an “ opus .” Thus, despite his best efforts, Wilfred could never guarantee that mobile color would be understood as a strictly, unadulterated visual experience. Its condition as a motile, chromatic, temporal and ephemeral experience underscored its status as an object and phenomenon of flux. Cheney was himself forced to illustrate his essay on the lumia with static, black-and-white photographs, as if mobile color presented not only a foil to linguistic representation but to the visual as well (fig. 4). Fig. 4, Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (1924). Photos by Francis Bruguière.[/caption] And he concluded his essay not with words or a photograph, but with a reproduction of a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe: Music—Black, Blue and Green (fig. 5). Fig. 5, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org Fig. 5a, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org [/caption] Music? Painting? Movie? An art with no name and, more troubling still, an art with no proper image. It was, as Macgowan had pointed out, continually developing, evolving, and passing. But perhaps the very difficulty of representing mobile color was in fact the indication of its most sublime possibilities. What exactly would be wrong with "a sort of super-colored movie?” And was that what Jones and Macgowan had gotten up to in the decade since Cheney’s book? Awful thought indeed. Trying to come to grips with mobile color brought Cheney not to the promised land of medium specificity, abstraction, non-objectivity or aesthetic autonomy. Rather, despite himself, he was drawn along, like Macgowan, Young, and Jones, toward the other arts, in this case, painting, music and the movies. Mobile color highlighted and exacerbated two conflictual but finally inseparable narratives about modern art. Claims about abstraction, about the emancipation of the arts from figuration and their deliverance into their own, particular and distinct media and vocations, invariably found themselves accompanied by claims of hybridity, immixture and confusion. [17] Thus, while critics like Babbitt, Cheney, Arnheim and, most famously, Clement Greenberg (despite their crucial differences) could all broker the legitimacy of modern art on the aesthetic limits first outlined by Lessing’s Laokoon (and to which they invariably referred), another faction (to which Jones and Macgowan belonged) could seek the same legitimacy in the sensuous overflowing of those limits manifest in Walter Pater’s rather paradoxical notion of the Anderstreben , through which the arts “lend each other new forces.” [18] Music, and especially the notion of visual music, could stand in for both tendencies. On the one hand, music was an abstraction. In it everything—perception, sensation, figuration—could be reduced to mathematics: duration, rhythm, interval, vibration. It was its own content. On the other hand, as a metaphor, it drew to it all the other arts and their allied perceptual forms. Music was the source of synesthetic experiences. Like color, it was an experience of “flow” into which memory and anticipation were soldered together. Emotion and diffusion: Cheney was honest enough to acknowledge at least that much: “It is a question whether absolute abstraction is not a will-o’-the-wisp, whether in any work of art (even musical?) the associative processes of memory and recognition are not indissolubly bound up, at least faintly, with aesthetic enjoyment.” [19] Visual music, then, confirmed the nagging suspicion that every attempt to draw the limits of, or the borders between, the various arts seemed to lead to their increasing “confusion,” as Irving Babbitt vehemently complained. No doubt the theatre and the cinema, composites by their very nature and history, were the most susceptible to these contradictions. Like Babbitt and Lessing before him, Rudolf Arnheim was not particularly a fan of aesthetic hybrids, but he saw clearly where Cheney’s, Stark’s and Macgowan’s arguments led: “[E]ven the theatre has been accused now and then of basically being a hybrid…. [A]bsolute theatre, the kind of performance that is sheer stage action… has remained sterile whenever it was attempted and must remain so unless it be stylized to the point of becoming dance or so enriched visually as to become film.” [20] Mobile color accentuated this condition. To think of it as theatre or drama was quite simply to watch theatre disappear into color or music… or cinema. Thus, it brought home the essentially composite nature of theatre itself. The entire spectrum of the arts was the condition of its sense. If Technicolor, at least in Jones’s sense of it, bore the trace of mobile color, that was because it indicated these same compositional tensions at work in the cinema. Sennwald had seen it first-hand. Mobile color could transform figuration into moving blocs of pigment. Chromatic flux, “flowing color,” provoked afterimages that signaled the spectators’ physiological and subjective, and thus ontologically obscure, contribution to the film, what Sergei Eisenstein had called “the brink of cinema,” “fusing stage and audience in a developing pattern” that seemed to lack a proper place. [21] At play then was a dual tendency: towards abstraction and high art, towards aesthetic fusions and the vernacular. This was how nameless arts were born. There was another tension at play in mobile color and this one perhaps brings us to the crux of the matter. On the one hand, the lumia were theatrical, that is they constituted both an art of vision and of volume. In Wilfred’s own words, they were “a three-dimensional drama in space.” [22] This distinguished the lumia from all previous versions of color music, from Pythagoras to Castel, Rimington to Scriabin. [23] And in fact, the inaugural demonstration to the Theatre Arts group brought out, as Cheney explicitly noticed, lumia as spatial art: “the effect of space instead of screen is achieved through the use of a background that is a modification of the stage-dome or cupola-horizon, in place of the flat wall.” [24] What Cheney was describing was the cyclorama that was revolutionizing the lighting effects of the modern theatre in the teens and twenties. A solid, domed, curvilinear background, usually constructed of plaster, the cyclorama enabled sophisticated light and color effects and obviated the need for painted backdrops. With it, the new stagecraft could give up traditional forms of mimesis and dedicate Itself to experiments in image generation. The cyclorama turned the theatre into a continuous field of projections. Plays like those produced by Jones, Macgowan, and O’Neill, could unfold rhythmically in a light that made prior dramatic unities suddenly indistinct if not indiscernible. [25] “Lighting is my music,” the German theatre designer, Ottamar Starke, said. And with the new experiences of theatrical light and space, the new, experimental, theatre became something closer to the flux of rhythmic progression than anything like Aristotelian mimetic dramaturgy. Plays became more episodic, putting momentum and suggestion in place of representation. Stage pictures were no longer produced before a static, painted, representational background. [26] Instead, they unfolded in the animated interplay between moving bodies and mobile light. “Let the stage, by means of its lights, be as alive as the drama itself,” proclaimed Hiram Kelly Moderwell in 1914. [27] “A new theatre and a new art,” wrote Macgowan about the designs of Rosse and Jones, “in which story, action, color, music, pantomime and voice would be fused.” [28] Actors emerged as living presences from their own projected shadows and images (fig. 6). Fig. 6, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), w/ Charles Gilpin performing before the cyclorama (Kuppelhorizont) constructed by George Cram Cook, scene design by Cleon Throckmorton. Provincetown Playhouse, NY (Wikimedia Commons).[/caption] “The lights and shadows on a human body reveal to our eyes that the body is ‘plastic’—that is, a flexible body of three dimensions,” Moderwell insisted. [29] The future imagined by Jones in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round,” had already happened. Had he forgotten that too? On the other hand, if the lumia resembled theatrical events or proto-happenings, they also constituted a set of distinct compositions, each one an “ opus .” They were thus repeatable, recorded, technical objects the status of which was simultaneously virtual and material, images that required a support in a medium of inscription, like a film. Thus, for each lumia opus there corresponded a “color record,” a glass disc that could be “played” and manipulated on Wilfred’s clavilux (fig. 7). Fig. 7a, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7b, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7c, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7d, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org This is why the analogies with music both made sense and fell short. It was not music as such that was at stake, but recorded music, phonography, with which the lumia perhaps were best compared. A chromo-graphy that was both a semiotic structure and the simultaneous possibility, through recorded repetition, of its technical deconstruction, like but not quite identical to either a modernist painting or a super-colored movie. A lumia opus was a temporal object but not necessarily a narrative or even a conventionally musical one. [30] What it promised, and this cannot be overemphasized, was not meaning as such, a text or a discursive semiotics, but a sensuous experience of color vision in and as time: developing, evolving, passing, repeating. And its inventor was having as difficult a time as anyone finding the means to express what was fundamentally a sensory, mnemo-technical phenomenon. In Wilfred’s own words, the “physical basis” of lumia was: “The composition, recording and performance of a silent visual sequence in form, color and motion, projected on a flat white screen by means of a light-generating instrument controlled from a keyboard.” [31] Composition, instrument, keyboard, all suggested music. Recording, light, sequence, screen, all suggested cinema. Performance linked the two arts, but also suggested the theatricality that had mesmerized the editors of Theatre Arts Magazine . “The lumia artist conceives his idea,” Wilfred wrote, “as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.” Mobile color was, like the theatre, like the cinema, a composite art. But it was also a recorded art; and the experience it promised—of emergence, expectation, disappearance and repetition—was bound up with its technical condition: not the time of seeing, but time’s entrance into, and emergence as, the visible. This is why it slipped through Cheney’s hands even as he tried—and failed—to represent it. Its ontology and locus were obscure, like a song or picture you can’t get out of your head (or ear, or eye). Modern art’s afterimage. “The mind of audiences alone can see the created thing as a unity,” wrote drama critic and future film producer, Ralph Block, of motion projections. “It never appears as such on the screen.” [32] And he added, à propos of the cinema proper and as if anticipating Jones’s own hesitations regarding color semiotics: For the camera, movement must be living, warm, vital, and flowing rather than set and defined in an alphabet of traditional interpretation. Like Bergsonian time, it must seek to renew and recreate itself out of the crest of each present moment. It is in this sense that it resembles music. [33] Thinking, in 1935, of Technicolor as “mobile color,” as “flow” and “movement” in search of its proper name, and finally as “visual music,” Jones was reviving and reanimating the lumia experiments and discourses from the previous two decades and, a bit surreptitiously, asserting their continued influence and relevance. He had clearly not forgotten—or at least was not conscious of having not forgotten—his experiences of Wilfred’s invention. He was in fact deploying its memory as the very form through which to mediate his passage from the experimental theatre of the twenties to the experimental, color cinema of the thirties. Visual music was the distributed middle term of a barely suppressed analogy between avant-garde experiments become super-colored movies, and super-colored movies become ecstatic avant-garde events. But what’s more, the cinematic future he was projecting was the perfect image of his theatrical past. Technicolor was revealing his previous life in the theatre as a dream, in some form at least, already come true. Technicolor as technics, a regime of suggestions, associations, memories and anticipations, with all of its futural momentum, was drawing him backward into a composite past. That past too had been inflected by its dreams. What was its future supposed to have been? Was its trace the imagined future of “every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being?” What kind of presence, exactly, were we being asked to imagine? The comparison or analogy of mobile color to music was reminiscent, in fact, of the ways in which the cinema tout court had been phrased as a kind of visual music. “In form and structure, expression by the motion-camera is more like music than anything else,” wrote Block in The Century Magazine . “It streams before the eye as music streams before the ear; it is in a constant state of becoming.” [34] Indeed, as early as 1921 the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, was collecting photoplays to be analyzed and taught in a curriculum devoted to film scoring. By 1923 Rouben Mamoulian, future director of Becky Sharp , was there, directing the American Opera Company on the Eastman theatre’s stage. [35] But if a film could be scored, was it not because it was, at least in principle, already a form of music: composed, measured, recorded? The film itself, like mobile color, like Wilfred’s color records, was already a visual music, and the so-called “abstract” or “musical” films of Eggeling, Richter, Ruttman, et al . only highlighted what was the case, again, at least in principle, of every film. [36] Thus, color was a kind of addition that, as Jones asserted, simultaneously pushed the cinema forward into a future of ever-increasingly animated or animatic simulacra, and backward towards its halting, uncertain and inchoate origins. It was as if it had always already been a medium of sound and color, and precisely because the technical inscription, the recording, of each of these independent registers of perceptual flux guaranteed their integration (or disintegration), their articulation (or disarticulation) in a singular, technical object or performance. According to Bernard Stiegler, “A film, like a melody, is essentially a flux: it consists of its unity in and as flow…. Cinema can include sound because film, as a photographic recording technique capable of representing movement, is itself a temporal object susceptible to the phenomenological analysis proper to this kind of object.” [37] The discontinuities and fusions, those afterimages and blocs of pigment that Sennwald remarked of Becky Sharp , were not in reality “faults.” They were in fact a kind of contribution to the phenomenology of film as a temporal object. What Jones’s Technicolor experiment demonstrated was that discontinuity and fusion were the technical preconditions for continuity and integration, not their undoing. Technicolor was indicative of the fragility of cinematic continuity and by extension the continuity of the spectatorial consciousness that resonated with it. Experiences of this sort, ecstatic but also critical and analytical, were precious. Every subsequent film experiment with the relation of image to sound, form to color, has confirmed it. [38] The more Cheney and the dramatists, Wilfred and the lumiastes, Jones and the colorists, Macgowan and the cineastes sought out their independent aesthetic identities, the more they encountered the opposite. Continuity required composition. Composition really did mean composites. Block had put his finger on it: the “constant state of becoming” that the cinematic or phonographic or lumia object was, could only find its “unity” in the synthetic becoming of the “mind” with which it resonated. And there might be an infinity of modes of com-positing the two. Like Bergsonian time, again as Block had phrased it, every repetition was both a renewal and the production of the new—an innovation and an opening. Temporal objects were not only the accumulative recordings of what was or had been, they were also futural and anticipatory, “the way things seem to be moving,” as Jones would write in 1935. The theatre and the cinema, the two worlds astride of which Jones found himself in 1934 and 1935, were both increasingly composite arts; and theorists of both had been discovering as much for at least twenty years. During the period between roughly 1910 and 1930, a group of texts devoted to the ‘new’ or ‘advanced’ theatre in Europe and North America and another to the emerging ‘art’ of the cinema converged around a specific cluster of what might be called motifs or themes. These themes, both camps acknowledged, had perhaps as much if not more to do with ideals than with realities; that is, what was at stake was a certain idea of the theatre or of the cinema, and so a certain idea of art in general. Although some of these texts, in examining the ontology of their respective arts, sought to distinguish or disengage themselves from the other, they in general explored their manifest and increasing overlappings and interpenetrations, and not just with one another, but with the entire spectrum of the contemporary arts. For example, Hiram Kelly Moderwell, writing in 1914, could claim that “from an institution of one art the theatre has become, in the space of less than ten years, an institution of all the arts.” The theatre was, in his account, “a series of pictures… a series of architectural designs… rhythmic spectacle… a kaleidoscope of color… a collection of blending sounds.” [39] The next year, William Morgan Hannon and Vachel Lindsay would make nearly identical claims about the cinema. In The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Fine Arts (1915), Hannon explained, “The photodrama is a complex—nay, a truly composite art.” [40] As much as it might distinguish itself from the others, it more importantly included them within its own expansive and dynamic field. Lindsay too, in The Art of the Motion Picture (1915), famously took an intermedial approach to cinema, characterizing it, as his chapter titles indicated, as “sculpture in motion,” or “painting in motion,” or even “architecture in motion.” [41] However, it was Victor Oscar Freeburg who recognized the most direct and compelling link between film and music that would soon characterize the rhetoric of Wilfred’s lumia and Jones’s mobile color. From 1915-1920, Freeburg taught at Columbia University, establishing what would become film studies as a legitimate part of the university curriculum. Freeburg’s The Art of Photoplay Making (1918) stressed the pictorial condition of film; indeed, “pictorial beauty” would serve him as a fundamental criterion of judgment with respect to the new art form. However, for Freeburg, the essence of film was recorded motion. “The essential feature of the motion picture is, of course, that it actually records and transmits visible motion.” He continued: And the photoplay as such is a single composition of these pictorial motions. The cinema composer is the artist who conceives these motions originally, relates them mentally to each other in some definite unity, prescribes and directs their production, and finally unites the cinematographed records into a film, and if the principles of pictorial composition have been applied in the making, this film will reveal pictorial beauty when projected on the screen. [42] If film was indeed a composite art, Freeburg now determined that its author was a “cinema composer.” If the filmmaker was, then, quite properly a composer, that was because a film, as motion, was a temporal object, a continuous but ephemeral art that was also a recording. Like music, a melody, for example, film was not only in flux but of flux. But its status as a recording made of that flux a permanent inscription, an image. In this respect the film was identical to the phonograph record in the grooves of which one could “see,” even “touch,” the image of sound. Freeburg thus anticipated, at least in theory, the color records that would form the material medium of Thomas Wilfred’s visual music. But he had also begun to divine the principles through which Jones’s dream of visual music could come true. The analogy between the phonograph record and the film was multiple and overdetermined, but it is clear that although it enabled Freeburg to consider film as an analog to music and painting, a composed and inscribed visual music, it crucially allowed him to think of film as a kind of writing and its study or analysis as a kind of reading. As early as 1915, he imagined that, perhaps someday, home viewing would become film’s proper sphere, with spectatorial sensitivity and sophistication cultivated through repeated scansions of superior films, in the manner of re-reading great books or listening to classical music on a phonograph. “It may be,” he speculated, “that the motion picture machine will take its place in our homes along with the phonograph.” [43] Freeburg was thereby promoting a modernist Arnoldianism that would add the best that has been filmed and recorded to “the best that has been thought and said.” [44] Today we can see exactly the ways in which his efforts bore fruit. The promise of the phonograph record was not so much the recording of a singular, unique, musical event, but that it could be listened to a second time, and again, repeatedly. One could learn not only to “appreciate” what was inscribed on the disc, but could learn to analyze, as it were, an experience that was its own emergence as such. Call it phono-grammatology. And one could, Freeburg surmised, do the same with a film. Indeed, temporal objects like films, like recorded discs, demanded nothing less. How else could these experiences be made critically accessible to the people who would otherwise simply undergo them as an experience of sense and sensation? Here was a humanist intuition that the human was fundamentally mediated, if not exactly constituted, by the technics that made it present to itself: books, records, films. Wasn’t the claim to them universal? Although he was in no real position to develop his insights in any full, philosophical way, Freeburg did notice clearly some of the consequences and implications of regarding film as both compositional and as recorded. As recorded temporal object, as mnemotechnics, a film was paradoxically both ephemeral and permanent, and in at least two ways. First, although the film was identical to itself qua object from one repetition to the next, it was rather more open and differential as a repeated experience. The spectator was changed with each viewing, so that spectatorial time was developmental and implied a kind of development of the film-object itself. The name for this relationship was “criticism,” as it might be undertaken by “specialists” or “a general public.” [45] Second, composition and recording also implied forms of com-possibility. “In the future, it may be that any given photoplay will be re-filmed over and over again until something like perfection results.” [46] A film was therefore a rather unstable, contingent object. Its fundamental openness implied not only perfectibility, whatever exactly that would be, but critical intervention in the object itself, on the order of say a mash-up, or mixtape or montage. This was the temporal object as the material of its own subversion. If none of this was happening—and it wasn’t, according to Freeburg—that was because commercial modes of exhibition were denying audiences the repeated, open experiences of difference that were the promise of the film. “A play is flashed upon the screen, fades away, and dies with that performance. It lives again somewhere… but not for us. We cannot read it. Nor can we find it again or see it at will.” [47] The mark of Freeburg’s genius was that he was able to discern in the technics of inscription the common element that linked together phonograph, cinematograph and the photoplay text as typescript, as writing. And he brought to bear on these technics a set of criteria drawn from art history and designed precisely to moderate the aleatory dissonances these technics constituted in the multiple dimensions of sound, image and symbolic language, as well as their potential, intermedial crossings. Film, Freeburg divined, was a temporal object, which was why it had to be thought fundamentally as a recording. Although his criteria tended toward the classical if not the conventional, his theory anticipated the modernist experiments with recorded discs by Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and Wilfred. [48] The latter’s work, if the testimonies of Cheney, Stark, Macgowan and Jones are any indication, supplied for the advocates of the new theatre the occasion to think through the phenomenology of the recorded, temporal object, in the way Freeburg had for film. It is therefore no wonder that the encounter with mobile color invariably led to evocations of music or movies or both. Thus, it could provide the bridge from the living stage to the living color of the cinema. In the cinema, Jones asserted, echoing both Freeburg and Wilfred, color is precisely composed, mobile and flowing, and recorded. Analogy was destiny. In 1941 Jones, who had returned to the theatre after his brief flirtation with Hollywood, published The Dramatic Imagination , a collection of essays that would help solidify his reputation and legacy as a major figure of the 20th-century theatre. The book’s first essay, “A New Kind of Theatre,” however, is primarily a meditation on the cinema. One might have expected him to at least recall his own experiences in Hollywood as a color designer or artistic director. He never mentions them. Instead, he considers film art within what he takes to be the century’s overarching, aesthetic ambition: to create forms adequate to the exploration of subjective life. He cites James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, among others, as examples. Contemporary playwrights too, he asserts, are fully engaged in this project, exploring, he writes in his characteristic rhetoric, “the land of dreams.” “They attempt to express directly to the audience the unspoken thoughts of their characters, to show us not only the patterns of their conscious behavior but the pattern of their subconscious lives.” [49] But it is the “motion pictures” that Jones believes constitute the art form most adequate to the representation of subjective reality. “They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do… They have the rhythm of the thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time…. They project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner life.” “Some new playwright,” Jones concludes in his typically futural mood, “will presently set a motion-picture screen on the stage above and behind the actors and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconscious…. On the stage we shall see the actual characters of the drama; on the screen we shall see their hidden selves.” [50] Visual music has become visual thought, the flow of color assimilated to the flow of images in general. The cycloramic projections of theatrical lighting from which three-dimensional, “plastic” bodies emerged in the twenties, have been replaced by a movie screen before which living actors move, temporarily blind to a truth unfolding behind them but with which they must certainly merge and fuse. Jones never accomplished what he proposed in 1941. We will never know exactly what it might have looked or felt like. Would it have even been in color? But the appearance of hidden selves recalls, in a very poignant way, the Technicolor dream of “the appearance of every human being to every other one.” And suggests that in that previous dream was included the hoped-for presence of each and every human being to themselves. There is thus a therapeutic dimension at work here that is not surprising, given both the psychological armature of Jones’s discourse as well the ways in which color had itself been thought of in therapeutic ways, as chromotherapy, a tradition we can now see that Jones inherited. [51] (fig. 8) But as always, Jones’s prediction of a new kind of future cinema-theatre was a barely disguised recollection of the past. In 1922, Jones and Macgowan traveled to Europe on a kind of theatrical fact-finding mission. Attending sixty performances in ten weeks, the two were able to draw conclusions about the current state of the continental stage and compare it to their own experiences in the USA. Their book, Continental Stagecraft (1922)was the result. In a chapter entitled “The Twilight of the Machines,” they praised the increasing irrelevance of stage machinery, of all forms of contraptions, to the advanced theater, and compared the trend with the modern novel. “While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank and James Joyce are taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making machinery unnecessary for drama.” What Jones and Macgowan have in mind here is a certain identity between the new novel’s direct engagement first with subjectivity, and second with writing itself as the medium through which it emerges as such. The same goes for the new theater, they contend. But here, the encounter is crucially effected through an experience of light. “A new device is lording it in the theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very much like the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new and unforeseen ends.” [52] What follows from this is the contention that theatrical realism can no longer be considered a mere fidelity to or representation of the actual, but a deep concern with form through which, in a sense, the actual submits itself as material for thought and thus finds itself materially transformed by that thought. The matter of the stage, then, finds itself decomposed and recomposed by the rather more immaterial forces of light and shadow. And this is exactly what Jones was asking from his new kind of theatre, now mediated by his passage through film and Technicolor. The “uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time” that he attributes to the cinema, he might also have attributed to the theatre, or the novel, or his considerations and reflections on his own recurring dreams. There is something remarkable about the ability to relive, again and again, nearly identical experiences and to experience them, each time, as new and as open, as generating the ongoing possibilization of life. It is as if Jones is consistently forgetting in order to remember, proposing a dream of the future that was already an accomplishment of the past. But time requires forgetting. If the past did not fundamentally slip away, there would be no place, no occasion for the present. But if there were no memory, no past crystallized or reduced to image or pattern, there could be no anticipation. For what, after all, would we be waiting, anticipating? This is what the phenomenology of the temporal object, its technics, brings into the open. Temporal objects record and thus repeat the emergence of the experience of time as sensation, each one woven into the other. Mobile color was the sublime experience of color as time. Color-technics. Before it was trademarked and subdued—but also, sometimes, explosively renewed—as Technicolor. “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?” asked Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher of technical and temporal objects. But he also asked from whence comes the desire to listen to a pop song, or watch a film, again and again… and again. Jones’s career was not a series of re-inventions; it was precisely not that. It was instead a life constantly in need of resuscitation. The pattern is always the same. The announcement of something new, of a dream come to life, that anticipates a future to be achieved, of an art on the brink… of cinema. But that future has already happened. The dream was already in color. So the ground must be cleared, the needle placed back at the record’s edge, the film rewound. And then replayed, but with a difference, each time. This is the shape of consciousness, the pattern of thought and behavior, shaped by temporal objects. The temporality, the melody, the film through which the “already” resuscitates itself as the “not yet.” More importantly—and Jones did not neglect this when he imagined the colors of the Homeric similes—this time precedes us (as archive or history) and extends beyond us (as archive and legacy): “a never-ending stream of images, running incessantly through our minds from the cradle to the grave, and perhaps beyond.” [53] The experience of the emergence of consciousness as time and sensation and ideation thus always harbors a potential emergence into collectives of which consciousness is always already a part. [54] Jones’s experiences with mobile color, including his forgetting of those experiences and their repeated re-emergences, constitute a small chapter in what might be called the historical phenomenology of the technical, temporal object in the 20th century: the grammatization of sense and sensation, the recording of sounds, images and words that played in the theatres, the homes, the automobiles, the elevators, and especially in the heads of people all over the world. These recordings, their deployments of memory and anticipation, helped shape the forms of consciousness of modern men and women; but their status as objects gave those same men and women critical and creative access to those selfsame forms and their always yet-to-be-thought possibilities. Jones dreamed these as multi-media performances; Freeburg as multi-media libraries. [55] The desire of many young people to have these forms back may be more than nostalgia, or perhaps even a nostalgia for the futures and resuscitations these objects of becoming once promised. The apotheoses of mobile color, however, were the extraordinary and even hallucinatory light shows that accompanied the rock and soul concerts at the Filmore, Winterland, Apollo, and the other theatres of the 1960s and 70s. There, fueled by LSD, pot and alcohol, the performers and the audience did find themselves ecstatically on “the brink of cinema,” “fused in a developing pattern” the promise of which may not yet be in default. Bodies really did “step off the screen and appear before you in the round.” [56] Fig. 9, The Grateful Dead, performing before light projections by Heavy Water, Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, 1970 (Photo Credit: Jim Baldocchi).[/caption] The pattern of Jones’s life indicates, indeed is symptomatic of, not only the profound effects of technical, temporal objects on the temporal orientation of the organism within the flux of sense and sensation, an orientation that, as Stiegler maintained, could always become a disorientation, but also of the condition and possibility of the critical deconstruction and thus creative re-orientation of those same flows. [57] The experiments with color technics of Wilfred and Jones clearly speak to the latter in profound and poignant ways. And this is why, making sense of what Jones and Wilfred were accomplishing, requires not close readings of the particular films or opuses they produced, but the meta-discourses surrounding them. The aim is to produce partial readings of the three mnemo-technical objects—film, phonograph, lumia —the dispositions and depositions of time and sensation in a technical support of inscription, to which these meta-discourses lent their words. And the stakes remain very high: the inventions and re-inventions of the forms of presence of beings to one another, and to themselves. References [1] Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 214-219. [2] Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of Today (New York: Dodd Mead and Company, 1914), 150. [3] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 16. [4] Stephen Eskilson, “Color and Consumption,” Design Issues . Vol. 18, No. 2 (2002), 17-29. [5] Robert Edmond Jones, “Dreams into Color,” Vanity Fair , October (1934), 14. [6] The film, which starred Miriam Hopkins, was an adaptation of Langdon Mitchell’s 1899 play, itself an adaptation of Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair (1848). [7] Robert Edmond Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” Vanity Fair . June (1935), 13. [8] Scott Higgins, “Demonstrating Three-Colour Technicolor: Early Three-Colour Aesthetics and Design,” Film History , Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 358-383. [9] Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” 13. [10] Rudolf Arnheim, “A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971[1938]),199-230. [11] Andre Sennwald, “The Screen: The Radio City Hall Presents ‘Becky Sharp,’ the First Full-Length Three-Color Photoplay,” New York Times . June 14 (1935), 27. [12] Stark Young, “The Color Organ,” Theatre Arts Magazine . Vol. 1, No. 1 (1922), 20-21. [13] Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 122-3. Macgowan’s evocations of the “fourth dimension” and “mystic philosophy” are indications that he had discussed the theoretical bases of the lumia with their inventor. According to Andrew Johnston, Wilfred’s work “was developed out of a desire to achieve an aesthetic experience that was mystical in orientation….” See Johnston’s “The Color of Prometheus, Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia and the Projection of Transcendence,” in Simon Brown et al. eds., Color and the Moving Image (New York: Routledge, 2013), 67-78. [14] Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema and the Media of the 1920s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 118-120. [15] Keely Orgeman et al ., Lumia. Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017), 24. [16] Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1924), 184-185. [17] Noam M. Elcott, “The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th-Century Art,” PhotoResearcher , No. 29 (2018), 7-23. [18] For a powerful account of Lessing and the aesthetic and political stakes of artistic borders, see, W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing's Laocoon, ” Representations , No. 6 (Spring, 1984), 98-115. For accounts of Pater and the trespassing of artistic borders, see, Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins eds., Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave, 2010). Also, Andrew Eastham, “Walter Pater's Acoustic Space: 'The School of Giorgione', Dionysian "Anders-streben," and the Politics of Soundscape,” The Yearbook of English Studies , Vol. 40, Nos. 1-2 (2010), 196-216. [19] Sheldon Cheney, Modern Art and the Theatre (Scarborough-on-Hudson: The Sleepy Hollow Press, 1921), pp. 3-4. [20] Arnheim, 201-2. [21] Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theatre to Cinema,” in Film Form. Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949 [1934]), 15. [22] Thomas Wilfred, “Light and the Artist,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 7, No. 4 (1947): p. 252. [23] Judith Zilczer, "Color Music: Synaesthesia and Nineteenth-Century Sources for Abstract Art,” Artibus et Historiae , Vol. 8, No. 16 (1987), 101-126. [24] Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art , 186. [25] For an account of the tempos and rhythms common to the new theatre and the contemporary cinema, see John Grierson, “Tempo,” Motion Picture News (1926), quoted in George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 432–33. [26] On ‘stage pictures’ and their persistence in the theatre and in early cinema, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). [27] Moderwell, 72. [28] Macgowan, 120. [29] Moderwell, 71. [30] The notion of temporal object originates in the early 20th century with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the analysis of internal time consciousness. Husserl’s example of a temporal object, that is an object-phenomenon that has to be comprehended in the time of its emergence, was a melody. A melody has to grasped in its unfolding for which each present moment contains both its immediate past (retention) and an anticipation of a future (protention). Bernard Stiegler has demonstrated the ways in which Husserl’s analysis neglects the technics required for the model of consciousness he adumbrates. Stiegler’s example, then, is not the melody as such, but the melody recorded on a disc or on tape. For a clear account of the temporal object as developed by Stiegler, see Matt Bluemink, “Stiegler’s Memory: Tertiary Retention and Temporal Objects,” 3: AM Magazine .com . Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020. [31] Wilfred, 252. [32] Ralph Block, “Motion,” The Freeman , October 27 (1920),157. [33] Ralph Block, “Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not Painting,” The Dial . Vol LXXXII, Jan.-Jun. (1927): 20. [34] Ralph Block, “The Movies versus Motion Pictures,” The Century Magazine , No. 102, October (1921), 892. [35] Tom Milne, Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),12-13. Mamoulian would also work, like Jones and Macgowan, with Eugene O’Neill, before making the move to Hollywood. [36] Malcolm Cook, “Visual Music in Film, 1921-1924: Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman.” In Music and Modernism. Edited by Charlotte de Mille (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). See also Akira Mizuta Lippit, Cinema Without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 41: “In cinema, speech echoes already there in the image, even when, presumably, the image is silent…. And the image is already an element of sound.” [37] Stiegler, 12. [38] Deleuze, Gilles, “ Having an Idea in Cinema .” In Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller. Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 14-22. [39] Moderwell, 17-18. [40] William Morgan Hannon, The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Arts (New Orleans: Ruskin Press, 1915), p. 23. [41] Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1915). [42] Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918),2-3. [43] Freeburg, 6. [44] Peter Decherney, “Inventing Film Study and its Object at Columbia University, 1915-1938,” Film History . Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 443-460. [45] Freeburg, 5. [46] Freeburg, 6. [47] Freeburg, 10. [48] To readers familiar with Freeburg’s book, my account may seem somewhat surprising. And it is true that I am concentrating on the early, preliminary observations on film in a text that is quite long. But Freeburg’s remarkable attempt at constructing what amounts to a poetics of the photoplay is dependent—and he knew this—on the technological conditions necessary for forming the judgments that would eventually give rise to that poetics. Thus, his analyses of sensation, emotion and intellection at the cinema, and the deepening of those both independently of one another and as linked in an overall organization of feelings and thoughts, emerge from an attention to a film as the composite, temporal and sensory phenomenon that produces the impression of reality characteristic of these kinds of experiences. In fact, he speculates that that “impression” may, over time, be mistaken for reality in what becomes a “confused memory,” so that in old age one might believe themselves to have had experiences “in reality” that were only ever had at the movies (p. 19). To counter this permanent submersion in and subjugation to the moving image, Freeburg advocates for a kind of film literacy, an attentiveness to the forms of grammatization (the filmic ‘writing’) out of which the film is composed, in order to bring out “beneath the attractive surface… the permanent values of illuminating truth, universal meaning, and unfolding beauty” (p. 25). These are humanist aims, certainly. But they are not the only aims that would logically follow from Freeburg’s essential, early, and in many ways materialist, insight. Indeed, his consistent unwillingness to separate the quasi-independent compositional elements of film from their technical base (from their mnemo-technics) gives rise to many of his crucial observations. [49] Robert Edmond Jones, “A New Kind of Drama,” in The Dramatic Imagination (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1967 [1941]), 16-17. [50] Ibid. 17-19. [51] T. W. Allan Whitfield and Jianne Whelton, “The Arcane Roots of Colour Psychology, Chromotherapy, and Colour Forecasting.” COLOR: research and application . Volume 40, Number 1, February (2015), 99-106. One of the 19th-c. originators of chromotherapy, a kind of theosophical art, was none other than Edwin Babbitt, father of Irving Babbitt, for whom color aesthetics, and his father as well, were anathema. [52] Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, Continental Stagecraft (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1922), pp. 66-7. [53] Jones 1941, 15. [54] What Stiegler calls, following Gilbert Simondon, “transindividuation.” [55] Anthony Hostetter and Elizabeth Hostetter, “Robert Edmond Jones: Theatre and Motion Pictures, Bridging Reality and Dreams.” Theatre Symposium , Vol. 19 (2011), 26-40. Kevin Brown, “The Dream Medium: Robert Edmond Jones’s Theatre of the Future.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media , Vol. 12, No. 1 (2016), 1-10. Steven Marras, “The Photoplay as Emergent Media Form: Victor O. Freeburg and Vachel Lindsay on Photoplay Aesthetics,” Screening the Past , www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12 . [56] The phenomenology of these sensory, temporal dynamics extends itself in our own time not only in the ubiquitous retreat of bodies back into screens of all sizes, but to VR and neural mnemo-technical practices as well, some of which perform the kinds of reflexive, critical deconstructions once advocated by Jones, Block, Freeburg, et al. That is, some of these objects (films, installations, etc.) enable us to touch, as it were, the time of our brains. See Mark B. N. Hansen, “From Fixed to Fluid. Material-Mental Images Between Neural Synchronization and Computational Mediation,” in Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Releasing the Image (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 83-111. [57] On orientation and disorientation in Stiegler, see Patrick Crogan, “Essential Viewing,” Film Philosophy . Vol. 10, No. 2 (2006), 39-54. About The Authors Bennet Schaber teaches filmmaking and film theory in the Department of Cinema and Screen Studies at SUNY Oswego, USA, and at the University of Kairouan, Tunisia. He is the editor of Eugene O’Neill’s Photoplays of 1926 ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 40:1, 2019), the author of “Towards a Cinematic O’Neill” ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 42:2, 2021) and “Little Cinemas: Eugene O’Neill as Screenwriter” ( Journal of Screenwriting , 13:1, 2022). Forthcoming essays on theatre critic, film theorist, screenwriter and producer, Ralph Block (1889-1974); and ‘voice’ in silent cinema. bennet.schaber@oswego.edu 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:

Caitlin A.Kane Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Caitlin A.Kane By Published on May 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF by Caitlin A.Kane The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Leigh Fondakowski (they/she) has dedicated nearly 25 years to creating theatre from narrative interviews and archival research. In works including The Laramie Project, The People’s Temple, I Think I Like Girls, and Spill, Fondakowski uses the words of real people to create nuanced portraits of communities in crisis and to illuminate difficult moments in U.S. history. In 2018, they were commissioned to craft a podcast about women’s liberation in honor of the 19th Amendment centennial. That commission led to Feminist Files,[i] an audio theatre series about the “nerdy revolutionaries” (including Dr. Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, Pauli Murray, Edith Green, and Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink) who started the “academic sex revolution” by clandestinely passing the legislation that we now know as Title IX. Although the commission for that work came before the pandemic began, Fondakowski's research and creative process were undeniably affected and constrained by pandemic-era shutdowns and by rising awareness of the need for more accessible approaches to producing and presenting theatre. In this conversation, conducted via Zoom in November 2022, Fondakowski and I discuss how these forces shaped their development of a hybrid podcast-theatre form that blends Fondakowski's first-person narrative, recorded interviews with relatives of those who led the fight for gender equity in academia, and performances of edited archival materials. Podcasts and other audio forms, we both agree, have great potential for theatre artists interested in exploring experimental and unconventional dramatic forms and for creating more accessible theatrical works. Caitlin Kane: Can you describe Feminist Files for those who have not yet heard it? Leigh Fondakowski: Feminist Files is a ten-part narrative audio series that tells the secret origin story of Title IX. It covers the years of 1969-1976, tracing how this group of women in Washington went behind the scenes to create legislation that has had an amazing impact. CK: In the series, you describe those women as “nerdy revolutionaries,” and it is such an apt descriptor. LF: Right, there are a lot of cliches about women's libbers from that period: bra-burning, protests in the streets, all that kind of stuff. That did happen. The radical lesbians were really at the forefront, but the women [whose stories we tell in the series] were not doing that. These were women who were focused on legislative change. The thing that I love about the [timing of this project] – it's tragic in a way – but Feminist Files was released on the 50th anniversary of Title IX in June [2022], and the day after that, Roe was overturned. So, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX pass, and in 1973, Roe is instated. Half a century later, Title IX is the last one standing. It is incredible in terms of the arc of history. CK: It makes the series even more urgent at this moment. There is a lot that we can learn about the legislative side of activism from the women whose stories you tell. LF: Right. I think my biggest discovery was realizing the intricacies and the convergence of different people's work that went into [passing Title IX]. I never really thought about how the sausage gets made. CK: How did you become interested in the stories of this group of feminist activists and the history of Title IX? LF: The project has a bit of a history. I was approached by this media company called Frequency Machine – a young startup co-founded by two women. They wanted to do something for the centennial of the 19th Amendment, so they approached me with this outline they had created for a women's series, right? I wish I could show you this document. Each episode was an epic chunk of women's liberation from 1910 to the present. So, I was like, I'll take this, and I'll see what I can find. I knew Title IX could be one of the episodes, so I sat down to talk with Rora [Brodwin, another playwright who had previously written a solo show about her Great-Aunt Bunny Sandler, the “godmother of Title IX”], and I realized the series could tell Rora's story and the story of Title IX. Then, I went to the Schlesinger Library and was convinced that it could be the whole series because I found all this material there. There was so much material, and there were so many parts to the story that I was discovering. So, I went back to [Frequency Machine], and I pitched it. The producers had a background in reality television, so we had to learn how to talk to one another, how to find a common language. I had to learn to speak in TV dramatic logic, which I'm still learning. It took a lot to convince them that there would be enough drama in it because this is not true crime, you know. I told them, “We're gonna use oral history, but we're gonna have an actor perform it.” And they were like, “Why are we gonna have an actor perform it? Can't we just use the real audio of it?” But Bunny Sandler isn’t an actor, so the real audio doesn't quite have that dramatic energy. I said, “I'm gonna adapt it to my style.” It was a long process of me convincing them this could be dramatic enough, which it turns out it absolutely is. In the end, I think maybe [the producers] were beaten down by my endlessly returning to this pitch! They also gave me the freedom to create something they didn’t entirely understand at first, which is a rare opportunity as an artist, to be trusted in that way. So, the origin story of it was that it was supposed to be this gigantic women's history. From a hundred years of women's history, I homed in on Title IX. CK: The audio theatre form that you developed for this project blends the dramatic forms that you use in your interview- and archival-based plays with a more conventional podcast structure. Can you describe how this developmental process built on the processes that you've used in the theatre? LF: What's interesting about it for me as a writer is I really hear text musically when I'm playwriting, both when there's pre-existing text and when I'm making the text up. In a way, it was like a long rehearsal process. I could live with these recordings and edit from these recordings. Instead of saying to the actor, “Cut that line” or “change this around,” I could just do that with their voice. It did give me the thought that, in the future, when I'm playwriting from big source material again, I'll have actors record the read-throughs of the whole play so that I have that audio and can play with that audio as I'm playwriting. This form also frees you from having to worry about bodies and space. You create an image world for each episode –you can really focus on voices and story. CK: What do you see as the possibilities for this form looking forward? LF: I think that it's an underexplored form. I mean, it's interesting to see what's happening in the theatre, right? Audible is putting plays on tape… LA Theater Works has been doing it forever, but I think people are more open to audio now, and Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon because it's a proof of concept, right? They don't have to invest in developing a TV series. It can be a podcast first, and then, they can decide they want to make it into a TV series. But there are also people who – instead of selling their intellectual property to someone in Hollywood – they are making an audio version where they have more control and can play with form. It has been called the Wild West because it doesn't have a lot of rules. SAG and Equity don't know what to do with it. It’s not governed by any of that stuff, so people are still just exploring. I think it's a truly experimental landscape right now. It's also just a different form, right? When [the producers] were giving me notes, they were saying that I needed to imagine someone doing their laundry, being on the treadmill, or cleaning their house. So, we've lowered the artistic bar, but it's also universal. Everybody can access it. It's not expensive, so in terms of what you were saying earlier– CK: In terms of what the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated for us as theatre-makers– LF: Right, we still have an issue in the theatre of affordability and accessibility: how much money is spent to make the thing, who gets to watch it, and who are the gatekeepers. In this podcast world, you still have some constraints, but anybody can make a podcast, and most people can access it. CK: You are somewhat present in your theatrical work as an interviewer or narrator figure, but in Feminist Files, you play a much more substantive role. What was it like to be that present as the host and narrator of this series? How did it feel to put yourself into the work in that way? LF: I've always resisted that, but in this form, it felt like an inevitability because I'm the one finding this stuff, and I'm trying to recreate this experience for the listener of going on this journey [as a researcher]. Before I found the oral history transcript [in Bunny Sandler’s files at the Schlesinger Library], Rora [Brodwin] had already told me most of Bunny’s history and her own story of sexual assault, including her going into the Title IX office that her great-aunt had created and not being able to tell her great-aunt about that experience. So, that was a narrative arc, right? Then, some of the most moving experiences for me were finding Pauli [Murray’s] journal, realizing that I was working beneath her portrait [in the archive], and Rora introducing me to her as a figure in history. I thought Rora was going to be able to thread all those other elements in. I spent an unbelievable number of hours putting [Rora and Bunny’s] voices together, so they were telling the story together. I thought it was just gonna be the two of them talking to each other because they couldn't talk to each other in real life anymore, but there was too much that needed to be filled in. I needed to talk people through and give context. I would also say that Sarah Lambert [my co-producer] had a lot to do with it because she is the standard bearer for artistic integrity. So, when Sarah was encouraging me to put myself forward, I knew I had to pay attention. She had never said that in any other process. And, of course, Sarah fact-checked everything to within an inch of its life, so I always felt confident in everything we were saying, you know? And then I had to learn how to direct myself narrating, which was a process. CK: Right – I can imagine how different that felt from working in a theatre with actors, particularly amidst the pandemic. Can you describe your directorial process? How did you do the recordings? Was the whole process done via Zoom? LF: Yeah, [the actors] would set up recording studios, most of the time in their closets, and then they would record, and I would direct via Zoom, but I didn't have a live feed to the recording because they were sent these kits with SIM cards, so it was nerve-wracking. I could hear how they were sounding over Zoom, and I could hear when they messed up a line, but I couldn't hear the quality of the recording until they sent us the files, so some of the editing was based on the takes and how they sounded. It was a very different process than when you're building work in a room with actors. CK: Did you do all the editing yourself, or did you do a rough edit and then have audio engineers who cleaned things up? LF: I did all the editing. I'm trying to think of how many passes on average, but we did a pass, and then, [the producers] would give notes, and then, we'd do another pass, and they would give notes. As it came more into form, they had more and more to say about it. In the beginning, they didn't know what it was going to be, so they didn't have much to say, but as it began to take shape, they wanted to weigh in more and more. Then it went to the sound person, Gary [Grundei], and he would edit based on sound, which was such an important element. So, there were probably three to five editing passes for each episode. CK: You mentioned that the process of creating this felt like being in twelve straight weeks of tech. LF: It really did. After I would make the final layout of the words, it would go to an engineer who does a pause pass, which is like a pacing pass. Then, it went to Gary for sound design again, and it came back to me, and I would usually edit out large swaths of the text based on Gary's work. CK: He does beautiful work, recreating the sounds of the archive for instance, which is both such a quiet space and a space that really comes alive in this podcast. Given how effective this form was in activating this period of feminist history and the capaciousness of the title, Feminist Files, I wonder if there is any plan for additional seasons or episodes? LF: I wanted to call it The Consequential Feminist. CK: What happened to that title? LF: That title never made it out of committee! CK: That's too bad! LF: I know. I wanted it to be called The Consequential Feminist. I really fought for that title. I think that's why you hear the term so often in the series. The producers were a bit wary of Feminist Files, too. They wanted to shorten it to be F Files. Because feminism is a “bad” word – people recoil and don't want to pay attention to feminism. The producers were feminists themselves but having worked in Hollywood for as long as they had, and experienced the sexism and misogyny of the industry, they felt people would be afraid of the word. CK: That’s disheartening. Do you know what the response has been to the project, given the title you chose? LF: It has a steady following but not gigantic because they are a young startup without a big marketing budget. We're hoping that we'll be nominated for a GLAAD Award so it can gain some traction. It's had a steady following, but I only know that from hearing from people that they're listening to it and enjoying it. CK: If it gets a more robust response, do you think there will be other iterations of the project? LF: That was the idea. The idea was that it could be anthologized, that we'd go back to the archives. I don't think they're gonna let me do it, but the story that I want to do next is one I came across accidentally in my research. Somebody left in the scanner a membership card for women in the KKK. It was just sitting there, and Teddy [one of the archivists] said, “Oh, they've left this in here.” We were both looking at it and looking at each other, and she said, “Yep, that archive is here.” I mean, that's a whole different story. We tend to think of the history of mobilization on the left, but I don't think we think of the history of mobilization on the right. CK: It would be a hard story to sit with for a long time, and you'd have to find an entry point for yourself and audiences, to help them find their way into that story and recognize it as part of our history that we need to grapple with. This project centers on a more uplifting narrative, but it was crafted at a difficult time. You began researching Feminist Files before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the recording and editing of the project was completed in 2020. What was it like to be working on it in the early months of the pandemic? LF: Well, as you know, it was a very scary and isolating time. Once we figured out the mechanics of how to send people the [recording] kits, and I started directing those recordings, though, it was like, “Oh, I'm back in my world.” Being able to spend those hours with Mercedes [Hererro], who is a longtime collaborator of mine, getting to be in the room with Ronald Peet, having conversations with Margo Hall about Black Lives Matter and her life – it was like air in a world without air, you know? And in the end, the producers and I did find a common language and we became strong collaborators, we trusted each other. They were able to get Jodie Foster on board to play Bunny, which shows how much they believed in this project. Getting to work with Jodie [Foster], with that high calibre of an actor… I got off that Zoom call, and I was dancing around the living room. It was lifesaving to have something big to focus on and to be able to connect artistically with people to create it. As a director, working with actors is the whole game, right? Without having that contact, you can think about the projects you want to make and read plays and do other things, but that engagement is where the creative flow really happens. [At the beginning of the pandemic], it felt like that was gone, and it would never be back. But then, it was right there. I could connect with these actors. It was amazing. The decision to have them break character from time to time to have conversations with me was me trying to capture that feeling of creating something together. We're discovering something together. We're in community, which is how the women in the story were also in community. I was trying to mirror that. It was a gift. Caitlin Kane (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism at Kent State University and a freelance dramaturg, director, and intimacy director. Their research and creative practice sit at the intersection of theatre and social change and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and center on queer and feminist approaches to staging history. [i]Fondakowski, Leigh. Feminist Files. Accessed November 10, 2022. https://feminist-files.sounder.fm . 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.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from Germany By Marvin Carlson Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A week or so in Germany in May, Covid years excepted, has long been a high point of my annual theatre-going. Although Berlin has often been my focus, the decentralized nature of the German theatre makes available an even richer selection even if one’s visits are limited to theatres only an hour or two train ride from the capital. Thus I began my 2023 visit with a mini-Shakespeare indulgence, beginning with King Lear in Hamburg, followed by Hamlet in Dessau and Macbeth in Dresden. Such a selection is by no means unusual in Germany, where Shakespeare makes an important contribution to the repertoire of almost every professional theatre. One of the results of this is that in Germany, where the director is often the dominant artist, the variety of interpretation, especially of the more familiar works, is almost beyond imagination (or some might say, reasonable justification). Accordingly I booked these productions expecting to see very little resemblance in any of them to the Shakespeare I might see in London or New York, and this indeed proved to be the case. King Lear . Photo: Armin Smailovic. I began with the Lear at Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre, directed by Jan Bosse, who was in-house director there from 2000 to 2005 and has particularly close ties to Hamburg, though he directs regularly at most of the leading German-language theatres. Bosse is now in his mid-50s, the generation of Thomas Ostermeier and Michael Thalheimer. In the fairly predictable cycle of directorial reputations in Germany, leading directors like these, once considered revolutionary, are now generally considered respectable but very much a part of the establishment. In another decade or so, if they are still active, they will probably be considered hopelessly dated by at least the younger generation, as Peter Stein and Claus Peymann were in their time. In the meantime, Bosse is considered a major if somewhat conservative director although his work would appear quite radical in the Anglo-Saxon world. His production begins not in Lear’s palace but in a glittering disco ballroom, where instead of a throne, a shiny musicians’ platform is the focus. Above it a huge half globe with reflecting mirror surfaces provides a visual element that will be ingeniously used in various forms throughout the evening. Lear is the master of ceremonies, making a rather awkward entrance below the globe through a curtain of sequins to seize the microphone. Although he is dressed in full drag, with a brilliant glittering low-cut black gown with a sweeping train, and with deep black fingernails, there is nothing effeminate about him—an aging but still strongly virile figure. The actor is Wolfram Koch, a leading figure in contemporary Germany who recently played a magnificent Prospero directed also by Bosse at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and the colorful, but gender fluid costumes are the work of Kathrin Plath. The scene is developed as a TV spectacle, with Lear calling up his daughters from their seats in the front row (where they smile and wave as the audience applauds) to present their clearly scripted testimonies on stage. Goneril and Reagan (Anna Blomeier and Tioni Ruhnke) are perfect properties for Lear’s production—elegant model types, with splendidly glittering ball gowns, perfectly coiffed silver hair and of course long black fingernails and striking but subtle makeup. Poor Cordelia (Pauline Renevier, who also plays Edgar) lacks their visual elegance as well as the expected verbal display. She has not even the consolation of a volunteer husband, since Bosse has removed from this production many of the lesser characters, leaving only the three sisters, Lear and the Fool, Kent, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund (Johannes Hegemann, who also plays Oswald). After the glittering opening scenes, the elegant disco back curtain disappears, and the remainder of the production takes place in a cold black void, the central feature of which is the glittering half dome, which appears in an impressive variety of configurations. Still hanging in the air, it sometimes reveals its back side, essentially as assemblage of wooden supports, forming a kind of rough retreat where the villain Edmund can weave his plots, or the imprisoned King can be kept. Sometimes it sits dome-like on the floor as various characters climb up and down it to gain better positions. On the heath, tilted slightly upward, it becomes the sheltering hovel containing the outcast Edgar. In some scenes this central element is surrounded by a cloud of individual lights hanging from the flies. During the tempest scene, it is pelted by countless small white balls, which suggest a crushing hail, or much more ominously but more metaphorically appropriate, a rain of detached eyeballs. The imaginative and constantly changing design is by Stéphane Laimé. The reduced cast size leaves only leading actors, each of whom turns in a bravura performance. Perhaps especially notable is the flamboyant Edmund, a consummate villain in his flowing black hair, black petal sweater, shiny gold sports pants and cowboy boots. The ethereal Fool (Christiane von Poelnitz) in a yellow jumpsuit layered with gauzy wisps of fabric, hovers about Lear like a bedraggled and ineffective guardian angel, reduced to making ironic comments on a darkening situation. The production is dominated however, by the powerful visual images of Laimé and by the fading ruin of Koch’s Lear, a major addition to his already impressive creations of other monumental figures of the Western theatre. The next two evenings were devoted to other major Shakespearian tragedies, and although quite different from each other, both clearly demonstrated the general stylistic difference that exists between a “conventional” German director like Bosse and many members of the upcoming generation Bosse himself has jokingly referred to as the “pseudo-young savages.” This is not simply a matter of age. Both Phillip Preuss, director of the Dessau Hamlet , and Christian Friedal, director of the Dresden Macbeth , are only five years younger than Bosse, but both are clearly among the “young savages,” firmly on the other side of a distinct stylistic divide in contemporary German directing. This difference has many variations and has been described in many ways, but many German critics would use the term popularized by the theorists Hans-Thies Lehmann in his 1999 book, Postdramatic Theatre . Although the term has been much discussed and debated, the Preuss and Friedal productions would surely be characterized as postdramatic, in opposition to Bosse, despite his radical changes to the play. The central difference is that Bosse still essentially follows the plot and action of the original, respecting its overall narrative construction, while the others assemble and arrange images and motifs from the original or related sources and present these as a visual and oral collage which bears the name of its grounding text, but accepts no responsibility to the narrative contained in that text. The approach is clear from the moment when the audience enters the Dessau Theatre to see the Preuss Hamlet . We see two similar male figures (Niklas Herzberg and Felix Axel Preißler) in dark military garb with sparkling accents, seated downstage at a table. The audience assumption is surely that these are Marcellus and Bernardo, the watchmen whose dialogue has opened Shakespeare’s drama for centuries. In fact as they begin to speak, their lines are not the familiar opening of the play, but a series of unrelated exchanges of apparently free association, in which can be recognized fragments of the play, including parts of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Gradually we come to realize that these are not the guards but a divided Hamlet, out of joint with both his world and himself. In his (their) constant repetitions, false starts and recirclings, he (they) resemble less Shakespeare’s character than such postdramatic protagonists as the couples in Beckett or Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The cast, in addition to these, consists of Stephan Korves, a loud, grotesque, insecure Claudius, Boris Malré as a fawning and servile Polonius, Cara Maria Nagler, who slips back and forth disturbingly but convincingly between Gertrude and Ophelia, and two “utility” men—Sebastian Graf, who plays Horatio, Rosencrantz, an actor and a gravedigger, and his “double” Roman Welzien, who plays Laertes, Guildenstern, another actor and another gravedigger. Lines from the Ghost are spoken by the entire company, often over the heavy booted tread of the unseen spirit. The stage, designed by Ramallah Sara Aubrecht, is in some ways extremely simple, in others highly complex. At the opening the table at the end of which the two Hamlets sit, is a long narrow one, running upstage and disappearing in the folds of a large curtain. On the curtain appears a live video showing a closeup of Claudius, carousing at his wedding banquet, and surrounded by everyone but Hamlet (the video is designed by Konny Keller). This scene actually takes place at the upper end of the long narrow table running down from far upstage, which is the main element of the set, although at this point it cannot be scene in its entirety. The offstage video then follows Gertrude/Ophelia as she leaves the King, climbs onto the table and walks slowly down it to where the Hamlets are sitting. As she comes through the curtains they part and for the first time we see her physically present, as the entire stage, and table is revealed. The effect is increased by a large mirror far upstage behind Claudius. We also for the first time see several other figures, dressed as courtiers, seated along the sides of the table, but soon realize they are actually dummies, somewhat reminiscent of the dead figures in a Kantor production. Most of the action takes place on or (thanks to the tracking live video, beneath this table, which serves as most of the settings of the production. A section in the center can be opened to suggest a grave, which from time to time welcomes the bodies of various actors, who climb in, are covered with dirt, and then climb out again to resume their eternal and repetitive dance of life and death. The other major scenic element is a variety of full stage curtains, of widely varying styles and set at different depths, suggesting a constant play of somewhat arbitrary beginnings and endings. Upon each curtain plays a continuing live video image of the apparently never-ending wedding banquet. Now and then a fleeting image suggests a particular scene –the player king and queen embracing Ophelia lowered into her grave, but these are merely passing images, sometimes repeated, never contextualized, and always embedded in a sea of contentious language. Like all three of the Shakespearian productions I saw, this was accompanied by the almost continuous contributions of a small onstage band with keyboard, strings, and percussion (music by Cornelius Heidebrecht). The continual repetitions and opening and closings of curtains calculatedly gave little indication of an approaching conclusion. On the contrary every effort was made to suggest something of a never-ending dream—perhaps that suggested in Hamlet’s central soliloquy, fragments of which are constantly repeated. Before the production begins, as the audience assembles in the lobby, confused noises are heard from behind the closed doors into the theatre. When the auditorium doors open, the audience enters to find the two seated figures in place on the stage, and projected behind them the live video of the loud and unruly wedding party, which has been going on for some time, and which we heard from outside. Like many post-dramatic creations, the production ends where it began, suggesting that there is in fact no ending. The two Hamlets resume their positions and conversation downstage and the video of the celebration continues on the closed curtain behind them. Eventually, their conversation ceases but the video continues. Perhaps ten minutes passed before the audience decided the performance was over and there was scattered applause, but nothing changed on stage. After another rather long wait a few audience members left, then others. When the house was perhaps half empty I went to the door and waited as others left. It was now about twenty minutes since the last words or live action on the stage, though perhaps a hundred determined spectators remained to watch the unmoving Hamlets and the continuing video projection. Out in the lobby I recognized that the sounds I heard there from inside the theatre were much the same as I had heard before the theatre opened, and I realized that the effect was to suggest that the display within presumably never ended, like the waiting for Godot. One might wonder if so extreme a version of this well-known drama would be well received, and the answer is that although naturally the performance had its critics, this Hamlet was selected by a jury of leading German critics and theorists as one of the ten outstanding productions of the year, and invited to participate in the annual Theatertreffen held later this same month in Berlin. Macbeth . Photo: Sebastian Hoppé. My third Shakespeare, the Dresden Macbeth , was as unconventional as the Dessau Hamlet , but developed from a very different set of assumptions and circumstances. In 2011, Christan Friedel, an actor at the Dresden State Theatre, joined the four members of the pop rock band Arctic Circle 18 to form a new group, dedicated to working in theatre and film as well as on the concert stage. They significantly took their name from Shakespeare, the Woods of Birnam. The first major undertaking of the new group was in providing the onstage live musical accompaniment for a production of Hamlet in Dresden in 2012, directed by Roger Vontobel. Friedel played the title role, for which he created and performed several songs. The group’s second theatrical venture was a collection of dramatic and musical works inspired by various Shakespearian texts and presented in Dresden under the title Searching for William in 2016. As the group’s reputation grew through a series of album releases, tours throughout Germany and Austria, and as far as Elsinore and major concerts, a production of Macbeth itself became inevitable. Like major and minor theatre projects all over the world, however, it fell victim to Covid. Just a week before its scheduled opening in Dresden in 2020 the theatre was closed, and although a much reduced concert version, Searching for Macbeth , was presented later that year for a limited audience, the full production could not be mounted for another two years. At that time it ran for over three hours, as compared to the seventy minutes of Searching for Macbeth and the approximately two and a half hours of both the Bosse Lear and the Preuss Hamlet , both based on much longer texts. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. Although more of the original in terms of lines and scenes could be perceived in this production than in the Dessau Hamlet , the Dresden Macbeth was essentially not so much a theatrical production as a no-holds-barred rock concert, with the emphasis not on the music, and even less on the text, but largely on the spectacular visual effects, stunning even for a m ajor German theatre. The witch’s realm was represented by a large open metallic box, filled with a writhing figure, that from time to time rose up out of the stage floor, the first time under the feet of Macbeth and Banquo. The menacing Birnam Woods formed an ever-present threat, both visually and aurally, appearing in countless and ever shifting forms—using video projections, beams of light, and massive moving screens, among other devices. Often hovering over the action was what seemed like a skeletal craft out of Star Wars , lined with machines that engulfed the stage with billowing clouds of smoke and powerful spotlights that could pick out particular actors, usually Macbeth, or in different combinations send down shafts of light that could suggest the walls of an insubstantial room. Certain images, like the bleeding hands, were developed into complex visual sequences, partly live and partly filmic. A striking example was the witches’ prophecy that Banquo would produce many royal descendants—a brief passage in the play—which was elaborated into a complex visual spectacle lasting several minutes and primarily created by film and video technology using the image of an adolescent boy in crown and royal robes splitting, multiplying, and creating increasingly complex visual patterns rather like a kaleidoscope or the dancers in the climax of a Busby Berkley musical. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. With all this spectacle the acting contributions of individual performers (there were over fifty of them) made a distinctly lesser impact. Indeed in terms of acting, critics regularly referred to this as a one-man show, not only because Friedel directed, created the music and acted and sang the title role, but also because spots and mikes often picked him out as the only distinct character amid a background of dark and constantly shifting configurations of characters. Like all the rest, however, he remained rather upstaged by the physical production, and his Macbeth was generally considered adequate, though rather conventional and even old-fashioned, considering the competition from the production as a whole. Aside from Friedel, the real stars of the show were the designer, Alexander Wolf, the lighting designer Johannes Zinc, and the video designers Clemens Walter and Jonas Dahl. By and large, the critics considered the production as a success in terms of its technical spectacle and far less impressive as an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. For audiences, however, the production was a major event, and the show is playing to continuously sold-out houses and standing ovations. Although all the productions I attended in Germany had good audiences, only in Dresden did I have real difficulty in obtaining a seat. Antigone . Photo: David Baltzer. The remainder of my trip was spent in Berlin, where my choices became much more varied. I began with one more major world classic, Antigone , at the Gorki Theatre, which once again demonstrated the liberties taken with such texts in many contemporary productions. The setting, designed by Zahava Rodrigo, was composed of dark billowing cloud-like forms, suggesting perhaps Antigone’s fatal cave or perhaps, given the feminist orientation of the work, a sheltering womb. In it, four Antigone figures (Lea Draeger, Eva Löbau, Julia Riedler, and Ҁiǧdem Teke) and an accompanying musician on an electronic keyboard (Fritzi Ernst) presented what might be described as a highly emotional group therapy session lasting about an hour and 45 minutes. Director Leonie Böhm is well known for her radical revisions of the classics, particularly for her 2019 feminist version of Schiller’s The Robbers , performed, like this Antigone, by four women. Of the Sophocles text, little is left but fragments of the famous choric ode on the wonder of man. The text and actions have been instead developed from the ensemble’s improvisations on the themes of shame, exposure, personal loyalties, physicality and death. Some of the material is clearly improvised, especially when one or another actor directly addresses members of the audience. It is not an easy production to watch, especially the first ten minutes, when not a word is spoken, but the four actresses collect their saliva, play with it rather like chewing gum and mix and smear it on the faces and in the mouths of their partners. In a theatre just recovering from Covid, this sequence provided the audience with a serious initial challenge, and not a few departed. After saliva came shit, the central image of shame, and clearly the most often repeated word in the text. A large pool of the appropriate color and texture provided material throughout the evening for the actresses to smear themselves and each other, and each of them, some nude, at least once immersed herself completely and emerged dripping to continue the performance. Certainly, the audience could sympathize with the often stated feelings of shame and embarrassment expressed by the actresses, but it seemed to me that these feelings were on the whole shared by the audience, and not in a positive way. The Broken Jug . Photo: Arno Declair. My last three evenings were scarcely more conventional, but on the whole more enjoyable. All were at the Deutsches Theater, which on the whole remains the most distinguished of the many major theatres in the capital. On my first night there I saw a German classic, rarely done abroad, Kleist’s The Broken Jug , generally considered among the few major German comedies. The plot concerns a provincial Dutch judge, Adam, who gains access to the bedroom of a local young woman, Eve, falsely claiming that for the proper favors he can rescue Eve’s fiance Ruprecht from military service. Surprised in the bedroom by the fiance, Adam escapes through the window, smashing an heirloom jug prized by Eve’s mother. The play consists of an investigation brought by the mother to reveal the intruder’s identity, a trial in which Adam serves as judge. His increasingly desperate attempts to avoid exposure are finally thwarted by a visiting external official who insists on seeing justice done. Interestingly, this was the only production of the seven I saw that related to its grounding text in a conventional way. Kleist’s sprawling text was cut, and in a few cases slightly updated, but generally faithfully followed, with careful attention to psychological and linguistic nuance. Still, it was definitely a contemporary interpretation. Perhaps most notably, the visiting magistrate who ensures the moral order is no longer a man, but a shrewd, thoughtful, authoritative, and clearly pregnant young woman (Lorena Handschin). Director Anne Lenk has presented a series of popular classic revivals at the Deutsches, and is known for her general faithfulness to the text, with moderate, usually feminist updating. The Broken Jug shows this clearly, with justice at last established by a female judge, despite the best efforts of a corrupt patriarchy (led of course by Adam) to cast all blame on the female victim. The sleazy Adam, his face still revealingly scarred by his encounter with the jug, is beautifully played by Urich Mattius, one of Germany’s most revered actors, and although he dominates the stage, he is ably supported by leading members of the theatre’s famed ensemble, including Lisa Hrdina as the abused Eve, Tamer Tahan as the wronged fiancé, Franziska Machens as Eve’s ranting mother, more concerned with her jug then her daughter, and Jeremy Mockridge as Adam’s faithful but rather dull clerk. Aside from its excellent acting, the production is a visual feast. Scene designer Judith Oswald has created a narrow stage, containing only a row of 14 chairs, facing the audience and close to the footlights. The actors move ingeniously among these chairs such a way as to constantly suggest the shifting relationships among them (Eve and Ruprecht for example, are placed at opposite ends of the row for much of the early action, and gradually coming together as they are reconciled). Immediately behind these chairs is a magnificent still painting filling the entire stage space—a 17 th- century Dutch still life showing a lavishly furnished table, with goblet and play, oysters and ham, peaches, pomegranates and grapes, and even a huge parrot. No such opulence would be found in the home of a Dutch village judge like Adam, but costume designer Sibylle Wallum has created a set of somewhat anachronistic but richly imaginative costumes in the pink, orange coral range which combine beautifully with the opulent background. The following evening I returned to the Deutsches Theatre, to its smaller venue, the Kammerspiele, or more precisely to the stage of the Kammerspiele where seventy or eight chairs had been set up in rows on the revolving turntable in the middle of the stage. Here the audience was turned to different positions where various backstage areas (and occasionally the auditorium itself and the walkways above the stage over our heads) became temporary performance spaces. The production was of special interest to me, Ibsen’s very rarely performed early work, The Pretenders , one of the few Ibsen plays I had never seen. The young director Sarah Kunze argues that Ibsen’s historical drama has been unjustly neglected, but this so-called “limited edition” does not really offer enough of the original to make a strong case. Ibsen’s play owes much to Shakespeare, with a huge sprawling plot and dozens of characters. Everything in this adaptation is vastly reduced—the length, the complex plot, and most striking of all, the characters, reduced to only three actors, who primarily appear as the three central characters—rather like reducing Henry IV to the Prince, Hotspur, and Falstaff. Granted, these characters anchor the action: the two rivals for the crown, the attractive and gifted Haakon (Lorena Handschin), and the dark and manipulative Skule (Natalia Seelig) and the Machiavellian Bishop Nikolas who feeds off of their rivalry (Elias Arens). This distinctly melodramatic edge was even more clearly evident in Arens’ Bishop Nikolas, whose flamboyant delivery, especially in his death scene and his return as a minister from hell, were high points of the production, as they are of the original play. I was pleased to see this theatrical rarity in any form, but the staging, cutting, and presentation in fact left so little of the original that I doubt it many audience members will accept the director’s assertion that she has rediscovered a forgotten gem. Leonce and Lena . Photo: Arno Declair. My final production, back on the mainstage of the Deutsches Theatre, was a new interpretation by Ulrich Rasche of George Büchner’s Leonce and Lena , a popular revival piece in Germany, but almost unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since his groundbreaking innovative production of Schiller’s The Robbers in 2018 Rasche has been hailed as one of the most powerful and original of young German directors, with his highly technological, powerfully lit, and perpetually and obsessively acted reworkings of classic texts. Büchner’s grotesque fantasy/comedy seems far removed from Rasche’s usual dark material, but he brings it unquestionably into his distinctive dramatic world through a striking directorial choice. Very little of the actual text of Leonce and Lena remains in Rasche’s production. It is replaced by extensive passages from other Büchner writings, including his letters, his revolutionary play Danton’s Death, and most significantly a good deal of an eight page call for political revolution, the 1834 Hessicher Landbote , for which the author was charged with treason and forced to seek asylum in France. The stage, designed by Rasche, is typical of his work, a vast essentially dark and empty space, here largely occupied by a massive, constantly revolving turntable, and a striking abstract element, here a huge, steadily shifting monumental lattice screen composed of color-changing fluorescent tubes (lighting by Cornelia Gloth). A chorus of ten actors, all clad in black with only their faces and hands dimly visible in a wash of blue light. Occasionally a chorus member will briefly emerge from the group to deliver a line, but the main body of the chorus remains steadily trudging onward, upon the constantly turning treadmill, slowly chanting the litany of oppressions and injustice making up the notorious pamphlet. Four musicians, placed in the front boxes with synthesizers, provide an appropriately crushing and continuous techno beat to accompany the unrelenting treading and chanting of the company. The effect is undoubtedly a powerful one, but at two and a half hours with no intermission, I found myself as much stunned as energized. This is an impression I often get from Rasche’s work, despite the unquestionable power of his visual imagination. In summary, I found the German theatre as always far more daring, more innovative, and more open to works (especially often neglected historical ones) than the Anglo-Saxon stage, which expands most of its creative energy on musical theatre and otherwise is satisfied as best with formulaic revivals of a handful of mostly English language plays. The German interest in pushing the boundaries certainly does not always work for me, but equally offers new insights into traditional works and into the potential of theatre to relate in new ways to the world around it to make this theatrical culture, so different from my own, continually fascinating. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). 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.

Watch Making of The Money Opera by Amitesh Grover at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Making of The Money Opera At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Amitesh Grover 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 20th. About The Film Country India Language English, Hindi Running Time 15 minutes Year of Release 2023 The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. Produced by Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. Directed by Vaibhav Raj Shah About The Artist(s) Amitesh Grover (born 1980) is an award-winning theatre director and artist. His body of work includes more than 20 productions, which range from global performances connecting performers and spectators across continents to the most intimate pieces. His creations have been commissioned, co-produced, and presented internationally by renowned festivals and theatres. His work is driven by the desire to understand the workings of power in societies controlled by the logic of techno-capital and increasingly authoritarian political forces. He is based in New Delhi, India. Get in touch with the artist(s) amiteshgrover@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://amiteshgrover.com , https://www.facebook.com/amitesh.grover?mibextid=LQQJ4d, https://www.instagram.com/amitesh.grover?igsh=MWpmaDZubHprNDR2cw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr 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.

Caitlin George, Violeta Picayo and Jonathan Taikina Taylor from the The SuperGeographics Ensemble Theatre will present excerpts from and talk about their upcoming production of HELEN. presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts (October 13-29, 2023). Presented by La Mama in Association with En Garde Arts HELEN. Written by Caitlin George Directed by Violeta Picayo With The SuperGeographics Ensemble Theatre PRELUDE Festival 2023 PRESENTATION Helen. The SuperGeographics English 60 minutes 1:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Caitlin George, Violeta Picayo and Jonathan Taikina Taylor from the The SuperGeographics Ensemble Theatre will present excerpts from and talk about their upcoming production of HELEN. presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts (October 13-29, 2023). Presented by La Mama in Association with En Garde Arts HELEN. Written by Caitlin George Directed by Violeta Picayo With The SuperGeographics Ensemble Theatre Content / Trigger Description: Caitlin George (Playwright) (she/her) is an Australian playwright, actor, and theatre-maker based out of Melbourne. Drawn to theatre by its collision of the possible and the practical, her work is driven by a compulsion for gender equality and a love for the explosive potential of language. As a playwright, her curiosity lies in reshaping our inherited narratives to examine cultural assumptions of gendered social roles. Through investigating myth, storytelling structures, and unsung histories, her plays question where we are and where we can go next. She has worked across south-eastern Australia, within the United States, and internationally in India, Mexico, and Canada. Jonathan Taikina Taylor (he/she) (Actor) is an actor, director, and movement artist working cross-culturally in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Most recently performed in Illusions by Ivan Viripaev (NY) and danced for choreographer Wendy Jehlen in Conference of the Birds (NY, Bejing, Palestine). Film Credits include Venci D. Kostov’s Una Mujer Despreciable. Directing credits include, Medea Refracted (Getty Villa, LA) Un Castillo De Cartas (Santiago, Chile), Moving Mouths (Goteborg, Sweden), La Casa Azul (Kathmandu, Nepal). He is Artistic Director of The SuperGeographics and Associate Artist of SITI Company. Violeta Picayo (she/her), is a bilingual Cuban-American director, actor, and choreographer. A born and raised New Yorker, she is passionate about creating works of and for her home city. Guided by a deep interest in the inherited body, Violeta has made her artistic home with some of New York’s most dynamic theater companies. She is a company member at Bedlam, OYL, The SuperGeographics, and an associate artist of SITI Company. Recent directing credits include the world premiere of The Strangers Came Today by Emily Zemba (Society/The New Ohio). Violeta has worked at NYC venues including BAM, The Public, Second Stage, the Gym at Judson, La MaMa; regionally at the American Repertory Theater, Portland Center Stage, City Theater, the Fisher Center; and internationally in Argentina, England, Greece, India, Scotland. Violeta is a proud graduate of Vassar College, the National Theater Institute, and the SITI Conservatory. www.supergeographics.org/helen, www.jonathanttaylor.com , www.caitlingeorge.website , www.violetapicayo.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

The piece is about a lesbian romantic love story. It will start with how they met, went through a long-distance relationship, and finally physically together. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Love Distance Shan Y. Chuang Theater, Dance Non-Verbal 10 minutes 5:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All The piece is about a lesbian romantic love story. It will start with how they met, went through a long-distance relationship, and finally physically together. Content / Trigger Description: To be able to follow the story along Shan Y. Chuang is an accomplished actor, singer, dancer, choreographer and pianist who was born and raised in Taiwan. Shan was trained in classical ballet, traditional Chinese dance and various Musical Theatre genres such as tap, jazz and hip-hop. She is a proud graduate of Circle in the Square’s Musical Theater program and is currently a member of Katharine Pettit Creative and LINKED Dance Theatre. She also holds an MFA in Musical Theater from National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). Shan’s work explores the world of LGBTQIA+, social justice, and self-discovery through dance movements. She focuses on creating physical narratives for the audience to follow the storyline. Shan received A City Artist Corps Grant and created a 30-minute dance, spoken words, and live piano piece “10 Years In The Making, 10 Years Of Me.” She is also a principal resident dancer at Katharine Pettit Creative and a collaborator with LINKED Dance Theater. Her theater credits include Once Upon A Mattress (Gallery Players), Caligula (New Ohio Theater), Liminal Archive (Al Límite), Breakthroughs (Queer Playback Theater), and Anything Goes. Instagram @shanychuang Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy, and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners. Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre Scene Partners By John J. Caswell, Jr. Directed by Rachel Chavkin Vineyard Theatre New York, NY November 8, 2023 Reviewed by Benjamin Gillespie Scene Partners , written by playwright John J. Caswell, Jr. (author of the critically acclaimed play Wet Brain ), is a non-linear exploration of memory and trauma that riffs on both the hopes and fears of its aging protagonist, Meryl Kowalski. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic (while Caswell was in residence at the Vineyard Theatre), and directed by Rachel Chavkin, the play centers on the journey of 75-year-old Meryl, who attempts to become a Hollywood movie star as a septuagenarian—an unlikely feat considering the movie industry’s notoriously ageist reputation, especially toward older actresses. Over the course of the play, Meryl travels from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, finds an agent, and ends up in the starring role of a movie about her own life. Embodied by a (then) 75-year-old Dianne Wiest, actress and character are the same age, significant for a play that, in many ways, is about the resilience of aging. Wiest brought a wisdom and strength to the role that helped to center a purposefully fragmented, though often perplexing, production which celebrated the possibility of an artistic third act for its determined heroine. Meryl’s backstory is told piecemeal to set up the play’s present tense in 1985. Meryl was born around 1910 in Los Angeles. At a young age, her parents separated, and she lived with her insensitive mother who relocated them to Wisconsin, where her mother then remarried. As we come to find out, Meryl’s stepfather repeatedly raped her as a child, but neither her mother nor stepsister, Charlize (played as an adult by Johanna Day), acknowledged this pattern of sexual abuse. Around 1930, Meryl married another abuser named Stanley Kowalski (“I know what you’re thinking” Meryl says. “I have no idea who’s responsible for feeding the details of my life to Mr. Williams for his little play! But my Stanley, he was so much worse, in every possible way”). Her ungrateful daughter, Flora (played by Kristen Sieh), is a drug addict dependent on her mother’s support to survive. The play begins just after the death of her husband (“that motherfucker!” she exclaims), at which point Meryl has had enough and decides to head west to become a Hollywood film star. But this is only the backstory, with the action of the play taking place in the present tense of 1985, but also (at least partially) in Meryl’s imagination. Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. The play presents the often painful, albeit revelatory, journey of a woman trying to process a lifetime of hardship in order to discover herself for the first time after spending three quarters of her life in abusive relationships. The fragmented reality of her mind (and consequently, the play) often leaves audiences with more questions than answers. But in a way, this is the point. The poetic, dream-like world of Scene Partners is contrasted by the harsh realism of Meryl’s life; anchored by the strength and tenacity of its aging central character, played expertly be Wiest, Meryl is akin to the great female roles of Tennessee Williams (who, as mentioned above, is directly evoked in the play several times). Deciding whether what’s happening in front of us is “real” or not misses the point: the focus here is rather for audiences to see Meryl telling her own story in the way that she (finally) wants and gets to tell it. But memory is a funny thing, and Meryl’s is as fragmented as it comes, not only blocking out experiences of trauma but also facing an unnamed neurological disorder that suggests she is losing cerebral control. “Is this like a memory play?” asks one of her acting classmates who Meryl recruits to act in her life story. “Do you want realism or should it be more like whoa! ?” “All of the above” answers her director/acting teacher. “It’s a work in progress” Meryl replies. Work in progress is an apt description for the play and production as it often loses its footing in between worlds, sometimes taking on the air of a rehearsal. But this does not detract too much from the beauty of Wiest’s performance or the stylish and dynamic staging by Chavkin, supported by a superb design team. The fragmentation of the play was emphasized through the innovative scenic and video designs by Riccardo Hernández and David Bengali, respectively, who utilized shifting screens and projections to illustrate the fluidity of Meryl’s memories. The use of large, moving screens not only bifurcated scenes but also served as a visual metaphor for Meryl’s fragmented, layered remembrances. However, while visually striking, this design choice occasionally created navigational challenges for the actors: on the night I saw the performance, one moving screen ran into Wiest mid-scene, though the seasoned stage actress hardly flinched and kept going without missing a beat. Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy , and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. Scene Partners seems to be a memory play, but not a traditional one: the world is split between “real” (or perhaps more appropriately live ) performance sequences along with pre-filmed screen performances. Sections of the play are created with projected films on the large screens that shift in and out of frame to represent different environments on Meryl’s journey. In fact, the production opened with an enormous projection of Wiest’s face on screen introducing herself, reassuring audiences, “This is exactly how it happened!” But we are never sure if the play is supposed to be perceived as being composed in the present tense, or if this is a more traditional memory play. “My life starts now!” she says. And perhaps it is through Meryl’s newfound artistic license that we should understand it all. The facial projection of Meryl shifts to black as words populated the screen with character names, like a script being written in real time, which is then read in voiceover as changes and corrections happened “live” in front of us. A sudden crash brings the lights up on Weist as Meryl descending from the heavens in a white chair before getting stuck in what seems like a chairlift (from where, no one knows) so that Wiest’s body could only be seen from the waist down. Stuck halfway between a dream and reality, in hindsight, this signaled where we would remain for the entire play. We later find out this process of getting stuck is a recurring dream Meryl has that she is performing for the film, but perhaps also dreaming. Half the fun of Scene Partners is putting together who is really there and who is only imagined by Meryl. In fact, the generic title of the play is a reference to metatheatrical roleplay, as we never fully understand when characters are just roles inside Meryl’s head or if they are actually there. The audience’s collective logic is often challenged when characters appear and disappear at pivotal moments in the production—is that really her sister in the interview scene or a figment of Meryl’s imagination?—not dissimilar to Florian Zeller’s award-winning play The Father . One thing is sure: Meryl is hellbent on being a great actress, but the trauma of sexual and physical abuse from the men in her past haunts her throughout the play. Again, Scene Partners is highly metatheatrical, beginning with Meryl’s first entrance, reminiscent of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (a role Wiest played at Theatre for a New Audience in 2017). This initial scene sets the tone for a production that constantly questions the boundaries between reality and fiction. The play-within-a-play and film-within-a-play structure allows for a complex narrative that keeps the audience questioning what is real and what is imagined throughout. Indeed, Caswell’s directive in the script that “people and things should seem to suddenly materialize and vanish” adds to this sense of disorientation and surrealism. Determined to tell her story on her own terms, Meryl faces ageism and skepticism on her journey to Hollywood from those around her. She is told by all (including her daughter and would-be agent) that she will only play old women in stereotypical roles. “I have been acting all my life. It’s time to get paid for it!” she replies. “There’s a market for durability. I’ll play a queen! Those roles are mine!” After receiving a suggestion to improve on her acting from her agent, Meryl enrolls in acting classes where her teacher “discovers” her and decides to help her develop a series of monologues that will be the basis for her life story in a series of films, each representing a different decade in her life. “I’m a maximalist at heart!” she says, which could also be a mantra for the expressionistic approach to Caswell’s writing, which created mixed reactions from viewers. Scene Partners is a compelling exploration of a woman’s struggle to reclaim her own narrative and identity against the backdrop of Hollywood’s unforgiving landscape, and society more broadly. A rich and multi-layered theatrical experience, the play is a significant contribution to contemporary theatre focusing on age and aging outside of the typical narratives of decline we see so often in mainstream culture. While the production was, at times, a little wayward, Wiest’s portrayal of Meryl was both poignant and powerful, capturing the character’s complexity and depth, her humor and kindness, but also her confusion and sadness. Her interactions with other characters, including her abusive deceased husband Stanley (who keeps returning in Meryl’s nightmares) and her over-the-top acting teacher-cum-director, highlight the various challenges she faces with unwavering resolve. Performance Review: Scene Partners © 2024 by Benjamin Gillespie is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International References About The Authors Benjamin Gillespie (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and 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. 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Meredith Conti Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Meredith Conti By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF As the national tour of Daniel Fish’s critically acclaimed Oklahoma! crisscrossed the United States in 2022, company members found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Instead of the stunned silences and standing ovations that typified the production’s reception at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, the national tour’s audiences offered an unexpectedly prickly bouquet of responses, including walkouts, boos, taunts, “thumbs down” gestures, refund demands, social media rants, and in one case, “vomiting in the balcony.” ( [1] ) Of course, Oklahoma! had its share of detractors since the production’s pre-Broadway days at St. Ann’s Warehouse, just as the national tour’s hostile reception was neither comprehensive or invariable; still, in cities across the country, the revival inspired tonally different audience responses to its New York City run. In a 2023 HowlRound article, Jud Fry actor Christopher Barrow suggests some likely triggers in Fish’s Oklahoma! for the tour’s audiences, including its aesthetic boldness, its identity-conscious casting, and its refusal to treat its source material as canonical, precious, and unchanging. ( [2] ) (It is worth noting, too, that the production’s original deep thrust staging was flattened to fit the US’s network of proscenium theatres). While I, like many non-coastal Americans, bristle at generalized depictions of our theatregoers as less open-minded or equipped to handle experimental or challenging performances, I do suspect that Bannow missed a potential trigger for heartland audiences: the revival takes direct aim at the nation’s ever-hungry gun culture and those who continually nourish it through word and action. ( [3] ) A buoyant, nostalgic, and unproblematically patriotic musical Fish’s Oklahoma! is not. But was Oklahoma! ever? The theatre of post-Newtown America (or post-UVA, post-Pulse Nightclub, post-Las Vegas, post-Tops Market….) has yet to fully reckon with a discomfiting, perhaps inconvenient reality: the industry and its artists have long been active, direct participants in the country’s gun culture. Indeed, many of the theatre’s cumulative products, from anti-gun docudramas and Annie Get Your Gun revivals to vaudevillian William Tell tricks and Wild West Show battle reenactments, are not just embodied responses to gun culture, they are gun culture. While the term itself has become something of a partisan battleground, “gun culture” is an omnipresent, self-reinforcing system of beliefs, values, and feelings about firearms and their usage, as well as the behavioral actions and socioeconomic, cultural, and political transactions that inspire or sustain them. Gun cultures exist anywhere guns circulate, and therefore “gun culture” as a term lacks specificity until contextualized by the society in which it functions. In what follows, I treat the phrase “US-American gun culture” as neither neutral nor strictly pejorative or celebratory, though I favor Pamela Haag’s assertion that gun companies have long exerted a behemothic and tactical influence on how Americans regard guns. ( [4] ) Despite the relative youth of the nation’s gun culture, it is a maddeningly complex, enduring, and variform organism. It whispers in myths; it shouts at the gun range. It operates simultaneously on the personal and institutional levels and engages manifold publics. It is animated by patrolling border militias and simulated gunfights at the OK Corral, and it is embodied by gun control activists and the twelve-year-old girl cradling her first shotgun in the glow of the Christmas tree. It meticulously sutures guns to American identity, and American life to guns. And whether or not we like it, the theatre regularly supplies the thread. Onstage gunplay not only disturbs audiences by surrogating actual gun violence or reenacting trauma, however; it also delights, astounds, amuses, and disarms. Nowhere is this capacious narrative and affective flexibility more apparent than in the American musical canon, where firearms serve a startling variety of functions while sliding easily along spectrums of genre, style, and tone. They are the go-to props of musicals set or staged in wartime, symbolic of hostile environments, courageous heroes, and desperate aggressors. They are the accoutrement of comedy and the drivers of tragedy. And, of course, they persist as ambivalent, malleable, and unpredictable indexers of political schisms, social inequities, and the empire-building violence required by Western patriarchy, colonization, and capitalism. As a vehicle for propelling questions of US-American gun culture(s) into the popular consciousness, the musical is a uniquely equipped performance form. Mounted to the notes of soaring harmonies, transported on the limbs of undulating, often virtuosic bodies, or underscored by elaborate landscapes and soundscapes, gun narratives intensify, stretch, transmute, and become unsettled in the musical medium. Despite their thematic and aesthetic heterogeneity, however, American gun musicals tend to press guns into service as potent indicators of belonging or marginality—often by distinguishing natural or paradigmatic Americanness through authoritative gun use or by harnessing guns as tools that induct characters into or expulse them from meaningful relationships, identity groups, or communities. ( [5] ) Indeed, with few exceptions, a gun musical’s firearms help compose, fortify, alter, and/or destroy human connections, be they romantic couples, love triangles, family units, friend circles, or communities organized by place, politics, religion, race, and other social or material conditions. To trace the guns in Hamilton (2015), for example, is to see guns violently regulate American identity/ies. ( [6] ) The mainspring of 2000’s The Wild Party ’s climactic gunfire, to cite another, is a love triangle that materializes and dematerializes in a single evening. And while The Wild Party is fictional and Hamilton fictional ized , intimate partner and intra/inter-community gun violence in the US is real, persistent, and documented. According to the John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, over half of all intimate partner homicides in the US are committed with firearms, and “a woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun.” ( [7] ) In addition, the Deputy Police Commissioner of Buffalo, New York argued in 2021 that an “overwhelming number of shootings and murders in Buffalo stem from revenge, retaliation and escalating beefs,” many of them now fueled by social media. ( [8] ) American gun violence carves up communities along and across categories of identity and culture: Black Americans are ten times more likely to die by gun homicide than white Americans;( [9] ) 4.5 million US women alive today report being threatened with a gun;( [10] ) firearms were used in 73% of trans American homicides between 2017 and 2021;( [11] ) current or former members of the US military make up a disproportionately high number of gun suicides;( [12] ) and “gun deaths recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children,” making the US an “extreme outlier” in gun fatalities in minors. ( [13] ) Still the country’s gun culture continues to thrive, buoyed by a formidable supply of ideologies, narratives, factoids, slogans, and figureheads that operate both within and far beyond gun-positive spaces. Germane to this essay is the recurring deployment of gun industry propaganda that reinforces an insider/outsider binary of American life. This includes mythic depictions of gun ownership that imply gun-handling is an endower of true, unassailable Americanness, and that personal firearms enable US-Americans to safeguard their loved ones and communities from external threats (despite data that concludes that guns in homes increase the risk of gun injury and death). ( [14] ) In this essay, I analyze how guns and the people who carry them shape and reshape two of the American musical’s classic human groupings: the community circle and the love triangle. I engage in close readings of two Golden Age musicals, Oklahoma! (1943) and West Side Story (1957), as well as their recent, gun-heavy Broadway revivals, in order to illuminate how firearms arbitrate or exacerbate race- and class-based conflicts within the depicted communities and “solve” the musicals’ imbalanced love triangles¾either facilitating a community-sustaining union or preventing a community-conjoining union from occurring. Indeed, in assessing these musicals and their twenty-first-century revivals as gun musicals, distinctive patterns in the gendering, racializing, and classing of American guns and gun violence become evident. These patterns, not surprisingly, are directly tethered to and expressive of the gun cultures and the wider sociopolitical landscapes in which the productions were created. As I argue, the original musicals reified conventional notions of the appropriate US-American gun handler as the white, Christian, cishet man, presenting their gun possessions as uncomplicated, necessary, and intuitive within the plays’ white supremacist patriarchies. The revivals, however, attempt to adapt the musicals’ guns to the country’s hyper-violent present, both by amplifying the gun’s role in catalyzing domestic and community violence and inculcating more participants into gun culture systems, including through the increased representation of skillful women, Black, and Latine gun handlers. In manifesting this provocative transferring of power, the revivals variously challenge and fortify the mythic triangulation of firearms, white masculinity, and Americanness. Shotgun Weddings and Handgun Honeymoons: The Guns of Oklahoma! (1943) and West Side Story (1957) Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway two years before World War II’s Allies and Axis powers laid down their arms. West Side Story ’s Broadway opening occurred one day after the Little Rock Nine, surrounded by heavily armed National Guardsmen, integrated Arkansas’s Central High School. While mapping both musicals onto a timeline of US gun events is a useful task, it is more meaningful to determine how Golden Age gun musicals reflected and upheld prevailing firearm discourses and representations. Following a brief primer on the material and metaphorical contours of midcentury America’s gun culture, I will assess Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s guns—and, more importantly, gun handlers—as chief arbitrators of belonging or marginality within the musicals’ imagined communities. By the 1940s and 50s, US-American gun culture bore only a partial resemblance to its nineteenth-century predecessor(s). As homegrown demand for firearms dried up following the American Civil War, the US gun industry attempted to stem the tide by pursuing foreign military contracts, especially in Europe, and by popularizing civilian gun ownership and use in North America. Late-1800s ads from Winchester, Ithaca Gun Company, and other manufacturers increasingly appealed to modern women and family men, recommending shooting sports—hunting, target shooting, and trapshooting—as healthful, safe, character building, suitable for women and children, and implicitly American (despite the sports’ much longer history in Europe). ( [15] ) Meanwhile, the newly founded National Rifle Association (NRA) promoted the creation of rifle clubs, training courses, and competitive shooting matches with an eye toward advancing marksmanship in the general public and, by extension, deepening the country’s reserve of skilled shooters. ( [16] ) In the twentieth century’s early decades, increasing numbers of white middle-class women took up shooting sports, while gun manufacturers and conservative commentators intensified their use of fear-based rhetoric to present personal gun ownership as the effective defense against home invasions and violent assaults. The latter exploited white Americans’ anxieties around race, immigration, and the specter of “urban crime” and reified whiteness as a prerequisite for proper gun ownership in the United States. Such rhetoric persisted through the mid-twentieth century as the civil rights movement re-enlivened debates about which Americans had (or should have) uncontestable gun rights. Some civil rights leaders, for example, proclaimed the right to bear arms as essential both to protecting Black communities from violent white mobs and to fully enfranchising African Americans as US citizens. As historian Nicholas Johnson notes, Rosa Parks, T.R.M. Howard, Daisy Bates, and other Black activists whose families were terrorized by firebombs and burning crosses “embraced private [armed] self-defense and political nonviolence without any sense of contradiction.” ( [17] ) As a weary but victorious America emerged from two World Wars, flush with good-guys-with-guns narratives, the gun industry endeavored to amend US history by inserting firearms at every page turn. According to Haag, midcentury ads “retroactively fetishized” guns and boasted “[c]asual assertions…that Americans had ‘always’ loved guns, or that they had a ‘timeless’ tradition of gun fluency, a ‘priceless tradition’ in firearms, or had ‘long known how to shoot,’ with ‘every boy’ trained as a marksman.” ( [18] ) Of especial importance in this historical re-envisioning was the mythologizing of the Wild West. Colt’s ads “rehabilitated the cowboy” into a “steely-eyed” and courageous icon of white American masculinity, while Winchester marketed its Model 1873 rifle as The Gun that Won the West. ( [19] ) Mythic depictions of the American West swept through 1940s and 50s popular culture like wildfire. Taking a page from the dime novels, frontier melodramas, and Wild West Shows of the nineteenth century, midcentury movies, magazines, and television series invited American audiences to visit an Old West of unparalleled danger, bravery, and beauty, with expert gun handling serving as the coin of the realm. ( [20] ) It was within this gun culture that Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s original productions operated. In an essay illogically asserting that politics are “absent” in American theatre, political theorist and theatre writer Benjamin Barber concedes that “on second inspection” the dual love plots in Oklahoma! “emerge as emblems of a powerful social context”: No less than Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle , whose social context is a struggle between goatherds and vintners over the right to use a contested valley, Oklahoma! puts the question of whether the territory can unite as a state around a common civic faith and a common political identity, or will be allowed to fracture and disintegrate along the fissures opened up by the competition of its economic factions. ( [21] ) These adversarial populations—farmers and cowmen, settlers and nomads—coalesce (if only outwardly) as the Indian and Oklahoman territories become one state. ( [22] ) As Bruce Kirle explains, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! “historicizes the isolationist/ interventionist conflict that preceded and shadowed America’s participation in World War II” and argues for unity in the face of a common enemy: the spread of fascism. ( [23] ) Yet national belonging in Oklahoma! is determined not just politically or geographically, but also socioeconomically and racially, as Andrea Most and Warren Hoffman have ably illustrated. ( [24] ) Furthermore, the musical’s male characters employ violence (or the threat of violence) as a way of formalizing the community’s boundaries, with firearms often accelerating the admissions process or keeping outsiders at bay. Indeed, the firearm’s vital role in US settler colonialism is plainly wrought in the musical. Though the original libretto contains no staged or referenced gun deaths, it also notably contains no Indigenous characters, suggesting that the settlers’ rifles have already succeeded in ejecting Native communities from their lands (“Oklahoma” comes from the Chocktaw “okla humma,” meaning “Red People”) and denying their identities as US-Americans. ( [25] ) Because Rodgers and Hammerstein “erased [the] indigenous complexity” of the musical’s source material, Lynn Riggs’s 1930 play Green Grow the Lilacs , and whitewashed its frontier community, Oklahoma! ’s guns persist as the designated material and symbolic deliverers of Manifest Destiny. ( [26] ) In more recent productions—at DC’s Arena Stage (2010), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2018), and Broadway’s Circle in the Square (2019)—multiracial casts reconstitute Oklahoma! ’s typically homogeneous community, “unsettl[ing] preconceptions of the frontier as white,” as Donatella Galella argues. ( [27] ) However, in Oklahoma! ’s first Broadway run guns appeared predominantly in the hands of white men, though some scholars read farmhand Jud Fry’s sexual savagery as representative of a stereotyped class- and race-based Otherness that “cannot be whitened.” ( [28] ) (Curly’s description of Jud as “bullet-colored, growly man,” indicating, perhaps, a tanned, dirty laborer’s bronzy skin tone, nevertheless leaves open the possibility that Jud is not white). ( [29] ) The only woman to touch a gun is Aunt Eller, Oklahoma! ’s no-nonsense matriarch; in the spontaneous brawl between farmers and cowboys at the top of Act Two, Aunt Eller “ grabs a gun from some man’s holster and fires it, ” putting an abrupt halt to the fighting. She then points the gun at groups of men, coercing them to rejoin the singing. They do. Within Oklahoma! ’s strict gender binary, Aunt Eller is unique. “She is an uncommonly public woman who mediates between male and female culture,” notes musicologist Susan C. Cook, but “[h]er public power comes at a cost; widowed, she is a desexualized crone, who stands apart from the other women[.]” ( [30] ) Gun handling, then, is a mark of Aunt Eller’s singularity. If Oklahoma! ’s guns exclusively belong to white men, what do they signal about the men’s belonging within the musical’s real and aspirational American communities? Two scenes offer clues: cowboy Curly McClain and antisocial farmhand Jud Fry’s private meeting in Act One, and Act Two’s box social. In the first, Curly and Jud converge in Jud’s lodgings, the farm’s defunct smokehouse, where Curly goads Jud into imagining killing himself (the better to live on in the memories of his mourners). On the smokehouse’s walls, Rodgers and Hammerstein specify, hang the accoutrements of manual farm labor and images of nearly naked women. Below them sit limited furnishings: a “grimy” and unmade bed, a spittoon, and a table and chairs. ( [31] ) Within this hypermasculine space, a remote and decommissioned site of work that now hosts the community pariah, each of Jud and Curly’s gun acts—for they are acts in the theatrical sense—exteriorize the men’s identical objectives: to triumph over their competitor, win Laurey and her farmland, and through these conjoined possessions achieve a level of community integration and security that presently evades them both. The acts escalate in intensity as the scene progresses. Jud seizes his pistol as Curly approaches the smokehouse and begins to methodically clean it; following a spate of Curly’s insults, Jud “reflex[ively]” pulls its trigger and blasts a bullet into the ceiling; Curly demonstrates his shooting skill by firing a bullet through knothole in the smokehouse wall. Due to their solitude and emotional intimacy, Jud and Curly’s forced displays of heteronormative frontier masculinity reverberate with both violent and homoerotic potential. But rather than the smokehouse containing the men’s armed antagonism, the guns audibly broadcast it, drawing Aunt Eller, Ali Hakim, and several others to their spot. “’S all right!” Aunt Eller assures those who have gathered. “Nobody hurt, just a pair of fools swapping’ noises.” ( [32] ) The box social is a community-sanctioned pageant of territorial masculinity masquerading as a charity auction. Like the display behaviors of male peacocks and harbor seals, Oklahoma! ’s men flaunt their authority, capital, and sexual devotion, but unlike the female peacocks and harbor seals in the market for a mate, the eligible women whose lunch hampers (and selves) are up for auction lack the agency to choose or refuse bidders. “ Oklahoma! thus embodies what Erin Addison calls an ‘American secular ideology’ of individualism and freedom for men and romance/marriage for women,” offers Cook. ( [33] ) Within this frontier thunderdome of cishet male competition, guns are enlisted as valuable commodities and tools of intimidation. In negotiations as part of the box social’s transactional politics are Oklahoma!’ s two love triangles. Curly and Jud are in pursuit of Laurey, who understands she must choose a man to help manage the farm she has inherited. The flirtatious Ado Annie, meanwhile, is torn between sweet but featherbrained cowboy Will Parker and the “Persian peddler / Lothario” Ali Hakim, the latter of whom is an ethnoracial outsider “typically played broadly and theatrically—for laughs—via the conventions of vaudeville,” writes Kirle. ( [34] ) Given that Ali’s interest in Ado Annie is carnal rather than marital, Will and Ali’s battle over Ado Annie’s hamper is an asymmetrical affair. Its lopsidedness is also engendered by violence, as Ado Annie’s father Carnes forces Ali to participate at gunpoint, prodding the peddler in the back with the tip of his gun to ratchet up the bidding. Though Will loses the hamper to Ali, he “gets” Ado Annie by satisfying Carnes’s demand that his daughter’s husband-to-be be financially solvent. Later, Ali marries the universally irritating Gertie Cummings in a shotgun wedding, consequently abandoning his nomadic lifestyle and assimilating into the territory folks’ white Christian community, his amorous ways and his Otherness curbed by the promise of gun violence. In Oklahoma! , the fathers’ firearms orchestrate unions that are advantageous for the community’s survival but not necessarily for marital harmony. Sung by the musical’s bachelors with Ali singing lead, Act One’s “It’s a Scandal! It’s a Outrage!” lampoons the men’s “entrapment” by armed fathers and their supposedly eager daughters: MEN: It’s gotten’ so you cain’t have any fun! Every daughter has a father with a gun! It’s a scandal, it’s a outrage! How a gal gets a husband today!( [35] ) Winning Laurey’s hamper (and presumably her hand in marriage) also requires considerable capital. In an effort to best Jud—who eventually bids “all I got in the world,” two years of savings from farm work—Curly sells off the vital assets of a cowboy: first his saddle, then his horse, and finally his gun. As the coup de grâce of the men’s acrimonious bidding, Curly drawing his gun is read first as a physical threat, frightening the crowd and inspiring Jud to retreat. For Scott McMillin, Curly’s capacity with a gun appeals to Laurey because it keeps Jud’s violence in check: “The cowboy-hero handles a gun so well that even the hired hand has to worry about him—that is one of the hero’s desirable attributes.” ( [36] ) Even after his gun sells, Curly secures Laurey’s hamper, her hand, and newfound respectability as a chosen caretaker of colonized Oklahoman land. Of the three guns in Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story , the famed musical that transports Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a hot and claustrophobic Manhattan neighborhood in the 1950s, two tellingly belong to law enforcement officials. Lieutenant Schrank and Officer Krupke are white supremacist authority figures who enforce an inequitable set of rules for rival street gangs, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the (traditionally) white ethnic Jets. The officers never draw their guns, at least according to the Broadway libretto. Schrank is a plainclothes cop whose weapon is presumably concealed by his suit jacket; Krupke’s sidearm, however, is always a visible part of his police uniform, indexing his simultaneous, conflated roles as neighborhood protector and aggressor. The third gun, and the only one that discharges within the course of the musical, is extracted from its apartment hiding place in Act Two, Scene One by Chino, a young Shark desperate to avenge the death of the gang’s leader, Bernardo. Chino unwraps the gun, which the stage directions specify has been stored in a cloth “the same color as BERNARDO’s shirt,” and jams it into his pocket before exiting, affiliating West Side Story ’s sole civilian firearm with two Puerto Rican immigrant men. ( [37] ) At the musical’s climax Chino finds his target, former Jet member Tony, and fatally shoots him as he runs into the arms of his lover Maria, Bernardo’s sister and Chino’s intended wife. As “CHINO stands very still, bewildered by the gun limp in his hand,” the lovers sing fragments of “Somewhere,” the musical’s utopic ballad of freedom and inclusion, before Tony succumbs to his gunshot wound. In the action that follows, Maria silently beckons for Chino’s gun and then turns it on Sharks and Jets alike, who at the report of the gunshot have amassed in a “ritual assembly” around Tony’s body. “How many bullets are left, Chino? Enough for you? And you? All of you? WE ALL KILLED HIM; and my brother and Riff. I, too. I CAN KILL NOW BECAUSE I HATE NOW. How many can I kill, Chino? How many – and still have one bullet left for me?” Unable to pull the trigger, Maria throws the gun away and collapses on the ground, sobbing. In the musical’s final moments, Tony’s body is carried away by Jet and Shark boys, a procession forms, and Maria follows in its wake, “lift[ing] her head proudly and triumphantly.” The neighborhood’s adults, including Schrank and Krupke, remain onstage, “bowed, alone, useless” as the curtain falls. ( [38] ) The importance of this gun, as a material node in which the musical’s themes of racialized violence, urban youth culture, and generational discord seem to converge, has largely gone unacknowledged in the existing literature, likely because the gun is introduced relatively late in the play, after Bernardo and Jet leader Riff die by knife-wounds in the gangs’ late-night rumble. However, even in the pre-van Hove world of West Side Story , a world that Brian Herrera describes as “characterized by the constant threat of incipient violence,” guns are conspicuous. ( [39] ) Consider the Jets’ first conversation about rumbling with the Sharks. Riff suggests that the Sharks “might ask for bottles or knives or zip guns,” inspiring a worried “Zip guns…Gee!” from Baby John, the youngest of the group. ( [40] ) Guns are named again at the gangs’ war council, not by Riff or Bernardo but by Tony, who attempts to mitigate mounting tensions by urging the leaders to agree to a fair fight, sans weapons. “Bottles, knives, guns! What a coop full of chickens!” he baits. ( [41] ) In both conversations, the Jets are depicted as reluctant to arm themselves with guns as a way of holding their turf: “I wanna hold it like we always held it, with skin!” Riff assures his gang in Act One. ( [42] ) And yet, in Jerome Robbins’ choreography the Jets habitually map onto their bodies gestures of guns and gun violence. Jets wannabe Anybodys responds to A-Rab’s insults about her appearance by shooting him with her finger, prompting Baby John to ask about the maiming power of zip guns. No one answers. Similarly in “Cool,” a frenetic dance in which the Jets attempt to regulate their volatile, pre-rumble energies, A-Rab shapes his hand into a gun, pantomimes firing it, and shouts “pow!,” a close mirroring of Anybodys’ finger shot. In a choreographic replication of cycles of violence, A-Rab is now no longer the victim but the shooter. Ying Zhu and Daniel Belgrad note in their study of dance in West Side Story ’s 1961 film adaptation that “Over the course of the dance, this [gun] gesture is not eliminated, but is disciplined and integrated into the emotional fabric of coolness, so that Action, at the dance’s end, can control it and use it.” ( [43] ) The Jets’ pretend gunplay, Zhu and Belgrad argue, can be situated within the musical’s larger motif of subversive “play [as] the bodily assertion of vitality in the face of adult regulation.” ( [44] ) Of course, this simulated battleground of finger pistols and vocalized “pows” —itself a reflection of popular mid-century children’s games pitting cops against robbers, cowboys against Indians—fails to prevent real gun violence from materializing. As Herrera, David Román, Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner have all forcefully argued, West Side Story ’s message of racial tolerance comes at an ironic cost: the perpetuation of Latine stereotypes and the faulty association of urban US-American crime to rising rates of immigration. ( [45] ) In the original lyrics to “America,” Shark girl Anita paints an unseemly picture of her native island, depicting Puerto Rico’s inhabitants as disease-ridden, oversexed, poor, and prone to unrestrained bursts of gun violence: “Always the hurricanes blowing, / Always the population growing, / And the money owing, / And the babies crying, / And the bullets flying.” ( [46] ) The fact that the only gun that takes a life in West Side Story is owned by one Shark and fired by another is neither inconsequential nor unrelated to Bernardo and Chino’s Puerto-Ricanness and their shared status as racialized outsiders who, if Anita’s lyrical tirade is at all based on reality, brought the problems of their homeland with them. The lie Anita tells Tony after being sexually assaulted at Doc’s store—that Chino has fatally shot Maria—is not only plausible, given Chino’s armed state; it also accords with the feud’s escalating violence and anticipates the ballistic trauma to come. In contrast to the white police officers’ holstered weapons, Bernardo’s gun was unsecured in the home and becomes uncontainable on the streets. With Maria’s seizure of the gun, its relationship to the Latine community is solidified. Though she is clearly unaccustomed to handling the gun, its scriptive thingness immediately instructs her how to channel what the libretto terms her “savage” rage. ( [47] ) America Reloaded: Gun-Centric Revivals of Oklahoma! (2019) and West Side Story (2020) In the midst of its direct transfer from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, Daniel Fish’s revival of Oklahoma! grabbed headings in early 2019 by announcing it would be Broadway’s first “Gun Neutral” production. For every visible gun onstage, Oklahoma! ’s producers donated to “organizations working to destroy illegal guns” as well as to those providing arts and STEM programming to communities disproportionately impacted by US-American gun violence. Speaking on the production’s partnership with the non-partisan Gun Neutral Initiative, lead producer Eva Price remarked: “[j]ust because a particular story calls for the presence of a particular weapon, that doesn’t mean that we have to remain complacent in America’s gun-violence epidemic. Helping to destroy firearms that shouldn’t be in circulation is both a privilege and a responsibility.” ( [48] ) Implicit in this gun neutral pledge is an acknowledgement that even prop firearms cannot claim neutrality in 2019 (if indeed they ever could). Furthermore, monetary pledges concede that gun cultures and politics are inextricably bound up in economic transactions and therefore tend to capacitate the financially privileged. Much like carbon offsetting, a gun neutral pledge operates from an assumption that even simulated gunplay has the potential to cause harm; it attempts to mitigate possible negative effects, even as it admits the perceived inevitability of theatrical and mediatized guns in popular culture. Shortly after the news went viral, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action characterized the production’s move as “‘smack[ing] of antigun political pandering.’” ( [49] ) There is much to attend to in Fish’s Oklahoma! and Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove’s revival of West Side Story (not the least of which are van Hove’s casting of a sexual predator in the role of Bernardo and staging of Anita’s assault as a penetrative rape). ( [50] ) But rather than comprehensively review the productions or summarize their critical receptions—the latter no small task, given the strikingly polarized opinions of Fish’s and van Hove’s work—I wish to compare the productions’ transformative treatments of guns with those advanced by their source productions. ( [51] ) Historically, the guns of Oklahoma! and West Side Story have operated as connotatively ambiguous objects until they are lifted into service by their handlers. That is, Curly, Jud, and Carnes’s guns are expected accessories for “territory folks” that become threatening with use. Fish and van Hove’s guns, by contrast, persistently and independently menace, from the racks of guns hanging on Oklahoma! ’s auditorium walls, always in view and materially and spatially inculcating theatregoers into the production’s culture of guns, to the pistol tattoo above Chino’s hip, a symbol of his early indoctrination into a gun-saturated world (he is now forever “armed”) and a foreshadowing of West Side Story ’s tragic climax. The revivals’ guns not only consummate the violent impulses of their operators, they engender personal and systemic violence. Of Fish’s Oklahoma! Soraya Nadia McDonald asserts, “social order is enforced and maintained by guns,” a description easily transferrable to van Hove’s New York. ( [52] ) In a conspicuous extension of the original musicals’ gun narratives, the revivals’ community circles and love triangles are contoured or irrevocably broken by armed characters and gun violence. Fish and van Hove take different tacks in mining and reframing their source material. Fish retains Hammerstein’s book almost in its entirety, embedding his major interventions interstitially or via bespoke stagings of scenes and songs. In its most dramatic departure from the libretto, Fish’s Oklahoma! reconceptualizes Jud’s killing as a deliberate gun death. On Curly and Laurey’s wedding day, Jud kisses the bride and presents the couple with a gift: his gun, and an opportunity to end his life. It is an earnest plea with a subtle “gotcha” undertone, for if granted, Jud’s slaughter will forever haunt their wedding day memories. Curly, with Laurey’s wordless blessing, accepts Jud’s offer and shoots him. Husband and wife are sprayed by blood as Jud crumples to the ground. ( [53] ) By replacing Jud’s accidental stabbing with the close-range gunning down of an unarmed man (however consensual the victim), Fish renders the impromptu trial that exonerates Curly of criminal culpability distressingly perfunctory. Curly’s acquittal, writes The Atlantic ’s Todd S. Purdum, “feels less like justice and more like rough complicity in vigilantism.” ( [54] ) West Side Story ’s single, fatal gunshot remains as scripted, though van Hove’s fixation on US-American gun violence is manifest throughout the production. Moreover, with a compressed run-time of 105 minutes and no intermission, the revival hastens toward Tony’s gun death without West Side Story ’s customary flashes of levity: “I Feel Pretty” has been cut and “Gee, Officer Krupke” refashioned. Though Fish began developing Oklahoma! in 2007 at Bard College, its 2019 Broadway iteration and the 2020 West Side Story revival hum with unmistakable nowness, dialoguing directly with US-American gun politics in the Trumpian age. Both stories are set in an unspecified present and feature multiracial casts, with gender expansive ( West Side Story ) and disabled actors ( Oklahoma! ) further diversifying the depicted communities. ( [55] ) Fish’s reimagined frontier boasts an interracial love triangle (Rebecca Naomi Jones’s Laurey, Damon Daunno’s Curly, and Patrick Vaill’s Jud) and a Black federal marshal (Anthony Cason as Cord Elam), the latter’s powerlessness during the murder trial suggestive not just of the community’s fervor to exonerate Curly but the precariousness of Cord’s endowed authority, even when armed. The antagonistic outsider Jud Fry is no longer a brutish farmhand, but a brooding, wiry, plaid-and-hoodie-wearing blonde, “a repository of loneliness and disconnection” who seeks community belonging and validation through Laurey. ( [56] ) Developed by Vaill and Fish over years of collaboration, this Jud oozes a despondent vulnerability that adheres his villainous acts¾including sexually assaulting Laurey and attempting to kill Curly with a switchblade masquerading as a kaleidoscope¾to his ‘victimization’ by an insular, cliquish community. “[It is t]he act of someone who feels pushed into a corner,” Vaill claims of Jud’s foiled murder plot. “This is someone who feels he does not have control, which is scary.” Of Jud’s role as the story’s villain, Vaill is quick to qualify: “He’s cast as the villain …. At the end of the day, he’s guilty of being in love with someone that people don’t think he should be in love with.” ( [57] ) Fish and Vaill’s apologist approach to Jud sets the character, and his assisted gun suicide, adrift in murky cultural waters. “Sympathy for the Incel?” wonders Catherine M. Young from the title of her HowlRound essay on Oklahoma!. In it, Young records a handful of the disparate public responses: Journalist Alison Stewart couldn’t tell if Jud was more like a fragile, vulnerable “Kurt Cobain type” or a school shooter. Sarah Holdren and Elisabeth Vincentelli both describe him as an incel, the involuntarily celibate men who resent (and occasionally kill) women who won’t sleep with them. Frank Rich was enthralled by Jud’s anguish. Such ambiguity has political implications. ( [58] ) Ambiguities there may be, but for Fish and Vaill, Jud is a distinctly American product: a seething, unstable concoction of “virulent misogyny,” toxic (white) masculinity, and lone-wolf reclusiveness that finds affirmation through the nation’s gun culture. ( [59] ) But here another troubling narrative metastases. If Jud represents “the role of the outsider that the community can create,” as Fish indicates (emphasis added), then the blame for Jud’s ostracism lies not with him, but with those charged with nurturing and binding communities together: the play’s women. ( [60] ) In van Hove’s New York, the Jets encompasses white and Black “native” Americans who together rail against the immigrant Puerto Rican Sharks, transforming the Jets’ racial animus from blatant white supremacism to a sort of qualified nativism with irreconcilable outcomes. “Mr. van Hove’s casting misrepresents the real solidarities that form at the margins of U.S. citizenship,” notes writer and translator Carina del Valle Schorske of the blended Jets. “‘Inclusion’ here is code for willful colorblindness.” ( [61] ) The gang’s new composition enables van Hove to broach stereotypes of African American gun use , as well as more fully confront the injustices of race-based police brutality. Baby John’s fear of the zip-gun’s ballistic power, for example, is now voiced by a Black teenager (Matthew Johnson). Later, after a brief squabble with the Jets, Officer Krupke (Danny Wolohan) draws his weapon and aggressively pushes it into the temple of one of its Black members, prompting several Jets to draw their smartphones and film the altercation. Krupke backs off, but the event propels the gang into a revamped rendition of “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Once a vaudevillian take-down of domineering and inept authority figures, the song is now a humorless “indictment of the carceral state,” with white and Black Jets striking ‘don’t shoot’ poses in front of “a bleak video montage of young men being humiliated and abused by the police.” ( [62] ) Branded “harrowing” by Los Angeles Times ’s Charles McNulty, an “overreach” by Newsday ’s Rafer Guzmán, and “pandering” by The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz, “Gee, Officer Krupke” (with choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker) functions as an embodied condemnation of systemic racism, police violence, and the prison-industrial complex—and one of the revival’s most overt bids for political relevance. ( [63] ) Audiences consume the productions’ gun acts via unmediated and mediated witnessing. Van Hove’s imagistic theatre routinely includes the use of video to bring the “characters closer to the audience” and “create subjective worlds on stage,” the director himself explains. ( [64] ) In West Side Story, the characters’ smartphones, pre-filmed footage, and live video from handheld cameras¾all projected onto a mammoth, stage-spanning screen¾together constitute an omnipresent surveillance apparatus that is in turns covert and intrusive. At intervals, the films decelerate into slow motion as the stage action unfolds at regular speed, a techno-theatrical “time warp” (to use Sarah Taylor Ellis’s term) that often prolongs the audience’s encounter with violence, as in Tony (Isaac Powell) fleeing from the rumble in a blood-soaked shirt. ( [65] ) Of one on-location shot that moves through a dead-end street, Schwartz remarks, “The camera advances in a slow dolly shot, producing the weightless, gliding momentum of a first-person shooter game.” ( [66] ) Indeed, the footage collectively documents a story of interchangeable hunters and prey. Cameras invade enclosed spaces—several interiors are pocketed behind the projection screen, including Doc’s store—and capture private and imagined interactions. ( [67] ) In one of the video design’s most unsettling interventions, Tony’s mental picture of Maria’s gun death fills the screen, her head blasted open by Chino’s close-range shot. Tony’s own death, however, is left unmediated. Chino approaches, fires his pistol, and Tony’s body registers the bullet’s impact; no extreme closeups linger on his bloodied torso or Chino’s inscrutable expression. Fish’s Oklahoma! employs live video and projections far more sparingly, notably when handheld video cameras penetrate the cramped environs of Jud’s smokehouse. At first, Jud and Curly’s tête-à-tête is plunged into total darkness, a drastic shift from the “aggressive brightness” employed elsewhere in the production’s lighting design. ( [68] ) The blackout, which amplifies the dramaturgical work of the scene’s soundscape, is later softened by live video tightly trained on Jud’s face—tormented, longing for connection—projected onto the stage’s backdrop. The scene vacillates in tone between a hushed, erotic intimacy (the men, faces mere inches from each other, whisper their lines into handheld microphones) and the unrelenting menace of cyberbullying, as Curly’s disembodied voice calmly extols the virtues of suicide. ( [69] ) Notes Ben Brantley of the smokehouse scene, “the lines of sex and violence…blu[r] in this gun-toting universe[.]” ( [70] ) When, after singing “Pore Jud Is Daid” and still blanketed by darkness, the men fire their guns at a knothole, the loud reports startle and unnerve. Sound and sight decoupled, the invisible weapons index their presence sonically. Though only men suffer gun deaths in Oklahoma! and West Side Story , the stories’ women together absorb much of the gun-related violence and trauma. Armed men (fathers, law enforcers, lovers, and stalkers) perambulate the playing space in Oklahoma! , pistols holstered and rifles clutched under armpits; Aunt Eller, by contrast, is accoutered with a wooden spoon for stirring cornbread. But if we simply track Oklahoma! ’s guns as they pass through men’s hands, we risk losing sight of Jones’s Laurey and Ali Stroker’s Ado Annie, outspoken women of intelligence and agency who must nevertheless navigate the complexities of a materially and psychically hostile landscape. Ado Annie’s life choices are under near-constant monitoring by her armed father, while landowning woman of color Laurey “resolute[ly] refus[es] to be thought of as someone’s possession” even as she’s caught in the crosshairs of rival suitors. ( [71] ) The production’s dream ballet and wedding scene lay bare Laurey’s conscious negotiations with Oklahoma! ’s gun culture¾and the men that drive it. In choreographer John Heginbotham’s postmodern dream ballet, Laurey’s avatar (Gabrielle Hamilton) moves with within a growing minefield of cowboy boots that are dropped one by one from the rafters. “[T]he sound they make as they hit the stage is as explosive as . . . gunshots,” pronounced The New Yorker ’s Sarah Larson in her 2018 review of the Off-Broadway production. ( [72] ) Less abstract is Laurey’s endorsing of Jud’s murder/suicide. In an extended moment of silent contemplation, Laurey spatially maps her inner conflict. She leaves Curly’s side to peer searchingly into Jud’s face, and then slowly returns to Curly. ( [73] ) We can only speculate on why Laurey sanctions “prairie justice,” Jud’s violent and permanent excision from the community, but as a Black woman and a survivor of sexual assault and stalking, Laurey is all too aware of how violence operates at the margins. ( [74] ) West Side Story ’s gun culture is likewise androcentric and hierarchical, but the women exhibit manifest signs of inculcation. Whereas Jerome Robbins’ choreography restricted the use of gun gestures to his male dancers and Anybodys, De Keersmaeker democratizes the movement by setting it onto the Sharks girls’ bodies in “America.” The aggressive gesture¾fingers shaped into a gun, straight arm tracing an arc from low to high like a protractor¾runs counter the women’s buoyant lyrics (“I like to be in America! / O.K. by me in America! / Everything free in America”). Violence continues to reach West Side Story ’s Black, white, and brown women in ways unprescribed by Robbins, Laurents, Sondheim, and Bernstein, including Anita’s attempted gang rape, Maria’s graphic head wound, and the rain-soaked rumble, where several feminine-presenting Jets and Sharks fight. ( [75] ) One need only witness the distraught Maria’s actions after Tony’s shooting to comprehend how versant the women are in West Side Story ’s microcosmic culture of violence. Silently, Maria (Shereen Pimentel) gestures for Chino’s gun. Unlike Marias past, who handle the gun with trepidation and difficulty, Pimentel’s Maria racks the handgun’s slide with speed and skill, advancing the next round of ammunition as she asks, “How do you fire this gun, Chino? Just by pulling this little trigger?” It’s a rhetorical question. She is well-acquainted with guns, even if this is the first she’s handled, and the Jets and Sharks take her threats seriously. The gun changes hands several more times: a Jet gently disarms Maria as she faces the audience and holds the pistol to her head; later, she reclaims the gun and passes it to Anita. In entrusting the gun to Anita, Maria effectively bars Jets and Sharks alike from accessing it, effectively removing the weapon from circulation¾at least temporarily. Guns are instruments of revolution and disruption, but they are also instruments of a sort of brutal petrification, of holding in abeyance those who might act counterculturally and preventing new, transformative associations from solidifying. The Golden Age Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s firearms police the perimeters of homogenous human groups, simultaneously restricting access into and thwarting departures from them. In reinforcing the community circle’s curved boundaries and transforming a love triangle with three vertices into a straight line with two points, guns and their handlers are bold, convenient catalysts for the American musical’s conservative endings. They help the boy get the girl; forestall any integrative or conciliatory pacts between rival street gangs; and fortify the settler-colonialist claims on stolen lands. In their twenty-first-century adaptations of Oklahoma! and West Side Story, Fish and van Hove present guns as the most responsive, convenient deliverers of modern violence, but their contemporary anti-gun, pro-diversity messages strain uncomfortably beneath the musicals’ constrictive Golden Age fabric, fabric that engages firearms in ways that unequivocally benefit white heteronormative America. After seeing Fish’s reimagined Oklahoma! , Johnny Oleksinksi of the right-leaning New York Post sardonically declared: “everything you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the bar and shot, replace by an auteur’s bag of tricks and a thesis on gun control and westward expansion. Here, the West was won by a culture of violence and toxic masculinity— what fun! ” ( [76] ) In all his rhetorical outrage, Oleksinski fails to recognize that Oklahoma! has always told this story. What he is detecting, however, are the heightened political stakes of the contemporary gun musical. Staged in the midst of partisan debates over Second Amendment gun rights and alarming rates of US gun injuries and deaths, the majority of twenty-first-century gun musicals, including Fish’s Oklahoma! and van Hove’s West Side Story , proceed from three assumptions. First, they regard gun violence as a public health crisis in the United States. Second, they implicate all Americans as active perpetrators or passive abettors in the country’s gun violence epidemic. Third, rather than depict gun handling as a prime signifier of national belonging, they suggest that merely persisting within the country’s omnipresent gun culture is a uniquely American act. Oleksinski’s “auteur” jab is likewise somewhat founded. In their searing critiques of US-American gun violence and its impact on disenfranchised communities, Daniel Fish and Ivo van Hove undertake crucial (if imperfect) work. And yet, as progressive white men of privilege, they perhaps cannot help but ventriloquize rather than possess the perspectives voiced by frontline populations. References 1. Christopher Bannow, “Surviving in the States: Audience Rejection on the Road with Oklahoma!,” 3 April 2023, https://howlround.com/surviving-states-audience-rejection-road-oklahoma . 2. Ibid. 3. According to musical theatre scholar Bryan M. Vandevender, the touring production featured less visible guns in its scene design than its Broadway counterpart. 4. See Pamela Haag’s analysis of gun companies’ influential tactics in The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 5. As I theorize, a “gun musical” focalizes firearms—and their provocative meaning-making—as essential objects in the musical’s dramaturgy and physical world. Put another way, just as a perfect Aristotelian plot would unravel with the removal of any scene, a gun musical could not function without their signature weaponry and the human conditions they engender. 6. For a fuller examination of Hamilton’s guns, which contextualizes the production’s weaponless Tony Awards performance, see my article “‘What if This Bullet is My Legacy?’: The Guns of Hamilton,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 2018): 251-56. 7. Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, “Domestic Violence and Firearms,” https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/domestic-violence-and-firearms/ . 8. Kimberly King, “Gun Violence Crisis: With Revenge and Retaliation on the Rise, How Police Are Responding,” 17 February 2021, https://wlos.com/news/local/gun-violence-crisis-with-revenge- retaliation-on-the-rise-how-asheville-police-are-responding. 9. Marissa Edmund, “Gun Violence Disproportionately and Overwhelmingly Hurts Communities of Color,” Center for American Progress, 30 June 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- violence-disproportionately-and-overwhelmingly-hurts-communities-of-color/. 10. Ibid. 11. Nicole Moeder, “Number of Trans Homicides Doubled over 4 Years, with Gun Killings Fueling Increase: Advocates,” ABC News, 12 October 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/homicide-rate-trans- people-doubled-gun-killings-fueling/story?id=91348274. 12. Eugenio Weigend Vargas and Marissa Edmund, “Gun Suicides Among Former and Current Military Members,” Center for American Progress, 3 March 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- suicides-among-former-and-current-military-members/. 13. Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann, and Albert Sun, “Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence,” New York Times, 14 December 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-children-data-statistics.html . 14. Beth Duff-Brown, “Californians Living with Handgun Owners More Than Twice as Likely to Die by Homicide, Study Finds,” 4 April 2022, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/handguns- homicide-risk.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CDespite%20widespread%20perceptions%20that%20a,of%20health%20p olicy%20at%20the 15. For histories of the gun industry’s attempt to domesticate US firearms through white women consumers, see Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Meredith Conti, “Hired Guns: Whiteness, Womanhood, and Progressive-era Shooting Promoters,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2021): 511-532; and Andrea L. Smalley, “‘Our Lady Sportsmen’: Gender, Class, and Conservation in Sport Hunting Magazines, 1873–1920,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 4 (October 2005): 355–80. 16. The NRA was founded in 1871 in New York. 17. Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 13. While magistrates and legislators banned or significantly curtailed Black and Indigenous gun ownership from the colonial period onward, marginalized communities of color had their own traditions of arms that variously conformed to and resolutely rejected governmental interference. 18. Haag, The Gunning of America, 357 and 356. 19. Ibid, 354. 20. Ibid. 21. Benjamin Barber, “Oklahoma! — How Political Is Broadway?” Salmagundi 137/138 (2003): 3-11, 9. 22. To be more specific, the Oklahoma Enabling Act of 1906 permitted “the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory to enter the union under a single-state constitution.” Michael Schulman, “Two Broadway Shows Dismantle the American Myth,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2019. 23. Bruce Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!’ in American Consciousness,” Theatre Journal 55, no 2 (May 2003): 251-274, 251. 24. See Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 25. As Warren Hoffman notes, the show’s refrain, in which the company repeatedly chants “Oklahoma!,” can ironically be translated to them shouting “Red People!” Hoffman, The Great White Way, 66. 26. Donatella Galella, America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 202. 27. Galella, America in the Round, 197. Galella describes three modes of understanding multiracial Oklahoma! casts that both producers and spectators could adopt: multiracial-conscious, whitened, and postracial (200). 28. Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 262. 29. The Theatre Guild Presents Oklahoma!: A Musical Play Based on the Play ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ by Lynn Riggs, music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein (New York: Williamson Music, 1943). 30. Susan C. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl: Gender, Race and Oklahoma!” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 1 (2009), 35-47, 43. 31. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. 32. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. 33. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl,” 37. 34. Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 251-274, 259 and 261. 35. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! 36. Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27. 37. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, based on a conception of Jerome Robbins, book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (New York: Musical Theatre International, 1960), 86. 38. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 119-120. 39. Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009,” Theatre Journal 64 (2012), 231-247: 236. 40. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 6. 41. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 56. 42. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 7. 43. Zhu and Belgrad, “This Cockeyed City,” 86. 44. Ibid, 90. 45. Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009” and Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); David Román, “Comment — Theatre Journals,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (Oct. 2002), https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069090 ; David Román, Paula Court, and Richard Termine, Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture in the Performing Arts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, José, Can You See? Latinos on and off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” Social Text 63, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000), 83-106. 46. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 43. 47. Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 24, no. 7 (2009), 67-94. 48. Greg Evans, “‘Oklahoma!’ to be Broadway’s First ‘Gun Neutral’ Production: Lauded Musical Joins Hollywood Initiative: Sundance, Deadline, January 28, 2019, https://deadline.com/2019/01/oklahoma- broadway-musical-gun-neutral-sundance-daniel-fish-1202543741/. 49. Qtd. in Charles Passy, “‘Oklahoma!’ Takes Aim at Gun Issue,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2019. 50. Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai have edited the first essay collection on van Hove’s work entitled Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (London: Methuen Drama, 2018). For coverage of the protests of Amar Ramasar’s casting, see Julia Jacobs, “‘West Side Story’ Stalemate: Bernardo’s Staying. So Are Protestors,” New York Times, February 19, 2020, and Adrian Horton, “‘We can’t stand by this any more’: Inside the West Side Story Premiere Protest,” The Guardian, February 21, 2020. 51. An inventory of West Side Story’s reviews was created by Playbill’s Dan Meyer on February 20, 2020. http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-the-west-side-story-revival-on-broadway . 52. Soraya Nadia McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” The Undefeated, September 16, 2019. https://theundefeated.com/features/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-oklahoma-on-broadway/ . 53. A cleverly installed blood cannon delivers the graphic stage effect. 54. Todd S. Purdue, “Culture: Oklahoma! Gets a Dark, Brilliant Remake,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019. 55. Of van Hove’s “austere aesthetic” Helen Shaw wryly observes: “he automatically modernizes everything he touches, from Shakespeare to O’Neill.” Helen Shaw, “In the New West Side Story, When You’re Onstage You’re Onscreen All the Way,” New York Magazine/vulture.com, February 20, 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/theater-review-a-new-west-side-story-onscreen-all-the-way.html . 56. Tim Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway: Creator and Cast Reveal How to Reimagine a Classic,” The Daily Beast, thedailybeast.com , April 15, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/oklahoma-on-broadway-creator-and-cast-reveal-how-to-reimagine-a-classic . 57. Laura Collins-Hughes, “For 13 Years, He has Humanized the Villain of Oklahoma!,” New York Times, January 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/theater/patrick-vaill-oklahoma-broadway.html . 58. Catherine M. Young, “Sympathy for the Incel? On Oklahoma! and Jud Fry in the #MeToo Era.” Howlround.com , June 26, 2019. https://howlround.com/sympathy-incel . 59. McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” Bryan M. Vandevender queered Vaill’s portrayal of Jud in a compelling paper delivered at the 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference. 60. Qtd. in Teeman, “Oklahoma! on Broadway.” 61. Carina de Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die,” New York Times, February 24, 2020. 62. Alexandra Schwartz, “Theatre: A Grim Take on ‘West Side Story,’” The New Yorker, February 21, 2020. 63. Charles McNulty, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ Blasts Back to Broadway – Kinetic, Bloody and Modern to the Core,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2020; Schwartz, “A Grim Take”; and Rafer Guzmán, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ on Broadway Gets a Dark Update, Loses Some of its Cool,’ Newsday, February 21, 2020. 64. “Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai, “Ivo van Hove: An Introduction,” in Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, edited by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (London: Methuen, 2018), 1-16, 7. 65. See Sarah Taylor Ellis‘s Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 2022). 66. Schwartz, “A Grim Take.” 67. Jan Versweyveld designed West Side Story’s sets and lights, and Luke Hall designed the video; Laura Jellinek designed Oklahoma!’s set and Joshua Thorson designed projections. 68. McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!.” Scott Zielinksi was the production’s lighting designer. 69. “When the camera turns and shows us both Daunno’s and Vaill’s profiles,” notes Sara Holdren, “stretched out huge across a wall where a black-and-white vista of fields and ranch houses is painted, we get a nasty jolt: Here is the country inside of these men, and here are their brutalities laying the foundations for the country.” Sara Holdren, “Theatre Review: An Oklahoma! Where the Storm Clouds Loom Above the Plain,” New York Magazine/Vulture.com, October 8, 2018. 70. Ben Brantley, “Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id,” New York Times, April 7, 2019. 71. Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway.” 72. Sarah Larson, ”Daniel Fish’s Dark Take on ’Oklahoma!’” Ariel Nereson analyzed the choreographic work of the re-envisioned dream ballet in a 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference presentation. 73. Laurey is effectively muzzled by Hammerstein’s book, which provides no dialogue during Curly and Jud’s struggle and Jud’s accidental stabbing. 74. Jesse Green and Ben Brantley, “Review: There’s a Dark Golden Haze in This Reclaimed ‘Oklahoma!,’ New York Times, October 7, 2018. Green and Brantley’s joint review is responding to the 2018 Off- Broadway production. 75. Of watching Anita’s attempted gang-rape (and its replication on the enormous projection screen) as a Puerto Rican woman, Carina del Valle Schorske surmises, “[Mr. van Hove] may not feel the oppressive repetitions of the history of violence against brown women bearing down on his body. But for many of us, it’s the umpteenth time we’ve seen Anita assaulted for dramatic effect, each time under the guise of greater authenticity.” De Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” 76. Johnny Oleksinski, “‘Oklahoma!’ Review: Anti-gun Revival of Classic Shot to Hell,” New York Post, April 7, 2019. About The Authors Meredith Conti is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB) and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and popular culture in the United States and Britain. Her research variously explores the intersections of theatre and medicine; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular entertainment forms (including world fairs, vaudeville, Wild West shows, and fancy shooting exhibitions); gender and race in the Victorian period; and guns and gun violence in 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.

Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Derek R. Munson Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage New York's Yiddish Theater Derek R. Munson By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway. Edna Nahshon, ed. New York: Columbia University Press in association with the Museum of the City of New York, 2016; Pp. 237. New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway is a collection of thirteen scholarly articles edited and introduced by Edna Nahshon, professor of Jewish theatre and drama at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a senior associate at Oxford University’s Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Written to complement a recent exhibit of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York, this accessible work successfully combines scholarship and art to form a captivating portrait of the American Yiddish theatre and early twentieth-century American Yiddish culture. Creatively rendered and chockfull of photographs, drawings, and ephemera—a scholarly coffee table book, if you will—New York’s Yiddish Theater is a feast for the eyes and senses and is, in this age of e-books and digital media, a reminder of the authority and beauty of print books. Nahshon argues that Yiddish theatre in the United States emerged from the unexpected collaborations of uptown-downtown German Jews and the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jews, while the Romanian origins of the first Yiddish theatre is credited to Abraham Goldfaden. His traveling players of commedia dell’arte-style skits soon grew into lavish operas such as The Witch (1879), a classic of the Jewish repertory. Once Goldfaden’s acting troupe landed in the U.S., extravagant stages were quickly built in and around New York’s Lower East Side, thereby becoming home to the Yiddish theatre movement that eventually migrated uptown and—later in the century—onto Broadway. Nahshon cleverly divides the work into multiple sections, similar to a playbill program, setting the stage in the Overture for the subsequent acts/essays written by other notable scholars. She also includes an intermission/portrait gallery and a Gallery of Stars, which functions as an annotation of Yiddish luminaries from the era. In addition to Nahma Sandrow’s “Popular Yiddish Theater” and Edward Portnoy’s “Yiddish Puppet Theater,” Barbara Henry provides a compelling historical and critical analysis of “Jacob Gordin: The Great Reformer” who, in addition to adapting Shakespeare into The Jewish King Lear, was also the first writer to adapt a Yiddish play into English, The Kreutzer Sonata. Nahshon and Judith Thissen discuss “Yiddish Vaudeville” and its influence on burlesque and the powerful legacy of Jews during the early days of Hollywood. The success of notable contemporary artists like Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Bette Middler are tied to the Yiddish theatre. One of the spotlight segments features an unpublished survey from the 1932-33 Yiddish theatre season, listing 185 different Yiddish language productions. The season was represented by 155 professional actors in melodramas, operettas, comedies, and reviews. However, after World War II the Yiddish theatre suffered from a steady drop in attendance, and as American entertainment choices shifted from stage to Hollywood, the Yiddish theatre declined and eventually faded into obscurity. A persuasive thematic argument runs through the collection suggesting that Yiddish entertainment is synonymous with American entertainment, and nowhere is this more evident than in Alisa Solomon’s essay about Fiddler on the Roof, “Tevye’s Travels: From Yiddish Everyman to American Icon.” Opening with Al Hirschfeld’s iconic caricature of the Broadway production starring Zero Mostel, Solomon traces the seventy-year genesis of the story of Tevye, from its inception by beloved Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem to its record-breaking Broadway run and its status as an American classic. Tevye the milk-man, or Tevye der milkhiker, and his family appeared in numerous Yiddish stories from 1894 through 1914 during which time Aleichem’s writing found a global audience. Tevye’s struggles to survive in a cruel motherland, where he is not wanted, spoke to a generation of European Jews, and Aleichem’s stories were eventually embraced in the U.S. After two failed attempts as musicals, Aleichem’s stories found a home at the Yiddish Art Theatre and later as a successful 1939 film. English language adaptations followed and finally, in 1964, the creative team of Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Jerome Robbins created a labor of love known by millions of theatregoers as Fiddler on the Roof. What began as a popular anthologized Yiddish story is now embedded in popular American culture, and Aleichem’s Tevye is an everyman for the ages. A distinctive feature of the collection, and one that sets it apart from Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry’s recent case book, Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business, is the book’s visual inventiveness. New York’s Yiddish Theater is filled with beautiful architectural renderings, historical photographs and drawings, and spotlight sections featuring pivotal moments in Yiddish theatre, such as Sholem Asch’s controversial God of Vengeance (1923). Sholem’s play is one of the first early twentieth century plays to look at same-sex attraction and was newly reimagined by Paula Vogel in Indecent (2015). However, it is the entire package that makes the collection such a special work and opens the door to additional historical and theatrical scholarship. As outlined in this collection, one needs very little background in American or Jewish American theatre history to appreciate the social complexities and dynamics of the Yiddish theatre movement. From its humble Eastern European beginnings and its immense popularity in the United States, to its influences on contemporary pop culture, the Yiddish theatre is embedded in American art and life. New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway is a valuable addition to our understanding of the significant legacy of the early Jewish American experience. Derek R. Munson University of Missouri The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 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.

Malcolm Richardson Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s Malcolm Richardson By Published on November 19, 2015 Download Article as PDF Given its historic role as one of the leading institutions in American philanthropy, perhaps it is not surprising that the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was among the first American foundations to experiment with arts funding.[1] Better known are the efforts of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which provided support for arts appreciation in American schools, and above all, the Juilliard Musical Foundation, created after the death of benefactor Augustus Juilliard in 1919.[2] By contrast, the Rockefeller Foundation’s earliest ventures remain largely unknown and have yet to receive any extensive scholarly study. Its first hesitant steps in the arts offer a revealing look at the prevailing attitudes among foundation trustees and staff. Many of these assumptions or biases—especially the fear of providing direct support to individual artists—would create barriers to arts funding for the next half century. The Foundation’s efforts in the 1930s to underwrite a regional theatre movement and its related experiment in offering support directly to individual playwrights also provide an interesting case study in the evaluation of arts philanthropy. Success proved elusive and difficult to measure, if not to define, in this first Rockefeller arts program. Rockefeller insiders regarded these efforts as failures, and scholars have been content either to repeat this judgment or to ignore the entire effort. Historians have failed to see the full significance for the arts of this Rockefeller program of the late 1930s, perhaps because it began as a simple effort to strengthen university programs in drama. To begin setting this record right, it may first be useful to stake out some broad tentative claims: First, if we exclude the Juilliard Foundation’s very specialized support for the music school of the same name and the Carnegie Corporation’s eclectic educational programs, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted the first sustained program in the performing arts by a major private foundation in the years before the second world war. Moreover, this effort predated the more celebrated work of the Ford Foundation from the mid 1950s until the 1980s and the Rockefeller’s own quite significant work in these same years.[3] A second and more specific historical claim may be ventured: while the RF’s first efforts in the arts produced mixed results at best, the passage of time makes it increasingly clear that the program in drama helped build the foundation for the flourishing non-profit, repertory theatre movement of the postwar period. At the same time, these first efforts also demonstrated the limits of that support, especially when reservations about supporting individual creative artists came into play. In the early 1930s Rockefeller Foundation trustees were debating the organization’s basic goals. In the previous decade the Foundation had chosen the advancement of knowledge as its underlying purpose, and support for the humanities became one of its core programs. Soon, however, calls from RF board members for more practical results increased with the country’s worsening depression. While the RF trustees were willing to concede that basic research in economics might not immediately lead to solutions to unemployment and stalled growth, they could see a direct link between the work of social scientists and the country’s most pressing problems. In the humanities, by contrast, evaluation proved difficult and the connection to daily life seemed remote at best. A trustee evaluation of all the Foundation’s programs warned that the humanities were in danger of falling into a trap if they slavishly imitated the natural and social sciences: It frankly appears to your committee that a program in the humanities, based on a cloistered kind of research, is wide of the goal which the Trustees of the Foundation should have in mind. It is getting us facts but not necessarily followers. We have more detailed information about a great number of rather abstruse subjects, but that does not logically mean that the level of artistic and aesthetic appreciation in America has been measurably raised.[4] The trustees concluded, “In our opinion the officers should be asked to study other methods by which cultural appreciation can be developed and the values of the humanities brought more directly into contact with daily living.”[5] The trustees’ embrace of the democratization of culture—“From being aristocratic and exclusive, culture is becoming democratic and inclusive”[6]—suggested that the humanities program should strike a balance between scholarly research and educational projects, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s board pushed the humanities program in particular to experiment with methods to reach a broad public audience. In practice this would mean a serious attempt to explore ways to advance the humanities through radio, film, and the mass media, and this is where much current scholarship on Rockerfeller philanthropy focuses its effort.[7] The change in policy dictated by the trustees coincided with a change in leadership within the Foundation. Seeking someone with a similar vision for the humanities, the Foundation turned to David H. Stevens, a former professor of English and administrator at the University of Chicago, who served as Vice President of the General Education Board (GEB), an older Rockefeller philanthropic foundation, and who was now given dual responsibilities at both the GEB and the Rockefeller Foundation. To understand the emphasis the Rockefeller Foundation would place on grass-roots theatrical work, it is also necessary to consider Stevens’ broader theoretical and scholarly commitments. When he left the University of Chicago to take a position with the General Education Board, which had been the first Rockefeller fund to support the humanities, both the GEB and the Rockefeller Foundation were supporting work in the humanities that emphasized archaeology, ancient history, and and the classical tradition.[8] To the extent that the Rockefeller offices had given any attention to the question, the implicit definition of the humanities rested upon an older tradition of philology and the study of the classics, leavened with a strong American interest in the study of Semitic langauges and archaeological work related to Biblical and religious traditions.[9] In contrast to an approach that left American culture subordinate to European-dominated scholarly traditions, David Stevens detected a “present urgent need for a larger appreciation of the American cultural heritage.” He had no patience with those who (“out of ignorance”) asserted “the poverty of the American cultural tradition” and turned their attention insistently “toward the achievements of other peoples.”[10] Stevens’ conception of the humanities meant that the Rockefeller Foundation should seek first to support “the preservation and development of American cultural traditions with a view to their continuing growth.”[11] For Stevens, support for a program in the dramatic arts would become the major vehicle for developing a distinctive American culture and for realizing the trustees’ goal of taking the humanities from the classroom into the public arena. Because of the “broad participation that dramatic work required,” and its effectiveness as “a strong social force,” a program in the theatre was ideally suited to respond to the trustees’ instructions to enhance public appreciation of the humanities. As Stevens put it, “the arts of the theatre draw on the past as well as the present, and when successfully used have an immediate effect upon the public.”[12] In spite of the obviously greater reach of the new mass media, in the search for ways to communicate the values of American culture, support for drama and theatre came to be the hallmark of the foundation’s grant-making in the humanities. In the 1930s the dramatic arts in the United States stood awkwardly poised on the cusp of a new era in which opportunities expanded in new directions while older theatrical traditions died. Hollywood exerted its magnetic pull for both audiences and performers, though for many actors, directors, and authors Broadway remained the pinnacle of achievement. But even though champions of the “legitimate” theatre might loudly proclaim the superiority of the live stage, theatre people knew that their industry was undergoing a sea change. Vaudeville, burlesque, and many variants of the popular theatre were dying, unable to compete with the movies and radio. Touring companies and summer stock were shrinking as well. While strong local audiences in Boston and other northeastern cities still gave Broadway producers a chance to try out an expensive production before opening in New York, the likelihood of recovering initial investments diminished at a time when demand from depression-weary audiences was weak. The number of new shows opening on the great white way dropped, and in a refrain that sounds quite contemporary still, these factors tended to limit risk and to channel energies into well-worn paths. Against this background of a changing profession, the humanities division of the Rockefeller Foundation embarked on a modest program of support for drama. In contrast to the vast literature on the federal theatre and the decline of Broadway during the same period, the Foundation’s support for theatre has only begun to attract scholarly interest and it remains a poorly understood chapter in American cultural history.[13] At the time theatre professionals debated their course of action without the vocabulary routinely used today, and as a consequence historians have perhaps failed to connect the Foundation’s work in the 1930s with the widely hailed postwar explosion of creativity in the American theatre. The little that has been published on the humanities program in the 1930s also falls into the trap of using the Rockefeller Foundation’s own awkward phrasing: non-professional theatre. For good reasons, the Foundation bent over backwards to avoid the dreaded word “amateur” to describe the theatrical organizations it supported. At the time the concept of a distinctive non-profit sector in general was only emerging, while the self-conscious, full-throated advocacy of professional repertory theatres in particular would not develop until after the second world war. Then, a significant number of free-standing new theatres, employing professional actors and staffs, usually in a repertory company, took shape within a not-for-profit organizational structure. While the Cleveland Play House shared some of these attributes,[14] including most notably its status as an independent non-profit, a true movement can be said to have started only with the founding of the Alley Theatre in Houston in 1947 and the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. in 1950. The professional repertory theatre began to reach its full maturity the following decade with a wave of new creations, beginning most notably with the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis (1963), and soon followed by the Actors Theatre of Louisville (1964), the American Conservatory Theatre (San Francisco, 1965), Long Wharf Theatre (New Haven, 1965), the Yale Repertory Theatre (1966), the Mark Taper Forum and Center Theatre Group (Los Angeles, 1967), and the American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge, 1970) among many. Nonetheless, despite some substantial morphological differences, it is possible to see this new theatre emerging in embryo in the 1930s. Barrett H. Clark, the theatre professional who would shape the thinking of David Stevens and the Rockefeller Foundation, left the commercial firm of Samuel French and Company to champion these theatres. Clark was well aware of the problem of defining the new theatre struggling to be born. “A theatre is emerging here and there throughout the country that is neither a part of the Road, nor an imitation of Broadway,” Clark wrote prophetically in 1935.[15] Clark listed some of the many names given these theatres—“Regional, Folk, Local, Little Theatre, Community, Amateur, Civic Playhouse, Revolt against Broadway, Nonprofessional”—before dismissing most of these as “labels indiscriminately stuck to a thousand theatrical ventures which have only a few similarities in common.”[16] The future of American theatre could be detected in a small coterie of intensely motivated groups springing to life in dozens, if not hundreds, of American communities. “The theatre I am thinking of is a group of units organized for the most part by the dramatic departments of colleges and universities and by private or semi-private corporations,” Clark wrote. “These are scattered throughout the country in large and small cities and in rural communities, and are distinguished from professional theatres in that they are chartered and operated not for profit, and pay no actors for acting.”[17] He conceded that the lack of paid actors and the absence of a commercial or profit motive could indeed be called “amateur,” but Clark settled upon “nonprofessional,” a somewhat unfortunate choice given that Clark praised the commitment of these theatre workers precisely for the sense of vocation and devotion to high standards that characterize professional activity. These not-for-profit theatres, Clark thought, embodied a new emphasis that would increasingly set them apart from Broadway and its satellites. “This difference is fundamental since it throws emphasis upon the theatre as an end in itself and not upon the making of money.”[18] Clark excluded from his definition the great majority of the community or Little theatres. He counted approximately 1,000 such theatres at large but thought that no more than 100 at most could produce four good productions in a season, and among the 700 college and university theatre programs Clark generously estimated that perhaps 100 could be deemed of high quality. (A year or so later, Clark lowered this estimate to one percent of all these theatres combined.)[19] Yet within this limited universe of less than 200 university and not-for-profit theatres, Clark thought that the quality of productions often equalled and sometimes surpassed the professional stage. He teased readers of the New York Times with the news that he had seen performances “far above the average of Broadway” at such venues as the Cleveland and Pasadena Playhouses and at the University of Iowa, Northwestern, and the University of Washington.[20] If the trustees offered the fundamental theory for the entire humanities program, Clark provided both a rationale and the strategy for the Rockefeller Foundation’s work in drama and regional theatre. In this vein Clark forwarded to Stevens a report on his visits to mid-western and western theatres. Everywhere he went, Clark noted, depression-era students approached him for advice. “What most of them wanted,” beyond career advice, he concluded, “was a viewpoint, something to make them feel that what they were working for was really worthwhile.”[21] Clark’s message to the schools he advised and to the students he encouraged served as the rallying cry for a new non-profit theatre movement. “If you want a theatre,” Clark told an audience of theatre educators and regional theatre leaders meeting in Seattle, “make it.”[22] If the emerging non-profit theatres offered one axis for plotting the boundaries of the new program, regionalism provided a second organizing principle. Just as Stevens rejected the prevailing Eurocentric view of the humanities, he also managed the delicate balancing act of working for an organization that personified the Establishment while kicking against the traditional dominance of Eastern institutions and elites. Wisconsin-born and a graduate of Lawrence College, Stevens seems to have shared the populist instincts of the Midwestern progressives. The first step in “the discovery of ourselves,” as he referred in one happy phrase to his proposed emphasis on American culture, lay in an exploration of American regional life. In one of his first messages to the Foundation’s trustees Stevens called their attention to the drama program at the University of North Carolina as an outstanding exemplar of regional culture. At UNC and other universities with experimental theatre programs those responsible for this work had succeeded in resisting “the cramping influence of pure scholarship in their graduate schools.”[23] Stevens identified with those who wanted to see a strong, decentralized network of American theatres and regional companies. Attracted by the populist and democratic impulses that were revitalizing American theatre in the 1930s, Stevens looked upon the work of the Federal Theatre Project and the WPA’s cultural activities in general with interest and sympathy. Early in the Federal Theatre Project’s life, Stevens offered the director, Hallie Flanagan, a small grant-in-aid to enable her editorial group to buy color printing equipment. In 1937 the Foundation provided much more strategic aid by providing funds to Vassar College (where Flanagan had taught theatre before her New Deal post) for a summer workshop, allowing Flanagan to bring forty of her best regional directors, playwrights, and designers to the New York campus for an intensive workshop. The resulting production, One Third of a Nation, was hailed as one of the most significant productions undertaken by the federal theatre and it toured widely, arousing both critical admiration and political controversy.[24] The Foundation’s program in drama thus moved very self-consciously from the center of the professional theatre world in New York toward the regional and amateur theatre. The program’s goals were to sustain a national movement of little theatres and university theatres, to improve their professional status and coordination (through the National Theatre Conference which Foundation grants helped reorganize), and to help these theatres find better plays for a public eager for good theatre. Pursuing this latter goal, Stevens urged Barrett Clark, who now led the Dramatists Play Service, an arm of the Dramatists’ Guild that licensed plays for amateur and collegiate groups, to make serious plays available to these theatres at reduced royalties. The Foundation’s largest grants went to university drama programs, although two community theatres in Cleveland and Seattle received substantial support for their ambitious attempts to develop independent local theatres. One of the aims Stevens had in mind when funding university programs was the development of the next generation of leaders. Stevens singled out Yale, the University of North Carolina, the University of Iowa, Case Western Reserve, and Stanford as centers of excellence. Yale’s outstanding drama department—arguably the best in the country at the time—received funds for technical experimentation, which led to the development of a new stage-lighting system (the work of George Izenour). The University’s scholarly interest in the history of drama was encouraged by a grant to help it organize a theatre archive. Foundation funds also provided a camera unit which allowed Yale to start a film archive of its productions and at the same time use film as a teaching aid. If Yale embodied a standard of academic excellence, the University of North Carolina, Iowa, and other institutions were chosen as “centers having a continuing influence on the cultural life of large sections of the country.”[25] Stevens saw a regional theatre as a natural, if not the principal, outlet for the expression of values that the mass media deliberately ignored in its search for a common national cultural denominator. Grants and fellowships, Stevens hoped, would help the community and university theatres develop playwrights who could employ local idioms and speak to regional needs. The outstanding example of this program was the University of North Carolina, where Frederick Koch led an ambitious program. The Carolina Playmakers toured the state, created a competitive high school program, and opened two summer theatres at either end of the state to reach prospective audiences more effectively. In many ways Koch’s work embodied what Stevens hoped to see develop at strong regional centers throughout the country. When Koch left North Dakota for North Carolina, he joined a university with a long theatrical tradition and an increasingly strong commitment to public service.[26] There, according to his admirer Kenneth MacGowan, he “found richer materials with which to fire his writers . . . and in North Carolina, even more than in North Dakota, Koch has brought forth playwrights.”[27] At its best, then, the regionalist movement of the 1930s promised a radical democratization of culture. Both in North Dakota and North Carolina, Koch’s theatre sought to empower local groups and communities to create their own productions and tell their own stories. By the time the Rockefeller Foundation decided to back his work in 1933, Koch had 141 students in his classes and in the academic year 1932–33 they staged no less than 52 plays written by students.[28] Stevens liked to recall that Paul Green, Betty Smith, and Thomas Wolfe all worked at one time in the theatre department at Chapel Hill with its director.[29] As David Stevens continued his exploration of American drama, he increasingly turned to Clark for information and advice, and the emerging Rockefeller program reflected a strong partnership between the two men. Among other things, Clark and Stevens agreed that there was an unmet hunger in America for good theatre. “Last year,” Stevens reported to the Rockefeller trustees in 1934, “the Federal Office of Education listed 22,000 public schools in which dramatic activity is under direction,” and there were “something like 1,000 new plays a year published by American distributors using mail-order techniques to reach buyers.”[30] Some indication of the mass market that the amateur or local theatre might on occasion reach was provided by the sales figures of the best-selling plays listed by Samuel French and other agencies. At one publishing house a serious play, Dust of the Earth, was paying all of the publisher’s overhead, while “at a lower level of theatrical entertainment” the gripping tale of Aaron Slick of Punkin Crick had been produced 50,000 times and had sold over one million copies.[31] While the motion pictures might be killing local stock theatres and the road companies alike, it did not follow that the demand for serious drama had declined in America. “The true index to that demand is not the number of New York performances given a new play,” Stevens observed, “but the printed copies sold and the royalties paid for its noncommercial productions.”[32] Stevens’ index measured only an aggregate demand and omitted important qualitative considerations, but it pointed to another area where the Foundation might work. Stevens’ reports to the Rockefeller trustees underscored the immense vitality of the country’s theatre and the possibilities of its market—if only good material were available. Or, as the producer Theresa Helburn put it, “One thing is sure. The theatre is only as good as its plays.”[33] Clark was ideally positioned to help solve this problem, and in the late 1930s he proposed several imaginative projects to create or identify new material for the network of theatres he and Stevens sought to strengthen. In 1936, when Robert Sherwood and other leading playwrights created the Dramatists Play Service, Clark left the for-profit sector to become executive director of the Guild’s new service for non-profit theatres and schools.[34] Clark’s work for the Dramatists’ Guild continued to place him at the center of what we would now call intellectual property issues, and he shared Stevens’ desire to improve the quality of material available to the emerging regional and not-for-profit theatrical movement. One Foundation memo called him “the only man in his profession who is in constant touch with all amateur producers and directors of university departments of drama. Mr. Clark is evidently the man to make the preliminary search in order to locate manuscripts wanted by non-professional producers.”[35] Amid all his professional work, Clark somehow found time to pursue his interests in theatre history. With Stevens’ enthusiastic help, beginning with a modest grant-in-aid and continuing through major grants for editing and publication expenses, Clark pursued a research project intended to expand the repertoire of available plays by locating original manuscripts and printed copies of popular nineteenth-century American plays. Armed with Rockefeller Foundation grants, Clark directed the work of a small army of editors and from 1940 to 1942, serving as the executive editor, he shepherded twenty volumes into print in the series, America’s Lost Plays.[36] At the Dramatists Play Service, Clark devised a plan to give college, university, and other non-profit theatres access to some of the best available material at a substantial discount. Given the Guild’s prestigious membership, Clark was able to offer plays by many of the leading contemporary American playwrights, including Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, and others. Among the plays that Clark and the Guild listed for discounts to colleges and nonprofit groups were contemporary hits such as John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Claire Boothe Luce’s The Women and the popular comedy, You Can’t Take it with You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Stevens was delighted to connect his academic network, newly organized in a rejuvenated National Theatre Conference, with Clark’s office, and he seems to have spent much of the decade attempting to broker more partnerships between the authors’ service organization and the representatives of the colleges and community theatres. Clark’s willingness to offer an immediate reduction in the rates charged to the NTC’s membership and other nonprofit groups seemed an omen of good things to come. Support for Individual Playwrights: the Dramatists’ Guild Fellowships Perhaps the most significant grant the Foundation made in the late 1930s in its support of drama came in an experiment with direct support to young and unproven American playwrights. This effort, the first attempt by the Rockefeller Foundation to provide support to creative artists, began in 1938 when the Humanities division provided $25,000 (approximately $375,000 in today’s dollars) to the Authors’ League for fellowships to playwrights. Administered by the Dramatists’ Guild, one of the component societies forming the League, the plan appeared to be in the hands of the best-placed professional society. The Guild first approached the Foundation in 1937 with its plan. Once again the key figure was Barrett Clark, and the plan took shape in the course of the continuing dialogue between Stevens and Clark. Clark first outlined his idea in a letter to Stevens in 1937, asking straightforwardly, “Would the Rockefeller Foundation care to offer to the Dramatists’ Guild (and Authors’ League—they are really the same in practice) say half a dozen scholarships, fellowships, or awards per year for one, two, three years or more?”[37] The new fellowships “should be awarded to young and unknown playwrights, in or just out of college,” selected on the basis of merit, and given with “no strings attached.” Calling the idea “of the utmost importance,” Clark proposed that the selection and administration be placed in the hands of the Guild, and he promised Stevens that if the Foundation were to back the plan, the Guild could produce “a board of judges that simply dazzles.”[38] Among the names he dropped as possible judges were Eugene O’Neill, Marc Connelly, Sidney Howard, Fannie Hurst, and George S. Kaufman. Robert Sherwood, the highly successful playwright who served as the president of the Dramatists’ Guild, wrote a fervent letter to Stevens promising the Guild’s full cooperation “at the shortest notice” if the Foundation would agree to aid it in its search for promising new talents.[39] Clark admitted that the proposal was prompted in part by the Guild’s stance toward Theresa Helburn’s Bureau of New Plays, a competition aimed at young writers at American colleges and universities. Helburn served as executive director of the (somewhat confusingly named) Theatre Guild, an experimental theatre company founded by the entrepreneur Lawrence Langner, who hit upon the then-novel method of selling subscriptions to sustain the company. Though Langner and Helburn numbered Eugene O’Neill among their favorite playwrights, and though the Theatre Guild was committed to producing serious work on the Broadway stage, the need to sell tickets initially led the producers to favor works by established playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw. This emphasis irritated American dramatists, and Sherwood and many of the playwrights at the Dramatists’ Guild feuded bitterly with Langner and Helburn over rights and production issues. Elmer Rice, for example, resented their early commitment to British and European authors and wrote bitterly of Langner and Helburn’s Theatre Guild, telling Clark “there seems to be no good reason why I or any American playwright should ever submit a play to the [Theatre] Guild. The Guild in its entire career has done nothing whatever to encourage the American playwright nor to help foster an American drama.”[40] When Helburn’s Bureau of New Plays accepted funds from the motion picture industry to re-grant to playwrights, Dramatists’ Guild leaders denounced the contracts offered by the Bureau as unfair to the authors. Helburn’s prizes, they claimed, served as a way for Hollywood to buy rights to cheap scripts from inexperienced authors who were signing away their future royalties.[41] (Clark gloated that at least two of the Bureau’s prize winners had renounced their awards, and he informed Stevens that those Dramatists’ Guild board members who had been working with the Bureau were resigning from the new group.) Nonetheless, it seems clear that the Bureau posed a serious competitive challenge to the Guild, and Helburn’s ability to offer new playwrights some modest funding worried the Dramatists’ Guild leaders. Clark confessed as much to Stevens by defending his plan in these terms: “This is the Guild’s opportunity, in the sense that the Guild stands for fair treatment to authors, yet it has been unable to give such material help as the picture interests could.”[42] The grant awarded by the Foundation in 1938 called for the funds to be awarded to the Guild’s parent organization, the Authors’ League, with Dramatists’ Guild staff responsible for administering the funds and working with the selection committee and authors.[43] But the plan approved by Stevens and the Foundation made some serious alterations to Clark’s original sketch. Stevens told Clark and the Guild that he also expected a proposal from the National Theatre Conference requesting funds to re-grant as fellowships to young academics working in drama at the university level. Stevens threatened to delay consideration of the Guild proposal until he could compare the two plans, implying perhaps a threat to cut the baby—in this case, the Foundation’s limited grant money—in half. To avoid any such Solomonic compromises, the Guild quickly agreed to join forces with the National Theatre Conference and to accept two NTC candidates as fellows. These stipend recipients would travel to New York to work in the Guild’s offices. Meanwhile, the selection committee would be composed in part of academics from the National Theatre Conference membership and in part by professional or Broadway theatrical figures, including Guild members. With the exception of the two awards for the NTC fellows, the remaining fellowships would be reserved exclusively for younger playwrights who had previously demonstrated some promise by having one or more of their works produced, usually off-Broadway at a commercial theatre, but who were not yet capable of earning a living from their writing. The Guild’s formal proposal cited its experience providing emergency assistance to hard-pressed authors, noting that in its own modest relief program “the large majority of the applicants are living a hand to mouth existence and that at least half are at present not writing because they have been obliged to take temporary employment that prevents their doing so.”[44] The experiment began bravely. An entry in David Stevens’ diary captures the initial high hopes. According to Stevens, the Executive Secretary of the Guild “says her experience shows a certainty every year of twelve to fifteen persons of first rate quality whose success may be determined by a year of support at a critical time.”[45] However, this first Rockefeller attempt to provide support for individual authors never found those 12 to 15 talents. In fact, the Dramatists’ Guild rang down the curtain itself and even returned some of the grant funds. From October 1938 to June 1941 the Guild awarded twenty fellowships, a total that includes four one-year renewals, to sixteen aspiring young playwrights. Looking at the careers of these sixteen playwrights, only one award appears to have gone to a playwright of undisputed talent whose work would continue to be staged years after the project ended. Two, as noted earlier, were given to candidates designated by the National Theatre Conference who were expected, it seems, to spend more time gaining professional and administrative experience than writing plays. (Interestingly, these two choices—George Milton Savage of the University of Washington and Betty Smith from the University of North Carolina—actually did write numerous, though hardly memorable plays. Smith, later famous as the author of the novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, earned some income from her playwriting, while Savage would go on to write over 70 plays and have a long career as a theatre educator at the University of Washington.) Given the terms of the Guild’s proposal, the remaining fellowships, with perhaps a few exceptions—notably for the African-American playwright Theodore Browne (Natural Man)—could hardly be called even qualified successes. Putting aside the two NTC administrative awards, of the remaining fellowship recipients chosen for their ability as authors, the Rockefeller files identify only three who succeeded in getting their new manuscripts accepted by any theatre for even a trial production. Although Browne’s work was staged by both the Federal Theatre project in Seattle and in a New York theatre, and continues to attract scholarly attention, neither the play he wrote for the Dramatists’ Guild program or that of any of the other Rockefeller Playwriting Fellows received any extended theatrical production during the life of the grant.[46] Consequently, David Stevens did not hesitate to rate this program a failed experiment. “In spite of this success in part,” his official evaluation of 1942 observed, “the plan has not resulted as hoped in establishing a method of encouraging young playwrights on the second lap toward arrival in the professional theatre.”[47] His final evaluation placed the blame for the experiment’s failure squarely on the Dramatists’ Guild and its selection committee. For its part, the Guild also pronounced the experiment a failure, laying the blame on a supposed paucity of new dramatists. “The committee was surprised to find out that there were so few capable new writers,” the Guild’s executive officer Luise Sillcox wrote to Stevens.[48] The Guild’s report explained its decision to return some Foundation grant because “the committee was not convinced that the awards were going to produce results.”[49] A Failed Project? Clearly, as this summary demonstrates, there was a well-thought out philanthropic program whose individual grants connected to one another, sometimes in intricate ways. But if there was a strategy, was there success? While admirable, Stevens’ attempts to expand the repertoire available to college and university theatre departments and other nonprofit or amateur groups met a number of setbacks. The weak sales for Clark’s twenty-volume scholarly edition of American plays perhaps indicates that the hunger for such plays was largely among a small group of theatre historians rather than active theatre directors. Moreover, the partnership between Clark’s Dramatists Play Service and the National Theatre Conference did not succeed immediately in reducing the costs of obtaining rights to the works of the popular dramatists represented by the Guild. As Clark admitted to Stevens, by the end of the decade, not one play had been sold at the non-profit rate because the NTC members had not bought sufficient quantities to trigger the discount. Clark explained to Stevens that “we agreed to make a 25 per cent royalty reduction on certain plays, provided we received a minimum number of requests through the N.T.C. To date, we have received on not one of these titles anywhere near the required minimum.”[50] All three of Clark’s most imaginative ideas—the discounting scheme, America’s Lost Plays, and the Rockefeller/Dramatists’ Guild Playwriting Fellowships—failed to expand the repertoire for amateur and regional theatres. And judged by its stated goal – identifying promising playwrights with work ready for the commercial stage—the playwriting fellowships seemed a disappointing experiment that clearly had failed. At least two Rockefeller insiders judged the entire program in drama a failure. Raymond B. Fosdick, who served as president of the Foundation during this period and who had been one of the most influential trustees directing the shift in priorities in the 1930s, thought the humanities program had not gone far enough in freeing itself from traditional academic scholarship and in reaching out to a broader public. Writing in retirement, Fosdick confessed, “We followed academic patterns although we understood in our hearts the wide gap between academic conceptions and the common life of man.”[51] More damningly, Stevens’ lieutenant, associate director John Marshall, later told an oral history interviewer that the “work in drama by the Rockefeller Foundation accomplished relatively little” in either the development of the theatre or playwrights.[52] Stevens, Marshall thought, was far too cautious and “felt he needed to be protected in this field by confining his recommendations” to college and university drama departments and community theatres. For Marshall, this proved to be a fatal flaw, as “this restriction doomed us to work with people I regarded as rather mediocre.”[53] The leading lights of the regional movement left him unimpressed. Marshall thought Frederick Koch “something of a ham” and he also dismissed the work of the Pulitzer Prize winning author and dramatist Paul Green.[54] Marshall’s most telling criticisms, however, pointed beyond Stevens to the general culture of organized philanthropy: The Rockefeller Foundation itself was too averse to risk taking. This attitude, driven in equal parts by the Foundation’s own conservatism and David Stevens’ academic orientation left Marshall chafing under the limitations of the program in the late 1930s. “I was always somewhat unhappy about this, and given to reminding Stevens that the theatre had its real life on the professional stage,” he later recalled.[55] Marshall’s criticism owed much to his own strong desire to see the Foundation embrace the creative arts and offer support directly to artists. When invited by Stevens to critique the existing program in preparation for a report to the trustees, Marshall wrote, “If we take the arts seriously as a means of communicating what the culture offers that may be of value to the individual, perhaps this is the weakest point in our record.”[56] Stevens saw the force of this objection, and his answer may be found in the finished report. Discussing the RF’s on-going work in radio, communication, and drama, Stevens contrasted the varying roles of the reporter, the critic, and the creative artist. “If we have done less here [i.e., in the arts] than in the less difficult fields of communication and interpretation, it is because judicious help for the artist is harder to provide than for the reporter and critic.”[57] For Stevens and many other foundation officials and trustees, the experiment simply demonstrated that fellowships for individual artists might be a poor way to subsidize the arts. The Foundation’s cautious approach also reflected an ambivalence about support for individual artists found surprisingly even within the ranks of the Dramatists’ Guild and among other established theatre professionals. Harold Clurman, the artistic director of the Group Theatre, wrote approvingly to Stevens after his discovery that “three of the playwrights in whom the Group Theatre is especially interested have been given your assistance in the way of grants for continued creative work.” In the same breath, however, Clurman confided, “Generally, I am pessimistic about awards given to artists, as so often inferior people manage to be chosen and good people to be neglected, but I am happy in this instance, and it is true of last year’s awards as well, good things have happened to the right people.”[58] Even Barrett Clark voiced some skepticism about the desirability of philanthropic support for authors and playwrights. “The giving of personal subsidies,” he thought, limiting his remarks to the creative arts, “should be based on rather more facts than we now have, and those who give such subsidies ought, in my opinion, to know somewhat more definitely than they do just how these subsidies work and to what extent they succeed in helping.” Clark proposed that the Foundation commission a detailed study of 100 fellowship recipients from various organizations to determine “to what extent such help has proved effective or otherwise.”[59] Although these attitudes may have colored the evaluation of the experiment, it nevertheless remains true that the Dramatists’ Guild project failed to produce theatrical work ready for full-scale production. Given the criteria of the project, success would have been possible only if the young playwrights had had time to smooth out the rough spots in their plays and work at length on the staging with directors. In this sense, the experiment ran into the bleak realities of Broadway and professional theatres in the late 1930s, where there was little time or money to expend on uncertain new work, a situation made even more difficult with the advent of war. At the same time a more in-depth look at the Dramatists’ Guild Fellowship calls into question the sharp black or white dichotomy of “success” and “failure.” First, it can be argued—as Stevens did in his evaluation—that even grants to those playwrights who were not endowed with genius paid some small dividends. While most of these writers are of little interest today as dramatists, it is essential to note that many did pursue successful careers. In addition to George Milton Savage and Betty Smith, several—Ramon Naya, Ben Simkhovich, Arnold Sundgaard, George Corey—were deemed by experienced producers to have talent. Another, Ettore Rella, wrote drama in verse and served the field by translating foreign works for American audiences.[60] Finally, in judging the merits of this scheme, it must be borne in mind that the program was experimental in the best sense of that word: grants for unproven talent are among the most difficult exercises to evaluate that foundations can undertake. With these caveats in mind, a look at the work of three playwrights whose works received trial productions suggests a different standard for evaluating fellowships to creative writers. George Corey, one of these aspiring playwrights, actually got his Broadway debut through the Experimental Theatre, a production that Corey credited the RF award with obtaining for him. His play, with the ill-omened title “Not in Our Stars,” closed after a short run. Corey admitted that his play lacked something vital that not even the short trial period could supply. Nonetheless, in the proud author’s judgment the play “contained excellent material and met with most of the requirements of a good play.” Yet correcting its defects for the stage had eluded him. Until the Rockefeller-Dramatists’ Guild fellowship came, “the task was a hopeless one, for that which the play needed could only come when the author himself could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears the play’s theatrical weaknesses.”[61] Despite this rather damning admission, Corey credited himself with a good start in the first act, but “my shortcomings as a craftsman boomeranged in the fatal third act.”[62] His critics, however, were not so kind. Even the two acts the young playwright regarded as satisfactory failed to please New York critics. One critic complained of a “long, clumsy and faltering first act,”[63] while another thought the entire play “can do with considerable rewriting, especially in its third act.” This latter critic added, “It might save Mr. Corey future disappointment if he were to toss it into a trunk and start another play.”[64] Despite the unanimous verdict that the play was a failure, some of his critics detected promise in Corey’s work. One review hailed “a genuine playwrighting talent”[65] and even his harshest critic took care to sprinkle some compliments. This latter critic [Burns Mantle] clearly understood the purposes of the experiment, and while he dismissed the Guild project as an effort to create “synthetic or test-tube drama,” he nonetheless called Corey “a promising dramatist” and conceded that, given its goals, the experiment “may quite reasonably get him an assignment, either to write other plays, or to submit such other plays as he has already written to those producers of plays and pictures who are continually yelling for them.”[66] This prediction proved accurate as Corey did not use this experience to forge a career on Broadway, instead becoming a successful screen writer. If Corey’s first-person story of his dashed hopes seems tinged with pathos, it may well have been representative. Two other RF-Guild fellows fared hardly better. One news story disclosed that a new play by Theodore Browne would get only one more night at another New York theatre before it too would be closed. A third fellowship recipient, whose work had been intended for the New York stage, was instead given a trial run in Boston, but there too his production closed after only a brief run. In the case of Theodore Browne, the judgment by producers and the Dramatists’ Guild may have ended a promising career. Browne, the only African-American author selected for this program, was one of only a handful of Negro playwrights working professionally in the 1930s and 1940s, and according to theatre historian Doris Abramson, of these few he was indisputably one who “had something to say, cared passionately to say it, and had talent that could be trained to that end.”[67] Although Browne became identified with the American Negro Theatre (ANT) in New York, he first achieved some success as part of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre project in Seattle. While working on the West Coast, Browne adapted Lysistrata for the Negro unit of the Federal theatre, setting it in an African context. During this time he wrote an original play, Go Down, Moses to dramatize the life of Harriet Tubman. Finally, Browne’s Natural Man, a creative re-working of the John Henry legend, built upon his success in Seattle and prompted calls for a staging in New York where theatres in Harlem, as well as stages downtown, clamored for new material aimed at black audiences. Critical reaction to Browne’s work at the time was largely favorable, and he remains of interest to scholars and practitioners in African-American drama. One of the founders of the American Negro Theatre judged Natural Man to be the “best and most significant play” of all those presented by the ANT in its short-lived inaugural season.[68] Browne’s production for the ANT was also the first of its productions to be reviewed in the mainstream press, though Brooks Atkinson faulted Natural Man for its sketchy script. More recently, Quita Craig has credited Browne with writing a multi-layered work that can be read on the surface as the re-telling of the familiar story and more deeply as a work communicating in a specifically black idiom, whose political overtones audiences would have understood as the playwright “completed the transformation of the ‘brute Negro’ into a black revolutionary hero.”[69] Despite the producers’ intention to revive the production later in 1941, the resources for a specifically African-American theatre dried up quickly along with the larger federal theatre project. Browne never got another chance to stage his work and although he seems to have been exactly the type of talent the Rockefeller project aimed at identifying and promoting, his career as a playwright never recovered from this early cancellation. A third fellowship recipient, whose work had been intended for the New York stage, was instead given a trial run in Boston, but there too his production was closed after a brief run. Like George Corey, this playwright left an account of his trials and tribulations, and again like Corey, he credited the fellowship with giving him the vital opportunity to see first-hand the problems of translating stage directions into a workable theatrical piece. “Probably no man has ever written for the theatre with less foreknowledge of it,” the young author confessed, adding, “As rehearsals progressed it became more and more apparent that if nothing else needed fixing, the ending of the play certainly did.”[70] The third act did prove to be the fatal flaw, but not entirely in the sense the author meant. In addition to the development of the plot, the play also experienced a number of production problems. Although the play was set in the South, the producers chose a British director who had never been there and who was more familiar with Shakespeare than Faulkner. Fears that Boston’s legendary censors might also take offense at the script also proved well-founded, even if the actual changes came long after opening night. But in the end the flaws in the script were upstaged spectacularly in the third act by the production’s technical crew. The climax of the play called for a fire to destroy the little country store where the action was set, but in rehearsal the smoke pots used to simulate a fire produced only some very unconvincing wisps of smoke. On opening night the production literally increased its fire power, and theatre patrons in the first rows were soon gasping for breath and fleeing the theatre.[71] Despite this staging fiasco, the critics were surprisingly kind. A critic writing for the Boston Post described the evening as “the maddest night of melodrama” and wondered in print whether “the happenings on stage were not the aftermath of the glorious celebration in the imaginative brain of a genius who celebrated gaily but a little too well and was removed for quiet to that famous ward at the Bellevue Hospital.” [72] The play, Battle of Angels, ran for two troubled weeks but never recovered from the opening night debacle, and perhaps needless to add, never received its New York production. However, as we know, the playwright, who had taken to signing his works as Tennessee Williams, went on to much bigger and better things. Although Tennessee Williams conceded that Battle of Angels did not work for the stage, he also left accounts that suggest the Rockefeller grant was indeed a defining episode in his career.[73] The financial support came at a crucial juncture in his career, and Williams’ notebooks, early essays and later memoirs all point to the same conclusion: the recognition by the Rockefeller Foundation was of decisive importance for the transformation of the awkward Thomas Lanier Williams into the flamboyant Tennessee Williams. At the same time, too much should not be claimed for the grant, as the desire to write was deeply embedded in the young playwright. In his first account of the Boston production, Williams wrote, “My conversion to the theatre arrived as mysteriously as those impulses that enter the flesh at puberty. Suddenly I found that I had a stage inside me.” Williams recognized the theatre as his vocation, adding that he had been writing since he was 12, and concluded, “for me there was no other medium that was even relatively satisfactory.”[74] Given this deep-seated need to write and to write specifically for the stage, no one could seriously argue that young Tom Williams would have failed to develop into a writer and a playwright had the Rockefeller Foundation/Dramatists’ Guild program not provided him money. But the Rockefeller grant clearly did mean something important to the aspiring young playwright. The Rockefeller money enabled him to move to New York and begin the career he dreamed of—though at $100 a month, Williams soon had to take another job to stay there. Years later, when he wrote his autobiography, his first ten pages were devoted to this prize and to the sense of triumph it gave the struggling young writer. Williams recounts with evident pleasure the fact that all of the daily newspapers in St. Louis interviewed him. His father, with whom he had waged an epic battle for respect, was now forced to concede that his fay son had some talent after all.[75] If it seems clear that at least some of the fellowship recipients had genuine talent, why did the RF-Dramatists’ Guild project collapse in such disarray? It seems clear that both the Foundation and the Guild had serious reservations about the desirability of providing direct support to individual authors, and the failure of all but a handful of the fellowship recipients to get their work produced even for a trial run must have confirmed both organizations in their skepticism about support for individual writers. At the Rockefeller Foundation, at least, it appears that this experiment colored internal discussions about the arts for years to come. However much John Marshall may have wanted to see the Foundation offer support to composers, playwrights, and creative writers, the immediate result of the Dramatists’ Guild experiment was to make this type of support less likely. Yet the premises on which this experiment was based were not entirely unrealistic as the experience of more recent playwriting schemes demonstrates. A comparison with contemporary experiments in identifying new plays, such as the Fund for New American Plays or the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, is instructive.[76] Initiated by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and administered by the Kennedy Center, the Fund for New American Plays had an excellent track record in identifying talented young playwrights whose work would go on to commercial as well as critical success. (Among others, this project provided early support to such writers as Tony Kushner and Wendy Wasserstein and helped develop new work by more established writers, including August Wilson.)[77] The key difference between the Rockefeller Foundation’s experiment and these more recent projects appears to be that efforts such as the Fund for New American Plays provided financial support not only to the authors but also to the non-profit theatres that agreed to sponsor new productions. These recent ventures in playwright development depended, therefore, on nonprofit theatres whose mission and whose budgets permitted more extended development of new work. Producers in the 1930s clearly understood this need. “Much can be done in teaching the fledgling playwright technique,” Theresa Helburn wrote, “But without the practical workshop of a tryout—of seeing the play in actual production and the shortcomings of the work, whether dramatic or structural, whether in development of convincing characters or of dialogue, whether in faulty timing or in lack of tension—the playwright simply cannot learn the basic principles of his craft.”[78] The Dramatists’ Guild’s fellowship competition for playwrights was an imaginative attempt to produce such conditions in the shadows of Broadway. Theatre directors and authors in the 1930s also understood that they needed a laboratory for new work. While the Theatre Guild and other partners attempted to set aside funds and time for experimenting, the harsh realities of recouping investments on Broadway meant that new works had to show promise immediately. “Five weeks is not long enough to prepare a complex play,” Williams complained after his effort went up in smoke. Asking rhetorically why his play had to be cast, rehearsed and rewritten in such a short time, Williams wrote tersely, “Answer: Money.”[79] While the Rockefeller Foundation may have been well-equipped to supply that need, it was less successful addressing another and no less real problem: in the 1930s there was no strong organizational framework in either the professional or the nonprofit theatres to mount sustained experimental work. No Foundation grant could remedy that absence quickly. Casting about for an alternative, one writer from the period could see few avenues other than those already identified by Clark and Stevens. “It appears that the universities and their theatres are the most hopeful places to look for such a new wave of creativeness,” Irving Pichel wrote in 1936.[80] A careful consideration of the evidence, then, suggests that David Stevens and the Rockefeller Foundation were not wrong, as Stevens’ colleagues later maintained, to look to the university drama departments and community theatres for future leaders or to offer grants to strengthen emerging regional playhouses. If the Rockefeller Foundation failed to find a way to link the commercial New York theatre that Marshall hailed with the emerging regional centers that Clark championed, it must be quickly noted that this chasm has never been easy to bridge. Stevens’ support for the leading university programs of the day provided crucial support during the depression for a generation of young theatre professionals, while the for-profit status of most of the Broadway theatrical organizations would have ruled them out as grantees of the Foundation. The appeal of the plan that Clark and the Dramatists’ Guild crafted came precisely because it promised to provide opportunities for all sectors of the theatrical community. If the Rockefeller Foundation proved adept in supporting universities and community theatres, it clearly stumbled over the problem posed by individual artists as the Dramatists’ Guild fellowships painfully illustrates. Yet, a project that sets free the talents of a Tennessee Williams poses some interesting questions about this first, halting effort to promote individual talent in the arts. Even though all the contemporaries, including Williams, regarded the RF/Dramatists’ Guild fellowship project as a failure, must historians join in this chorus? In retrospect, it seems worth asking whether an experiment that gave validation to one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century really should be deemed a failure at all. Perhaps one genius among 20 grantees is not such a bad percentage for any philanthropic foundation willing to take risks to advance the arts. Seen from a vantage point decades later the experiment illustrates a paradox in philanthropic support for the arts: sometimes a foundation or patron’s greatest success, like that of all creative artists, comes only when they are willing to fail repeatedly first. Malcolm Richardson is an independent scholar who has written on American philanthropy, support for the arts and the humanities, and international cultural exchanges. Over a long career he has worked for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Before completing graduate studies at Duke University, he worked briefly as the drama and film critic for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. [1] The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve and shape the presentation of this paper’s argument. [2] Andrea Olmstead, Juilliard: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 99-122, offers a brief overview of Carnegie’s support for the arts. Abigail Deutsch, “Investing in America’s Cultural Education,” Carnegie Reporter 6, no.1 (Fall, 2010): 16-25 describes the best-known Carnegie programs in arts and music education. Although her work does not examine Carnegie arts programs in detail, Patricia L. Rosenfield, A World of Giving: Carnegie Corporation of New York—A Century of International Philanthropy (New York: Public Affairs, 2014) provides the most comprehensive look at the Carnegie Corporation’s leadership and grant-making strategies. [3] On those efforts see Richard Schechner, “Ford, Rockefeller and Theatre,” in The Tulane Drama Review 10, no.1 (Autumn, 1965): 23-49. [4] Report of the Committee on Appraisal and Plan, Rockefeller Foundation records at the Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3: series 900, box 22, folder 170. [5] Ibid. [6] Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 241. Fosdick, who wrote much of the trustee committee’s report, elaborated on this thinking after he became president of the Foundation in 1936: “The conquest of illiteracy, the development of school facilities, the rise of public libraries and museums, the flood of books, the invention of the radio and the moving picture, the surge of new ideas—and, above all, perhaps, the extension of leisure, once the privilege of the few—are giving culture in our age a broader base than earlier generations have known.” This quote also from The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, 241. [7] William J. Buxton, ed., Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication and the Humanities (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009). [8] See Fosdick, Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, 237-51, for an overview. [9] James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). [10] David H. Stevens, Memorandum: “Program in the Humanities,” March 1934, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 9. [11] “The Humanities in Theory and Practice,” 31 March 1937, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box.2, folder 10. [12] Ibid. [13] William J. Buxton, “RF Support for Non-Professional Drama, 1933-1950,” Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center (Spring, 1999), 1-5. Stephen D. Berwind, “Raising the Curtain: Rockefeller Support for the American Theatre,” in Angels in the American Theatre: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy, ed. Robert A. Schanke (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 225-41, comes in only during the second act, so to speak, by focusing on post-1945 developments. The essay by Julia L. Foulkes, “‘The Weakest Point in Our Record’: Philanthropic Support of Dance and the Arts,” in Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication and the Humanities, ed. William Buxton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009) is also valuable on the development of Rockefeller Foundation arts grants. [14] Jeffrey Ullom, America’s First Regional Theatre: The Cleveland Play House and Its Search for a Home (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). [15] Barrett H. Clark, “West of Broadway,” New York Times, 27 October 1935. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid. Later RF documents captured this definition by substituting “non-commercial” for “non-professional” theatres. [19] “Playwright and Theatre,” in Our Theatre Today, ed. Herschel L. Bricker (New York: Samuel L. French, 1936), 175. [20] However, he conceded, “True, I have yet to see anything there as finished as the Moscow Art Theatre, the Theatre Guild at its best, or the best productions of such directors as Arthur Hopkins or Jed Harris.” “West of Broadway,” New York Times, 27 October 1935. [21] Clark report, 7. Appended to letter to Stevens, 25 February 1935, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200, box 210, folder 2513. [22] Ibid. [23] “Program in the Humanities,” dated “March, 1934,” record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 9. [24] Hallie Flanagan, Arena: History of the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985 reprint); and Joanne Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1988). [25] “The New Program in the Humanities,” 10 April 1935, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 10. [26] See Archibald Henderson, ed., Pioneering a People’s Theatre (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945). [27] MacGowan, Footlights Across America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 209. [28] Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report, 1933, 329. [29] Stevens, A Time of Humanities: Recollections of David H. Stevens as Director in the Division of Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, 1930-1950 (Madison: Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 1976), Robert H. Yahnke, ed., 82-83. [30] Stevens, “Program in the Humanities,” March 1934. [31] Ibid. [32] Ibid. [33] Theresa Helburn, A Wayward Quest: The Autobiography of Theresa Helburn (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 97. [34] On Sherwood’s leadership of the Guild, see Harriet Hyman Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 195-6. [35] “Detail of Information,” attached to the signed authorization for the grant-in-aid, 4 March 1936, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200, box 210, folder 2513. [36] The series, originally published by Princeton University Press, was reprinted as Barrett H. Clark, General Editor, America’s Lost Plays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963-65), 20 volumes. [37] Clark to Stevens, 5 February 1937, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [38] Ibid. Most of the proposed judges were members of the Guild’s board. [39] Robert E. Sherwood to David H. Stevens, 24 December 1937. Rockefeller Archive Center in record group 1.1, series 200 R, box 210, folder 2519. [40] Quoted in C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. I, 130. [41] Ibid. The split between the authors and producers is well-documented in Bigsby A Critical Introduction. [42] Clark to Stevens, 5 February 1937, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [43] The administrative arrangements are spelled out in a letter from Luise Sillcox, the Treasurer of the Authors’ League of America and Executive Secretary of the Dramatists’ Guild, to David Stevens, 9 March 1938, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [44] Luise Sillcox to David Stevens, 9 March 1938. This letter, a separate document on Dramatists’ Guild stationery, served as the formal proposal. It too is found in Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box.210, folder 2519. [45] David H. Stevens, diary entry for 10 January 1938, summarizing visit by Clark and Luise Sillcox, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [46] Although the files and reports mention only three productions, I found that at least two other Dramatists’ Guild Fellowship recipients––Ramon Naya and Alexander Greendale—received productions either during or shortly after the grant period. Greendale’s drama, Walk into My Parlor, even played at a Broadway theater for 29 performances in late 1941. Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 208. On the off-Broadway production in 1942 of Naya’s Mexican Mural, see the account by director Robert Lewis, Slings and Arrows: Theater in My Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1984), 132-4. [47] Stevens’ evaluation, “Appraisal of RF 38053 to the Authors’ League of America,” 11 February 1942, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 211, folder 2521. [48] Sillcox to Stevens, 24 February 1942, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 211, folder 2521. [49] Ibid. [50] Clark to Stevens, 8 March 1939, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2515. [51] Fosdick to Francis Hackett, 31 January 1952. Papers of Raymond B. Fosdick, Princeton University Library manuscripts collection. [52] “The Reminiscences of John Marshall,” an oral history memoir in the Oral History Collection, Columbia University, and in the Rockefeller Archive Center, 213. Hereafter cited as Marshall, Reminiscences. [53] Marshall, Reminiscences, 208. [54] Ibid., 208-9. [55] Ibid., 208. [56] John Marshall to David H. Stevens, Memorandum titled “DHS’ Draft Review of Humanities Program,” 19 June 1939 Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 1, folder 2. [57] “The Humanities Program of the Rockefeller Foundation: A Review of the Period from 1934 to 1939,” 22, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 11. [58] Harold Clurman to David H. Stevens, 2 January 1940, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200, box 211, folder 2520. [59] Clark to Stevens, 28 June 1939, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2515. [60] In addition to those listed here and the three discussed in detail in this article, the remaining fellows were Leopold Atlas, Alis de Sola, Alladine Bell, Caroline Francke, Alexander Greendale, David Howard, and Noel Houston. [61] Corey’s first person account was published in the New York Times, 27 April 1941. (This and other clippings found in Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 211, folder 2522). [62] Ibid. [63] John Anderson, New York Journal American, 28 April 1941. [64] Burns Mantle, New York News, 26 April 1941 [65] Christian Science Monitor, 26 April 1941. [66] Mantle, New York News, 26 April 1941. [67] Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 156. [68] Ibid. [69] E. Quita Craig, Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era: Beyond the Formal Horizons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 47. [70] “The History of a Play,” in “Battle of Angels: A Play by Tennessee Williams, with a note on the play by Margaret Webster and an account of its production in the City of Boston by the author,” Pharos 1&2 (Spring, 1945): 110. [71] Ibid. His most recent biographer concludes, “If ever the professional debut of a major playwright was a greater fiasco, history does not record it.” John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (New York: Norton, 2014), 25. Lahr follows Williams’ account (16-28). Also useful are the accounts in: Claudia Wilsch Case, “Inventing Tennessee Williams: The Theatre Guild and His First Professional Production,” in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 8 (2006): 51-71; and Milly S. Barringer, “Battle of Angels: Margaret Webster Directs Tennessee Williams,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 4 (Winter, 1992): 63-77. [72] Unsigned review [Elliott Porter?] “Miriam Hopkins at the Wilbur,” Boston Post, 31 December 1940. [73] In his notebook, Williams wrote “I wait! For the Fates’ decision. I mean the Rockefeller Fellowship Committee’s. It seems a last chance of escape. . . . I dare not think what it will be if this last, wild hope is snatched away from me.” Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 167. [74] Williams, “The History of a Play,” 110. [75]Williams, Memoirs (New York: New Directions, 2006). See also, Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985). [76] Jeffrey Ullom, The Humana Festival: the History of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) provides an excellent overview of this venture. [77] Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a good summary of the Fund for New American Plays. The only overview appears to be The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “History of the Fund for New American Plays,” at http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/theater/fnap/history.html (accessed 29 September 2015). See also, The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Report to the President (Washington, 1992), reprinted in Journal of Arts Management and Law 23, no. 1 (1993) and Backstage, 20 February 2001. [78] Helburn, A Wayward Quest, 254. [79] Williams, “History of a Play,” 117. [80] Irving Pichel, “The Present Day Theatre,” in Our Theatre Today: A Composite Handbook on the Arts, Craft, and Management of the Contemporary Theatre, ed. Herschel L. Bricker (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 152. "West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s" by Malcolm Richardson 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.

DANCERS 4 PALESTINE + THEATER WORKERS FOR A CEASEFIRE presents Building Cultural Power through Organizing at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Building Cultural Power through Organizing DANCERS 4 PALESTINE + THEATER WORKERS FOR A CEASEFIRE 3-3:50 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Organizers from two Palestine solidarity formations in the arts will dialogue about the obstacles and opportunities related to organizing within the arts, specifically as it relates to the current struggle for building solidarity for Palestine today. Topics of discussion will include strategies and tactics, building cultural power, an overview of actions, and provocations for others to develop or join organizing efforts from wherever they are. This event will be livestreamed via Howlround Theatre Commons . Building Cultural Power through Organizing is presented in partnership with ASAP/15: Not a Luxury LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Theater Workers for a Ceasefire exists to organize U.S.-based theater workers in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We aim to use our bodies and talents in pursuit of a comprehensive ceasefire, which we understand is merely the first step among many in realizing a Free Palestine. Dancers for Palestine (D4P) is an autonomous group of dance workers who organize in solidarity with the global movement for Palestinian liberation. Formed during Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza beginning in 2023, D4P seeks to both cohere and create a dance community which is vocal and active in its support of the Palestinian people. D4P is a local and international endeavor with a core organizing group in NYC and an ever expanding network of dancers and organizers working toward a dance field free from complicity in genocide, imperialism, white supremacy, and all systems of oppression. D4P’s work has included protest and direct action, political education events, art-based fundraising, and campaigns in alignment with the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and against repressive anti-boycott policies. D4P works alongside with other arts and culture-based groups organizing for Palestine, including Artists Against Apartheid, Theatre Workers for a Ceasefire, and Writers Against the War on Gaza, and aligns strongly with labor organizing movements in the arts. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on April 28, 2021 Download Article as PDF by Isaiah Matthew Wooden The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The 1978 documentary Black Theater: The Making of a Movement opens with a striking performance by the legendary artist-activist-duo Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee that reveals the stakes of the project and the revolutionary Black artistic movements it archives.[1] Viewers first encounter Dee’s radiant face and honey-toned voice. With her eyes fixed squarely on the camera, the esteemed actress launches into a poem whose opening line offers a powerful rebuke of the notion that Black art is in any way imitative or derivative. “Black poetry is not what Shakespeare begot,” Dee recites percussively.[2] Davis quickly responds to her initiating call, adding “Nor, is it one with Tennyson.”[3] For a minute or so thereafter, the pair trade lines that remind viewers that Black art “sets up its own condition” and, indeed, “defies tradition.”[4] The performance culminates with Davis and Dee inviting viewers to join them in celebrating all that is distinct and compelling about Black art. The scene offers an evocative overture to a film that, by casting a resplendent spotlight on some of the key figures and movements that collectively revolutionized Black art in the twentieth century, distinguishes itself as a major milestone in African American theatre and performance history. Produced and directed by Woodie King, Jr., the founder of the New Federal Theatre, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement has been screened countless times since its late-70s premiere, and the academic database and video publisher Alexander Street has made it available to stream through its website.[5] For those who study and teach African American dramatic literature and theatre history, the film remains an indispensable resource for the sheer number of Black theatrical luminaries it brings together to meditate on the vital importance of Black art in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. As the promotional description that accompanies it asserts, the film “is a veritable video encyclopedia of the leading figures, institutions, and events of a movement that transformed the American stage.”[6] In addition to Davis and Dee, the documentary features, among other theatrical innovators, Amiri Baraka, Roscoe Lee Browne, Ed Bullins, Vinnette Carroll, Robert Hooks, James Earl Jones, Lloyd Richards, Ntozake Shange, Barbara Ann Teer, Glynn Turman, and Douglas Turner Ward commenting on the rich contributions of enterprises and initiatives such as the Black Theatre Alliance, the Group Theatre Workshop, the New Lafayette Theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the Urban Arts School. The film offers viewers much more than an abundance of star power or a standard accounting of the organizations and institutions that helped shape the new theatre movements that the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s engendered. It overflows with insights about the tremendous significance and influence of the arts—theatre, especially—in Black social, cultural, and political life. Revisiting the film in the wake of the growing calls to fundamentally upend and overhaul the systems and structures reinforcing racism, antiblackness, and white supremacy in the arts reveals just how deeply relevant and resonant many of the conversations it catalogs remain. Its subjects convey with profound clarity their visions for a Black theatre that is at once revolutionary, heterogenous, and deeply attuned to the experiences of Black people. In drawing attention to a few of its more potent threads and themes in what follows, I hope to situate the current demands for change within a longer history of struggle to rework the American theatre. I also aim to explore how heeding some of the vital lessons the documentary provides might further enrich and embolden efforts to imagine, plot, and build artistic practices, strategies, principles, and conditions that are both transformative and sustainable. The documentary launches with well-known figures including Dee, Davis, playwright Owen Dodson, and director Lloyd Richards paying homage to some of the artists who they credit with making their work in the theatre possible. They give particular praise to change agents like Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson for breaking barriers and expanding possibilities for the Black theatrical imagination. Two key points emerge from these backward glances. The first is the idea that Black theatre has always been deeply connected to and rooted in community. Davis explains how Black artists in New York City responded to the bigotry and discrimination of commercial and mainstream theatres by bringing together people from their own mostly segregated neighborhoods to mount performances. In doing so, they extended a tradition that dates back to the early national period, as theatre historian Marvin McAllister outlines in his study on the “entertainments” of impresario William Brown.[7] However, as Richards observes, the little headway that Black artists did begin to make on and off Broadway in the 1940s and ’50s was quickly undermined by the racist and repressive forces of McCarthyism. Richards, reflecting on the widespread efforts to terrorize Black artists during the period, offers the second key point I want to underscore. Black theatre, he insists, is fundamentally a theatre of protest. “The theatre has been for Black people a way of protesting the circumstances within which we attempt to exist in this country,” Richards remarks.[8] An abundance of evidence in the corpus of African American dramatic literature bears out this declaration. As Daphne Brooks points out in her evocative reading of William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom, the first play published by a Black person in the United States, African Americans have long mobilized the power of theatre and performance to forge both discursive and embodied insurgency.[9] Throughout the remainder of the documentary, King grants some of the Black arts leaders who helped heighten the fervor for a radical Black consciousness, aesthetic, and politic that intensified during the catalytic Black Power era an opportunity to elaborate on their motivations for pursuing new theatrical paradigms. The deep commitment so many of these artists had to centering experimentation in their work resounds across these conversations. Vinnette Carroll, who was both the first Black woman to stage a show on Broadway and to garner a Tony Award nomination for her direction, notes that she founded the Urban Arts Corps in 1967, in part, to create a space for Black artists to train and develop new material that might not otherwise receive nurturing or support. “It’s also a place where some writers and musicians can come and try out things and not be afraid to fail,” Carroll explains.[10] Barbara Ann Teer, who, along with actor-activist Robert Hooks co-founded the Group Theatre Workshop in 1962 and, in 1968, established the National Black Theatre in Harlem, expresses a similar sentiment. Teer recalls how she and her early collaborators at the National Black Theatre spent nearly two years collectively devising artistic processes and practices that at once “fitted the sensibilities of Black people” and demonstrated “the richness and greatness and power inherent in the form and feeling of Black life/style.”[11] To that end, they experimented with drums, rhythms, chants, and energy, all in an effort to create a theatre that was unequivocally and unapologetically Black.[12] Not every Black artist of the era committed to renouncing any and all things associated with the theatrical traditions of Europe. For example, the Group Theatre Workshop, which mounted an off-Broadway staging of Douglas Turner Ward’s Happy Ending in 1965, paved the way for the founding of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967. While the Negro Ensemble Company would quickly fortify its reputation as a launching ground for Black artistry and talent (including a production of Errol Hill’s Man Better Man in the 1968-69 season), it did not shy away from engaging with white interlocutors and collaborators. The first work the company produced was Song of the Lusitanian Bogey by German playwright Peter Weiss, in fact. “When the decision about Song of the Lusitanian Bogey was announced I knew I would get flack,” Turner Ward recalls.[13] “But no matter. The fact, in this instance, was that authorship had no significance. The play was ‘authored’ by the real historical situation itself. Peter was merely a conduit. More significantly, the material was going to be authored by an all-Black creative team, giving it life,” he goes on to say.[14] The production proved an auspicious springboard for the company, establishing it as a formidable presence on the New York arts scene and a model that others might adopt and follow. Certainly, as James Earl Jones recollects in the documentary, many Black artists maintained profound ambivalence about what their social and artistic responsibility should be to the various movements brewing around them. Jones recalls that during the successful off-Broadway run of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, a fierce debate erupted amongst his fellow company members about what actions they should take to advance the struggle for rights, freedom, and justice. “Half of us thought it was our responsibility, our social and artistic responsibility, to go up to picket… [The] other half preferred to, as Roscoe Lee Browne would say, stick to our vocational guidance, stick to our work.”[15] While Jones notes that he sided with Browne, he also confesses that he found great value in the dissension, as it not only served to build a greater sense of ensemble amongst the company, but it also empowered each performer to clarify for themselves what form they wanted their activism to take. As the film shifts focus to the future of Black theatre in its final section, a more subtle line of conversation begins to emerge about the perils and politics of arts funding. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the drastic economic changes that occurred throughout the 1970s, the interviewees voice a palpable unease about money and resources. It surfaces in the appeal that Carroll makes for wealthy Black people to consider financially supporting the arts: “I’d like to see more Black producers doing all sorts of things in the theatre, and that Black people would invest in us because we certainly have a group of Black people now with the money to invest in the theatre,” she asserts.[16] In the wake of Nixon’s election to the U.S. presidency, many of the grant-giving institutions that had been instrumental in launching ventures like the Urban Arts Corps, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the New Lafayette Theatre (the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, among them) decided that it was too risky to continue to support Black cultural institutions and withdrew their financial backing. This left many of these organizations without the resources they needed to stay afloat. Bullins, who after a brief stint as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party became the playwright-in-residence at the New Lafayette Theatre, explains: When Nixon came in the late 60s…he so frightened the philanthropic community that they cut back on just about all Black arts activities…So, all that money just about disappeared. And, we were working with a company of fifteen actors and all the support personnel with quite a yearly budget. And so, we couldn’t operate on the level that we had been operating on.[17] The documentary’s various discussions about funding underline just how potentially detrimental an overreliance on the goodwill and philanthropy of foundations and corporations can be to building a truly sustainable theatre. This is an important caution to take note of, especially amid calls to celebrate the commitments that institutions like the Ford and Mellon Foundations have made in recent months to granting millions of dollars to Black arts and cultural organizations.[18] These foundations have proven time and again that they are undependable. And, although they might provide some relief in the short term, the inconsistency of their funding often produces deleterious effects for Black art that are much longer-lasting. While the film’s chronological structure might suggest a progressive, teleological narrative, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement closes by exploring many of the questions and ideas that remain unaddressed or unresolved for Black theatremakers. The conclusion of the film sends an urgent call to Black artists to continue to find ways to bring the artform to Black communities and to harness its power to embolden radical change. Each of the figures featured in the documentary played a significant role in expanding possibilities for what the American theatre could be. Revisiting the film reaffirms just how solid the foundations they laid remain. It also provides an occasion for contemporary scholars and students of Black theatre to contemplate further how to capitalize on some of the “new stirrings” that have emerged in efforts to reimagine and remake the theatre—and the world—anew.[19] Isaiah Matthew Wooden is a director-dramaturg, critic, and assistant professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. A scholar of African American art, drama, and performance, he has contributed articles and essays to The Black Scholar, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, among other scholarly and popular publications. Wooden is the co-editor of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP 2020) and is currently at work on a monograph that explores the interplay of race and time in post-civil rights Black expressive culture. [1] Black Theater: The Making of a Movement, directed by Woodie King, Jr. (1978; San Francisco: California Newsreel), https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/black-theater-the-making-of-a-movement?source=suggestion. All subsequent references are to this version of the film. [2] Black Theater. [3] Black Theater. [4] Black Theater. [5] The New Federal Theatre notably celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2020. [6] See Black Theater. [7] See Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [8] Black Theater. [9] See Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). [10] Black Theater. [11] Black Theater. [12] La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers provides a wealth of evidence of some of the other ways this commitment to experimentation manifested for Teer and her Black Arts Movement contemporaries. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). [13] Douglas Turner Ward, “Foreword,” in Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company, ed. Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1995), xiii. [14] Ward, “Foreword.” [15] Black Theater. [16] Black Theater. [17] Black Theater. [18] See, for example, the announcements about the Ford Foundation’s “American Cultural Treasures” initiative and the Mellon Foundation’s sponsorship of “The Black Seed.” [19] See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). ISNN 2376-4236 Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble” by Elizabeth M. Cizmar “Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth” by Baron Kelly “A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson's Black Feminist Intervention” by Khalid Y. Long “An Interview with Elaine Jackson” by Nathaniel G. Nesmith "Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston" by Michelle Cowin Gibbs "1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Antimusical The Mule-Bone Is Presented" by Eric M. Glover “'Ògún Yè Mo Yè!' Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities" by Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green "Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar" by Lisa B. Thompson "Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge" by Bernth Lindfors "Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation" by Olga Sanchez Saltveit "A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement" by Isaiah Matthew Wooden www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2020 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.

Talya Kingston Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Talya Kingston By Published on May 19, 2023 Download Article as PDF Patrick Gabridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. 2018. Plays In Place is a Massachusetts-based company that collaborates with museums, historical sites and cultural institutions to commission plays that are fully produced in their space. While re-enactment on historical sites is not uncommon, this company contracts professional playwrights to pull historical information into fully realized stories that allow audiences to more fully engage with the human interactions that happened in different times and contexts. This engagement can bring new audiences in, and open new conversations, thus enlivening the site and making it more relevant in the life of its community. The commissioned playwright is similarly offered a fulfilling creative collaboration that they know from the outset will be both compensated and produced for an audience. It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that a company that centers writers, both creatively and in the budget, is run by a playwright. Producing Artistic Director Patrick Gabridge’s own work is often featured in the repertoire, but as the company has grown, he has commissioned a cadre of other playwrights (including me). Through the creative process he connects us with historical resources, strongly advocates for our creative freedom, and pays us at every stage of development. I sat down with Patrick to talk about his company’s process for developing new works of theater. I’m curious about your original inspiration for starting Plays In Place. Tell me the origin story of this playwright-led company. Plays In Place was inspired from the production of a play called Blood on the Snow that I was commissioned to write for the Bostonian Society for the renovated council chamber at the Boston Old State House. I’ve always loved writing historical work, and I’ve always loved doing site-specific work. This gave me a chance to do both together. It was clear there was a strong hunger from audiences, especially in New England. We sold out that first run before we even opened. We added a week and sold out that week. We came back in the second year for a twelve-week run. Years later, people are still calling that museum regularly asking when the show is coming back! Starting a company made it easier for me to approach other museums. Our goal is creating new site-specific plays in partnership with museums, historic spaces, and other institutions. I’ve founded theatre companies before, but in this particular case, I wanted to found a theatre company where we didn’t have to manage a space or raise money. I didn’t want a development department and I didn’t want a building. Speaking of raising money, can you describe the financial model for playwrights that you’ve developed through Plays In Place and how it differs from the traditional model of play development in this country? There are a few dozen playwrights who operate on commission for larger theatre companies, and they make money that way, and they get their plays produced that way and that’s great. It doesn’t happen for most of us – not all the time anyway! So, the typical model is you write a play on spec, you send it out to a lot of theatres and those may or may not get produced. It’s a scattershot approach to doing your work. It’s nice that you have a lot of control over what you are going to write, but your possibility of getting it in front of an audience, let alone getting paid for it, is pretty small. Even if you are in a position where a theatre company is commissioning you, they might be commissioning a bunch of different writers. They’ll do some development of your plays, and maybe they’ll pick one or two of those plays to fully produce, but maybe they won’t. So, it is good that you got paid and you still have a play that you can shop around somewhere else, but sad if the commission doesn’t end up in a production. What is different about our model is that the commission is part of the development process. We’ve learned to set up our contracts in multiple phases. Typically phase one is writers working with the institution on basic research, to come up with the storyline and structure. In this phase, the writer is paid upfront to come up with a proposal. This puts us in a good spot for phase two: the commissioning to write the plays and one or two in-house readings. And then phase three is rehearsal and production. In general, the institutions we’re working with are not developing a lot of different plays and starting the project because they intend to produce the work. This phased model allows them to raise the money in steps. It’s easier for the institutions to say yes to the partnership if I say to them that phase one is going to cost them $5000 – they might have that money, or a way to get it. Phase Two is significantly more money but it’s not a huge amount, and once we have scripts in hand, it’s easier to raise money for the rest, for the production. Plays In Place can commission playwrights at very competitive terms, especially for shorter plays. There are very few theatres commissioning one-act plays unless the playwrights are very famous. We don’t need our people to be famous, they just need to be good at what they do and willing to collaborate with the partner institution and keep their needs in mind when writing. For example, we are partnering with a historical site, so our production has to connect to the actual history. I like talking about money with writers because I think we don’t talk about it enough, and then we go into our conversations with producers a little ill-informed. Plays In Place mostly develops work in a community, which is different from the somewhat isolated traditional playwriting mode. Can you talk about the development process for writers and other artists, and how we work together with the sites? The process that you and I are involved in now [a partnership with Historic Northampton], as well as the National Parks Service’s Suffrage In Black and White , both involve three writers and we are all meeting somewhat regularly to talk about our work and to coordinate our presentations to the institutions. There is significant independence between each play, but also, I feel that it’s very important as a group to build that project together, so it has some liminal level of cohesiveness. They are plays that are going to sit together in an evening so whatever that meal is going to be for the audience it must be palatable and delivered in some stylistic framework. The model varies quite a bit from project to project. The Historic Northampton plays are shorter and all have the same director, so there will be a unifying feel between them. We are already talking about what shared actors we’re going to use and what the handoff is going to be between the plays. Whereas the Suffrage In Black and White pieces are full-length plays that will each have their own director. Plays In Place acts as a Creative Producer. We work with the teams to kind of tie them together and the writers are part of that tying things together so that we each understand what the other is doing. Having parameters for a writer can be a very stimulating part of the puzzle. We’re solving puzzles. In the traditional theatre the puzzle presented to us is pretty much “here’s a blank stage” and we act like all blank stages are the same, which I think is a fallacy, but it also causes us to create a somewhat generic version of our play. The business model in the traditional theatre is: get your play done at a professional company, have it be very successful, and have it be done by a bunch of other professional companies, and then have it be done by a bunch of community theatres, and then by a bunch of schools, and together that’s going to make you a bunch of money. Which is true when it works out, but you’ve also had to design a play that fits in all those different spaces. Our model is much less practical in some ways, in that if we do our jobs well the play can’t be done nearly as effectively in other places. For example, I just ran Moonlight Abolitionists , which is designed to be done under the full moon at Mount Auburn Cemetery as a concert reading in the dark. A friend of mine saw it and wanted to know if she could do it in her theatre in London. She could, of course, but it would lack the context that the cemetery brings and the atmosphere the moonlight brings. I wrote it for this place and time on purpose. The specificity of what we create as an artistic team is exciting to me. And I’m more interested in that than the ability of it to be done a thousand times elsewhere. It’s a tough question to ask yourself as a writer: would you be ok if this play was only ever done twice? Would it be worth the work? I will say so far, the answer has been yes. The production experiences are so intensely rich that it is worth it. Moonlight Abolitionists directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. October 2022. Walking around the site at Historic Northampton before I even had a story was such an inspiration. As a writer, how is the development process different when you are writing for and from a specific place? It depends on what the place is bringing. The plays are still going to be driven by story and character, but how are those stories and characters related to this place? Often the physical action and visual nature, even the sonic nature of the play, is already influenced by the setting. The question I’m always asking as a dramatist is: what is active about this place? As opposed to just a setting. In the plays that we’re writing for Historic Northampton what is interesting is the historic homes, we are in someone’s yard and so there is a familial sense that is going to inform all our writing, as our characters inhabited this neighborhood. The plays that I did at Mount Auburn Cemetery were different. Cemeteries sound like great places to write plays, except for the fact that the things you know the people for are not things they did in that place. This makes it difficult to create present scenes in the space. I wrote ten plays for the cemetery, in two sets of five. The first set was about the natural world, so that involved things that were there like salamanders and mushroom hunters and birdwatchers, all really rooted in the place. The second set of plays tended to be about people who were buried there. So, there is a play that starts out at this giant sphinx monument that is a memorial to the Civil War, but the scene is between the sculptor and the man who commissioned that piece, Jacob Bigelow, who was old and blind at the time. The scene takes place at the arrival of the sculpture, and then the way we made it active is that we know when he arrived, he inspected it with his hands. So, we got permission to bring this old wooden ladder on and the actor is actually feeling the sculpture and asking all these questions and they are in conversation about this object that is there. Matthew C. Ryan and Ken Baltin in Man of Vision. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. The action of the play is strongly influenced by the physical environment, and that in turn determines the structure. A good example is Moonlight Abolitionists . I knew I wanted to write a play to be done under the full moon, and I knew I wanted to write about abolition. So those things come together but then under the full moon, it’s going to be dark, so structurally that sends it towards a concert reading. It wasn’t going to be safe to move people around in the dark. I decided that it was OK if the characters were static physically as long as it was dynamic relationally between them. This decision also allowed the play to encompass a broad range of times. It is performed in the dark and the characters are lit only by their music stands lights, which casts this really eerie glow on the giant sphinx behind them. Lisa Timmel, who was the Director of New Work at the Huntington when I was a Playwright Fellow there, used to say, “structure is destiny” and I think place informs the structure. My mantra is “Don’t fight the site”. Understand where the site is guiding you and use it because you have so much, but if you try to go against it, you can’t win. I could do a play at Mount Auburn Cemetery set on the moon, but why? The audience will have spent all their imagination jumping to this new place. There are things that I can do in these spaces that I could never afford to pay to do. In a theatre I could make a full moon but it’s not going to be the same as a real full moon with the wind blowing on you at 9 o’clock at night in the middle of a cemetery. We also did this play about the Armenian genocide in the Mount Auburn Cemetery and when someone died, they would exit and they would walk away from the action, but the exits would take five minutes! The play would be continuing, and these people would be just walking way off in the background. When we performed at dusk when characters died, they would just wander into the gloom and disappear, in a lighting effect that would take a huge amount of money to replicate in the theatre, but the earth was doing it for us! You also have the dramatic tension in the fact that these events happened in the same place that they are being reimagined and that your audience knows this. Yes! The audience has that feeling, but so do the performers. When we were at Mount Auburn, I knew one of the actresses had gone to visit the grave of one of the people that she had portrayed in the Armenian play, this young woman who had died in childbirth shortly after arriving in America. It’s impossible for that not to deepen your performance as an actor. There is this richness that you feel. When we did Blood on the Snow it was intense because the play depicts this meeting that happened the day after the Boston Massacre, but you’re in the room where this meeting took place 250 years ago and there are 50 audience members crammed in with a dozen cast members but they are all in the room and you can feel the bones of the place all around you. The people feel so alive, and the audience soaks it in. Amanda J Collins and Robert Najarian in Consecration. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. References About The Authors Talya Kingston is a playwright, dramaturg and educator working primarily in new play development and theatre for social change. She is the Associate Artistic Director at WAM Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline By Published on April 29, 2023 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (Re)Generation was developed with a faculty fellowship from University of Miami Jessica Bashline and MK Lawson, the creators of (Re)Generation interview one another to document and archive the process of the piece as well as offer a model for those interested in engaging with an outdoor urban Tour-style performance outside of the traditional tourism environment. (Re)Generation follows two women and links their lives to the place they inhabit and the ghosts that surround them. One, a single mother living in contemporary NYC; and the other Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President. The First Act follows a playwright, Jessica, as she goes through her morning, walking through the park and trying to find a place to concentrate on preparing to pitch her play to a theatre company. While Jessica doesn’t speak out loud the audience listens to her inner monologue on their own headphones as they follow her through the park. Act One ends with a scene between Jessica and Victoria Woodhull sitting on a park bench having a conversation through time and space. The Second Act brings us back, physically, to where Act One begins—this time we follow Victoria Woodhull through the 30 minutes leading up to her scene on the bench with Jessica. And now the headphones come off. Act 2 happens in real-time with three actors speaking on the streets of New York City. The audience winds up on the same park bench, watching the same scene that ended Act One. The play is an exploration of time and space, reality and illusion, and the very real search for kindred spirits in a world that has become increasingly isolated. (Re)Generation was developed and performed in Washington Square Park in NYC in August of 2021. MK: Hi- here we are, back on Zoom… JESS: I know, I hate it! MK: I figure we can start with me asking you a few questions since the piece originated with you, and then we will move forward from there. Sound good? JESS: Sounds good. MK: Ok- tell me where this piece began? JESS: (Re)Generation started as an amalgam of scripts I had been working on for a few years, originally imagined as traditional theatrical pieces. The first script started six or seven years ago as a monologue: a divorced single mother trying to write a lecture on place as a character in literature; specifically, New York City. Over the years I created scenes for this character that took place throughout her daily life, a convention that I played with a lot in the writing of that work initially was that the audience never saw the people our lead interacted with, her family and friends were always offstage, or just around the corner. The only real people she interacted with were the people she briefly encountered in the city. I was exploring isolation and loneliness in a city of millions. The piece never worked—and I put it away for years. A few years later, I became fascinated with Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president in 1872. I began to write about her, because her story is amazing, and played with the idea of intertwining the two stories—as they both seemed to revolve around New York City as a place of reinvention. But I could never find the right story to tell. So—into the dropbox of script pieces these stories went…Until COVID. I went back through my dropbox of script pieces and came across the writing I had about this single, divorced mom trying to figure out her life and career while feeling isolated and alone in a place so full of people; and Victoria Woodhull. I knew I wanted to play with a COVID-safe way of making this piece that allowed humans to connect in real life. I landed on promenade theatre, allowing audiences to follow actors through the city streets. And then I called you! MK: Yes you did. JESS: And I think I said—we are going to make theatre that doesn’t live on Zoom— MK: YES! JESS: And we were obsessed with trying to figure out how to create COVID-safe live performance that wasn’t just theatre outside, that allowed for the way the theatre was made and performed to be a part of the journey of the piece. MK: I loved the idea you had for creating two very different acts of the play. If I remember right- you came to me right away with the fact that you wanted Act 1 to exist in the character of Jess’ mind—it was her inner voice—and so the audience would be listening to her through their headphones. JESS: And then Act 2 would be more traditionally theatrical, with actors speaking out loud to a communal audience. MK: Yeah- that was exciting to me as a way of exploring isolation in two different ways. JESS: And in the park! MK: So the first act is about Jess, walking through a contemporary Washington Square Park, and the second about Victoria Woodhull, and takes place in 1872. JESS: And I really couldn’t conceive of the form this would take until I called you. And the beauty of the fellowship money I received from the University of Miami was that it was for research, about discovering something new. There was no pressure to have 700 people show up at a performance. Which was such a gift. MK: Right it was. We really did get to say, okay, Well, what might this look like? I remember thinking about how formless it was at the time. How part of the intrigue was we don't have to know what this is. We could just have seeds of ideas. Especially coming out of the pandemic. I can remember you asking a lot in our first call– What is the experience we want people to have? Rather than, what is the play we want to do? JESS: Yup- it felt really freeing to ask that question. And that is the question I am focused on a lot now. MK: The next thing I was gonna ask is about the historical piece: Victoria Woodhull. Because the idea that you had that really captured my attention was this idea that we could be somehow listening to someone's inside voice. We could get inside of someone, isolated from the world, by their own thoughts in this sense. And that kind of personal experience was really interesting. But then there was this historical piece. Can you talk a little bit about how the historical piece came in, and the importance of that. JESS: So the original piece was very heavily influenced by New York as a city. It started actually with this 4-page monologue about New York City and the architecture, and how the architecture told stories and spoke to her. And I, as a New Yorker, have always felt incredibly drawn to this idea that people come to my home, the place where I was born, where my family was born. People come to this place and create these huge lives for themselves here. But with that, we also have so many small, regular lives that live here. But you rarely hear about them. MK: Oh, yes, the juxtaposition. JESS: Yes- the juxtaposition of those 2 things: of this woman who is just trying to live her life and have a conversation with a human being, and Victoria, who lived an outlandish, amazing life, that she could only have lived in New York. She had to move to New York in order to become this thing that she became. MK: I was just thinking about all the different conversations we had about how this play was going to work. Once we made the decision of the basic ways we were going to hear Acts 1 and 2. JESS: It is so fun to go back on a process that I feel so far away from, and also for me, was a process that dated back even longer than that, years before you were involved. My favorite was bringing you a whole bunch of stuff that I'd written that was kind of incoherent and trying to find form. What if we follow her into a coffee shop? And what if things happen? And we plant people? And there are actors everywhere, and every interaction is staged? MK: Those were grandiose days. JESS: At one point we talked about her leaving her apartment, and we were going to have conversations coming from the building, but in all kinds of languages; all the conversations that might have ever existed on that one piece of land before, which is really interesting to me. Built in was always this idea of, what is this history? MK: And how is someone distilling it in her mind? Right? And how do we connect with each other across time? I feel like that's when time started to become a question in the process. And then there was a moment where we realized that Acts One and Two would happen in a parallel timeline. We would follow the contemporary actor through Act One. And then essentially, the audience would see that Act Two would be that same time Loop. JESS: That was the one thing that we kept from all that early writing. The scene between Victoria Woodhull and Jess is almost verbatim from an earlier draft. MK: Yes. That scene of the two of them, meeting across time and space, I think, became the thing we held on to, and it was like, how do we get there? JESS: I have a question for you. Talking about your dramaturgical and directorial process. Once we figured out the structure: the first act would be me walking through the park with an audience following me with headphones in; people listening to my inner thoughts versus the second act which was a more theatrical structure, what challenges did that present for you? Dramaturgically and Directorially, bringing audiences into those experiences? MK: I feel like from very early on the biggest challenge in Act One was almost logistical. Because what we had was sort of nothing but permission to try something that we weren't sure how to do. How do we record this thing? How do we even rehearse this thing? How do we take scripted text and let it become thoughts that we can hear? And in a public park that was being used by the public? No permits or rentals. Essentially all of the variables that you can control in a theatre. We had none of those at our disposal, aside from being able to design a track that people could listen to. I think some of my favorite memories were scouting locations. I’d never thought about location scouting for the theatre, and that became a thing we got to do. We got to think about what serves our story, what serves this format that we're creating as we go. And I remember walking around and thinking not only what is functional, but getting to dream a little bit. How might these characters move through this space, and could they have really been here? How might we be able to invite whatever is going to naturally occur in the creative process without knowing what even that was going to be. Like traffic? I’m having a memory of how to pull traffic into the scene with Victoria Woodhull, and thinking… What is traffic to them? It can't exist, but also as actors, they have to pay attention to the fact that they need to be heard over New York City traffic. I feel like we accommodated a bit of that in choosing location. Ultimately. JESS: People have asked me, if you had to categorize what this is. Would you call it a tour? Would you call it a promenade theatre? And I just don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that—but maybe MK does. MK: You know. I remember thinking about a conversation we had asking: what could this be? In other places, and with other historical figures. But a theatrical tour doesn't feel like it quite covers it. Because we were after something very different about human experience. Yes- you were going to cover some ground and learn something. But we wanted it to do the thing that theatre does. Connecting people to a place or another person, or even to an idea. If we lost the construct of time, what does it feel like for me to try to connect back in time? We were also constantly thinking about the theatricality. Thinking about what we could do in the next incarnation- Jess: With more money! And time! MK: Yes. And more members of the team. JESS: Is there a better word then? Promenade Theater maybe? MK: Maybe promenade-- But in terms of promenade I think, I'm gonna arrive somewhere and a thing is gonna happen then I'll arrive in a new place. (Re)Generation felt more fluid. JESS: What was so interesting to me was when we made the decision, and I I don't even know when we made the decision, whether I did, or you did, or whatever. But at some point we said- Well, clearly the scene with Victoria and Jess will happen twice. The same scene must happen twice, right? At the end of Act One, and then it has to have it again at the end. What we started talking about was this sort of circular nature? Each of them was trapped in this circle. And so I think I agree with you- promenade feels like it starts in one place and ends somewhere else. So maybe we made something new—a theatrical Dosey-doe! MK: I also think it’s important to say that we were also talking a lot about patriarchy and hierarchical structures in theatre making. And something about this circular structure also felt right for the way we worked together. JESS: Making this piece without a typical theatrical hierarchy. MK: Yeah. Can we just collaborate in a way that is egalitarian? Best idea in the room, or the best idea in the park wins. JESS: I will say, like as the person who brought in the initial idea, and did most of the writing. I felt so supported by the kind of lack of structure of our structure. We know each other well. So it just felt natural. MK: Yeah. JESS: Maybe it's because I came in with so little you know. I just remember you asking me about a million and a half questions. So what happens here? What happens here like? Why, Why, why, why, Why, why? And what if we do this? And what if we do that? And what if we did this? In the best dramaturgical sense. But then I felt like once we got a thing that was up on its feet– we didn’t have traditional actor/director/writer structure. There was so much give and take, because there I was- an actor in Act 1. If you can call it acting, walking around Washington Square Park trying to find a park bench to sit on while a group of people with headphones trailed me. And we would have to video my walks- so we could try to time them out to possible recordings of the script. Which meant we got to go back to the tape together, so we could really talk through everything that was happening. MK: Washington Square Park- no permits. I mean, what sort of ballsiness it took to even attempt such a thing. JESS: Had we known quite how difficult it would be to make it work- I don’t know if I would have. But I’m glad we did. MK: I don't know if you remember. But we did pick up audience numbers along the way- in rehearsals and performance. I want to say how much that means to me, reflecting on this, looking back on it. In talking about a play, the seed of which was about isolation, the fact that we picked up audience makes me remember that our first question was- what do we want people to experience? How do we get people experiencing other humans again? In NYC we are so isolated, I’ve got my headphones on, thinking about a million other things or ways I feel inadequate. Or things I didn't get done, or groceries I need, or this song that won't get out of my head, and I could so easily miss everything going on around me. And to think that what we were after was sort of manifested in the very idea that people were awake enough to go, hey- Something's happening here that I'm not expecting and I’m going to hop on the party. JESS: People got the link, put on their headphones and caught up with me. My favorite person who joined us was a lovely man, who was unhoused. He was sitting in our “performance” area, and stayed with us from the dress rehearsal. After the rehearsal he heard us talking about performance and he asked- Do you mind if I stay here and watch? And I was like, first of all, it's the park, you can do whatever you want. But also absolutely! And he wound up watching the whole thing. But he didn't have headphones, he was just watching people watch me! Which was fascinating! I will never forget that at the end of the piece, he said, Thank you so much, I see the musicians all the time, but I don't get to go to the theatre very often. MK: That's great. Because again we think of the back to this hierarchy -how restrictive and how much theatre is inaccessible at times. How do we dismantle that a little bit? This feels like a good place to ask something like what do you feel like you learned, and if you could just do the next incarnation this summer, what would you do differently? JESS: Well, I’m still really interested in isolation and the idea that place has memory. These are consistent themes for me. I would love to look at this piece again. I'd love to look at it now, not from a place of fear. (Re) Generation was created from a place of fear that we would never get back inside a theatre again. And I wonder about looking at it now, coming from a place of generosity from a place of opening that space- MK: because it deserves to be opened. JESS: Yes. What about you? MK: It makes me think of that Ann Bogart essay. Talking about that distinction between making something from a survival mode versus a gift-giving mode. It feels like you articulated that exactly. JESS: So, I think we can wrap this up by saying, what did you learn making theatre in Covid? MK: I have learned that we have become a species that isolates by nature, which is terrible because we are not a species that isolates by nature. We may have made it through an epidemic of COVID, but we’re still suffering from an epidemic of loneliness in a very real way. JESS: And the live performing arts, music, dance, theatre these are some of the last bastions of community storytelling and tradition that are non-religious. And I think you can look at the rise of religion right now as just people desperately needing connections. Why can't we get a rise in the performing arts in the same way? MK: Right, and being able to have communion with history. I think it's something again that this piece, if you wanted to call it a theatrical historical tour, you know, whatever name you give it, there's something about the communion with a historical figure that is an incredibly empowering experience. It’s something you can’t take away from someone, that experience. JESS: You know what? MK: What? JESS: Let’s do it again– another city, another park, another historical figure. MK: I’m game when you are. JESS: Amazing. Jessica Bashline is an Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Miami, where she teaches acting and theater creation. She was the Artistic Director and co-founder of Strange Sun Theater , a theater company in New York City. Jessica is an award-winning playwright, director and actor currently touring her solo piece, Ann and Me: or the Big Bad Abortion Play. She has a BFA in Acting from Boston University and an MFA from Goddard College. www.jessicabashline.com MK Lawson has been teaching, developing and directing theatre professionally for the past 15 years. She has directed and/or choreographed award-winning productions for Atlantic Theatre Company, Florida Repertory Theatre, and WPPAC among others. She has also developed pieces for the NY International Fringe Festival and the NY Children's Theatre Festival. An interdisciplinary performing artist at heart, MK is currently the head of Musical Theatre for the Hotchkiss School in Northwest Connecticut. www.mklawson.com References ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. About The Authors ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jocelyn L. Buckner Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas Jocelyn L. Buckner By Published on May 23, 2020 Download Article as PDF by Jocelyn L. Buckner The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 32, Number 2 (Spring 2020) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center This American Theatre and Drama Society special issue of JADT features four essays that explore what “local” performance means across very different community contexts. Throughout the Americas, communities generate and are informed by performance in ways that reveal, challenge, and strengthen shared understanding about the identity of the local. Performance plays a role in articulating a collective representation of self not only to local residents, but perhaps also to communities outside the realm of the art work’s place of origin. The call for papers for this issue was inspired in part by Jan Cohen-Cruz’s Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States[1]. Cohen-Cruz explains that in community-based productions, members of a community are “a primary source of the text, possibly of performers as well, and definitely a goodly portion of the audience … Community-based performance relies on artists guiding the creation of original work or material adapted to, and with people with a primary relationship to the content, not necessarily to the craft” (2). This special issue builds upon Cohen-Cruz’s work to further explore the significance and influence of local and community-based performances, both past and present, across the Americas. This collection not only illuminates performance practices in specific locales by particular constituents; it also creates connections between studies of community performance and other methodologies and theories of theatre and performance studies. The five authors featured here consider performances in artistic residencies, immigrant communities, localized eco-tourism, and indigenous-language theatre. These pieces highlight culturally specific work generated at the local level, advance the argument for studies focused on performance tuned to community rather than commercial appeal, and draw correlations to larger social and artistic phenomena in the process. In “The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship,” Claudia Wilsch Case explores the local and regional impact of performances by members of Frank Lloyd Wright’s residential apprenticeship program. The Taliesin Fellowship encouraged its participants in a range of creative endeavors. Its amateur public performances developed into a popular attraction for local residents hungry for artistic experiences. Case provides detailed analysis of the apprentices’ early concerts and skits alongside film screenings from the 1930s, tracing the development of physical movement pieces inspired by Eastern mystic Georges Gurdjieff in the 1950s which, by the 1960s, had evolved into original dance dramas written and choreographed by Wright’s daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright. Case argues that the performances occurring at Taliesin and Taliesin West from the 1930s to the 1970s exemplified the Fellowship’s role in remapping the American cultural landscape. By privileging work developed locally, rather than dispatched from larger cultural centers such as New York, Case illustrates how the Taliesin Fellowship cultivated area audiences’ appreciation for locally crafted performances, reinforcing community ties while also priming them for the US regional theatre movement. Sarah Campbell advocates for a multi-faceted approach to studying Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula, arguing that it is often perceived as insignificant due to how it has been treated in scholarship. In “’La conjura de Xinum’ and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre” Campbell considers Maya language theatre as an “art world,” defined as a system of interconnected participants determining the reception and influencing the significance of a piece of art. She highlights how dialogues surrounding Maya identity reflect the ways external alliances intersect with community members and organizations that produce theatre, resulting in varying valuations of this work. To illustrate her point, Campbell provides a compelling argument for considering the context for and ensuing local and critical responses to a community-based performance in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, called “La conjura de Xinum.” Campbell makes the case that one should not dismiss the play as simply a fringe act by a community theatre troupe in rural Mexico; instead, the performance exposes the agency of Maya artists in promoting language and cultural revitalization. By illustrating the interconnected nature of artists, audiences, and scholars/critics, Campbell illuminates the roles of respective participants and their influence on the creation, perception, and valuation of Maya language theatre, both in the community from which it emerges and beyond. In “Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the ‘Toxic Mound Tours,’” Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz employ performance studies to examine how Ross privileges place, environment, and history in her performance, revealing the long term effects of environmental contamination and its consequences for residents living adjacent to the five stops on her Toxic Mound Tour. By featuring several spaces whose contamination dates back to WWII and Cold War era weapons production, Bauer and Kalz argue that Ross’s tour educates ecotourists on the environmental and health risks that the St. Louis community has assumed in the interest of national safety, thereby rewriting the local history of these spaces and their legacy for today’s community. Sharing their experience as ecotourists in their own community, Bauer and Kalz underscore the significance of featuring place as event to reveal how disparate individuals are linked through a deeper understanding of community spaces and a collective awareness of belonging. Arnab Banerji’s critical analysis of New Brunswick, New Jersey’s South Asian Theatre Festival (SATF) defines the dynamics of the festival’s shared creative community and the immigrant community’s efforts to affirm itself as a major American subculture. In “Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018,” Banerji asserts that the artists involved in the festival are not only celebrating their culture of origin, but also delineating its relationship with their new home culture here in the United States. While the SATF might at first glance be regarded as simply a public performance of plays, Banerji’s analysis of the audience’s engagement with the works, the mindful curation of festival content, and the cultural sensitivity given to the production of the festival, reveals the complex dynamics of immigration and integration at play on stage and in the audience for these performances. Through examining the SATF as a site for individuals of the South Asian diaspora to assert their cultural citizenship as well as an opportunity to perform acts of creative citizenship, Banerji illustrates how these artists appeal to an audience that does not necessarily conform to geographic, linguistic, and socio-cultural boundaries. Banerji’s piece contributes to the growing field of scholarship on South Asian American performance as well as local acts. As much as theatre and academic communities often privilege “professional” nationally and internationally recognized centers of cultural production, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing closure of virtually all productions and performance venues well into 2020 and beyond, has revealed how much we actually rely on local resources and artists for a sense of connection to one another and to ourselves. During these unprecedented times, what so many of us are searching for – and missing desperately – is the reassurance that comes from connection to community. Theatre has survived centuries of crises - from plagues, to world wars, to economic collapses. With each threat, theatre has always managed to realign with the needs of the audience, sometimes by relocating, whether that be to the outskirts of town or to cyberspace, and often by reframing the definition of “local” and where, how, and through whom artistic communities coalesce. The sphere of community held by theatrical performance is proving elastic in the age of the coronavirus, expanding to circle the globe and welcome audiences around the world who are hungrily streaming professionally produced, pre-recorded theatrical content online. Simultaneously, theatre has compressed to include synchronous, intimate, devised Zoom performances for audiences of one who have isolated themselves at home and are desperate for personal, human connection. By reimagining the parameters of production and participation by both artists and audiences, theatre and its communities will not only survive, but it will reinvent itself and its relevance to those looking for themselves and for a sense of belonging. This issue goes to press in the wake of ongoing violence against people of color, specifically the anti-Black violence evidenced in the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmuad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and many others, alongside the subsequent violence perpetrated against those peacefully protesting their deaths. The idea of community, at the local and national level, is being tested once again. Theatre artists and scholars are uniquely positioned to reflect on systemic prejudices, which are also manifest in the theatre industry at large. As scholars/artists/citizens we have an obligation to aid in the development of new community models both within our industry and at the local level that are committed to supporting and participating in anti-racist protests, pedagogy, and productions; honoring and mourning the lives of those who have been lost; amplifying voices of the marginalized and silenced; and advocating for messages of allyship, equity, and inclusion. Theatre must help heal and build community and I encourage you to find ways to participate in and support this work. As uncertainty and possibility simultaneously loom in the future of theatre and performance, this issue serves as an example of work yet to be done to herald the role of theatre and performance in defining and preserving community at the local level throughout the Americas. This issue was made possible by the support of Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society; the stewardship of JADT editors Naomi Stubbs and James Wilson and managing editor Jessica Applebaum; the dedication of members of our Editorial Board who contributed their time and expertise to fostering these essays; and the keen eye of editorial assistant Zach Dailey. I wish readers health and safety in these extraordinary times, and hope this scholarship inspires others to consider their relationship to local acts within their own communities. Editorial Board for Special Issue Dorothy Chansky Mark Cosdon La Donna Pie Forsgren Khalid Long Laura MacDonald Derek Miller Hillary E. Miller Heather S. Nathans Diego Villada Jocelyn L. Buckner is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Chapman University in Orange, California. She is the editor of A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (Routledge), and a former book review editor and managing editor for Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She has published articles and reviews in African American Review, American Studies Journal, Ecumenica Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, HowlRound, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Popular Entertainment Studies, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics, as well as book chapters in the collections Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere and Food and Theatre on the World Stage, and over a dozen entries in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting. Buckner is also the resident dramaturg of The Chance Theater in Anaheim, CA, and has collaborated with other theatres including South Coast Repertory Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Native Voices at the Autry, as well as London’s Donmar Warehouse and Theatre 503. She is the Vice President of the American Theatre and Drama Society. [1] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2. "Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas" by Jocelyn L. Buckner ISNN 2376-4236 Guest Editor: Jocelyn L. Buckner Editorial Board for Special Issue Dorothy Chansky Mark Cosdon La Donna Pie Forsgren Khalid Long Laura MacDonald Derek Miller Hillary E. Miller Heather S. Nathans Diego Villada 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: Jess Applebaum Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu Editorial Assistant: Zach Dailey 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 ‘Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas’” by Jocelyn L. Buckner” “The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship” by Claudia Wilsch Case “'La conjura de Xinum’ and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre” by Sarah Alice Campbell “Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” by Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz “Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical creative citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival” by Arnab Banerji www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu 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 ©2020 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.

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.

Claudia Wilsch Case Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship Claudia Wilsch Case By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tison Pugh Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tison Pugh By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF 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.