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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 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 About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Arnab Banerji 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.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle James M. Cherry By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. The principal undertaking of August Wilson’s playwriting career—the “Pittsburgh Cycle”—is a singular accomplishment in American theater. A series of ten plays highlighting the cultural shifts and stresses of African-American experience throughout the 20th century, the Cycle was written and staged over the course of three decades and completed shortly before Wilson’s death in 2005. Wilson situated his opus largely in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where he spent his childhood, a once-vibrant African-American community that fell into decay following failed urban development schemes and resultant poverty. Throughout the Cycle, Wilson connects the Hill District’s transformations to the larger history of African-Americans—slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, persistent institutional racism—and the ways in which these realities reveal themselves on stage in micro-histories of Black lives. Wilson also foregrounds the historical linkages of music, ritual, ceremony, and oral culture as critical dramaturgical elements. As their descendants replace characters on Wilson’s stage, these are the ties that bind still. The restoration of a fragmented ancestry is personified in the reoccurring figure of Aunt Ester, the wise woman who physically embodies the link across time to Africa. Taken together, the plays of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle can be seen as the work of playwright tethering a community to an obscured past. As Sandra G. Shannon rightly notes in her introduction to a new collection of essays, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays, the narratives that fill Wilson’s plays are not simply representations of African-American life, but are also intensely personal, “reflect[ing] the playwright’s own fragmented life exacerbated by a complete disconnect with his biological father, by his flight from a racist Pittsburgh’s school system, and by his discovery or “reunion” with the blues, Africa, Amiri Baraka, and by his newfound regard for the vernacular of fellow Pittsburgh natives” (5). For Shannon, as well as many authors in this excellent collection, Wilson’s dual roles as an “autoethnographer of the black experience,” and as “the wounded healer” (6) who confronts his own personal history as a way to make sense of the larger historical narrative, are essential to understanding Wilson’s great accomplishment; they are also essential to comprehending what Wilson’s vision of the twentieth century means in our twenty-first. Since August Wilson’s death, there have been many attempts to examine and reconcile Wilson’s completed project, and recent scholarly treatments of the complete Cycle resonate throughout the volume under review here. Shannon’s text joins an already active critical conversation, including Harry Elam’s touchstone work The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), a recent Cambridge Companion collection, and the frequent stagings of the plays across the country. Appropriately enough, Shannon’s collection ranges widely in subjects and inventive theoretical perspectives. Sarah Saddler and Paul Bryant-Jackson’s piece on Two Trains Running brings together Manning Marable’s advocacy of a multidisciplinary “living history” to reclaim the lost narratives of people of color, and Diana Taylor’s argument to consider the “embodied behaviors that serve to e/affect the outcome of the social drama, and thus “ history” itself” (53). Saddler and Bryant-Jackson conclude that Wilson creates a document of living history in which the political struggles of the 1960s are played out on a personal and spiritual level on stage. In another essay, Psyche Williams-Forson probes the Wilson’s frequent use of food as way to depict communal and gender relationships, citing Wilson’s own interest in cultural anthropology. These arguments reframe August Wilson not just as a significant “realist” playwright, but as a writer whose works respond to various theoretical frameworks. Wilson deploys African ritual in his plays, often as a way to reconnect with a lost heritage, and several essays in this collection tease out the various dramaturgical and symbolic meanings of this connection. Artisa Green’s analysis of the “Òrìșà archetypes, sacred objects, and spaces” (10) and the Yoruban week calendar “which comprises a seven day cycle characterized by daily attributes that resulted from events which occurred in Yoruba creation stories” (156), facilitates a significant new understanding of the spiritual architecture of Gem of the Ocean. In the case of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Connie Rapoo looks at Loomis’ “acts of sacrifice” (177) as ways to “remember the spiritual African past in order to restore cosmic order” and to reclaim a forgotten cultural identity. More significantly, this collection often shows how Wilson’s work uses history to reflect upon contemporary concerns. Isaiah Matthew Wooden’s piece on the fraught relationship between the American justice system and the African-Americans subject to it in Gem of the Ocean is deeply relevant to the America of Black Lives Matter and police action captured on cell phone video. The concluding essay by Susan C. W. Abbottson deploys the work of theorists Alan Wilde, John McGowan, and Linda Hutcheon to investigate the optimistic, inclusive humanism in Wilson’s work. For Abbottson, “what Wilson is modeling through this cycle are lessons of responsibility, connection, history, and identity, which combine to create a final vision of what contemporary society most needs: active democracy” (200). In illuminating the experience of Black people in America, Wilson’s “self-defining American chronicle for the ages” (199) also sheds light on the desires, anxieties, and possibilities of all human beings. The main utility of the August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is as a companion to, and an expansion of, previous Wilson scholarship. While it is inevitable for any collection to focus on some works more than others, Jitney (1982), Fences (1985), and Radio Golf (2005) are seldom addressed in this volume, though they are certainly topics of examination elsewhere. The inclusion of a production history of the Cycle would have made the text more user-friendly. Yet, the multiplicity of theoretical perspectives here acts as a provocation for other scholars to look at August Wilson’s work in new, inventive ways. Just as Wilson himself sought to forge links between the present and past, readers of his work should be encouraged to connect it with our present and future. James M. Cherry Wabash College The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 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.

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. 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Although she was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for drama and produced a diverse body of work critically esteemed in her time, Susan Glaspell’s dramaturgical innovations and contributions to US theatre have largely been overlooked by theatre history narratives for the better part of the twentieth century. With the possible exception of her feminist masterpiece, Trifles, Glaspell’s plays have not been anthologized or celebrated on par with those of her contemporaries, among them Eugene O’Neill, whose career was launched by the company she co-founded, the Provincetown Players. Building on the work of Linda Ben-Zvi, J. Ellen Gainor, and Marcia Noe, among others, Jouve’s monograph furthers the recuperative efforts of feminist scholarship to critically examine Glaspell’s dramatic oeuvre and theoretically position its significance to the development of modern drama. Following a concise biography of Glaspell’s personal life and professional achievements, Jouve positions her argument in conversation with Robert Brustein’s Theatre of Revolt (1962) in which Brustein, examining plays by celebrated male luminaries such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shaw, characterized modern drama as rebelling against communal values and espousing individualism in response to monolithic democratic cultural mores. Brustein singles out O’Neill in particular as the forerunner of the theatre of revolt and modern drama. Jouve, in turn, seeks to recover Glaspell’s significant contributions to the development of modern drama and Brustein’s so-called theatre of revolt, asserting that, “rebellion permeates every level of Glaspell’s dramatic endeavor, from content to form. […] Glaspell explored the potential of drama as an actual instrument of pacifist rebellion to an extent which few playwrights of her generation actually dared” (15-16). The book is divided into three parts. Part I “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Denunciation” begins by highlighting Glaspell’s lifelong passionate compulsion to write. Extrapolating from primary documents, such as a 1917 interview in which Glaspell declared that “almost everything in politics is a story,” Jouve argues that the genesis of Glaspell’s inspiration to write lay in questioning the “duplicity of American democracy” (21). Close textual analysis of Trifles (1916), Woman’s Honor (1918), and Alison’s House (1930) reveal how Glaspell’s protagonists, sometimes powerfully absent from the stage as in the case of Trifles’ Mrs. Wright, serve to critique the hypocrisy of democratic ideals that limit or exclude women from legal and public spaces. Productively engaging the notion of “deterritorializing the self” from Una Chaudhuri’s Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (1995), Jouve explores stage directions, settings, and space, arguing that in Alison’s House and many of Glaspell’s works, the domestic space, the home, is simultaneously a place of constraint as well as a site of creative freedom. This section also treats The Inheritors (1921) and Free Laughter (1917), which was only recently unearthed in 2010. Free Laugher, a comedic play about banning laughter, showcases Glaspell’s clever deployment of form as content. Part II, “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Resistance” draws on Brustein’s concept of revolt as well as Albert Camus’s notion of the rebel, first exploring the female protagonists of The People (1917), The Inheritors (1921), and Springs Eternal (1943). Categorizing the protagonists into two types of rebels, the idealist and the individualist, Jouve asserts that, for Glaspell, whose health was fragile, “writing was the most efficient mode of activism she was able to embrace, so she gave the stage to her fictitious combatants to lead the revolt” (94-96). Throughout the analysis, Jouve not only finds correlations between Glaspell and her characters, several of whom she portrayed onstage, but also breaks down Glaspell’s language at the rhetorical level, identifying how metaphor, repetition, verb tense, and alliteration underscore intention and theme. For example, in The Inheritors, Madeline’s dialogue depicts her as the ultimate “idealist rebel and mouthpiece of the playwright,” in the tradition of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” In The Outside (1917) and The Verge (1921) among other works, Jouve finds “individualist rebels” who differ from the aforementioned idealist counterparts putting “their own prerogatives before the common good,” prizing freedom of choice and defying gendered conventions of family and society (126). Included in this section is the first scholarly treatment of Wings, an unpublished, fragmented play from the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Jouve’s analysis of Wings positions the male protagonist among Glaspell’s individualist rebels who “desire to overthrow the cultural order,” freeing himself from the conventional role of male breadwinner to pursue his desire to fly. Here again, Jouve finds significance in setting and correlation among the playwright’s subjectivity and form and content, noting that the experimentation of form in Wings echoes the protagonist’s actions in The Verge: “Like her heroine who experiments with form in the 1921 full-length play, Glaspell takes her experiments a step further by resorting to expressionism in order to render the invisible by the visible, to make existential confusion visually manifest through the set” (135). In Part III, “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Hope,” Jouve contrasts Glaspell’s canon with Brustein’s “revolting” dramatists whose work critiqued existing conventions and institutions but failed to offer solutions or alternative ideas. Conversely, Glaspell’s drama “envisages collaboration as the alternative to conventional coercive patterns that split society into the oppressed and the oppressors, and as a means to achieve social harmony in the face of political and cultural abuses” (165). Jouve persuasively argues that Glaspell stages “positive revolts,” highlighting how collaboration manifests in some of the aforementioned plays through examples of sisterly, national, and international solidarity. This last section concludes by countering previous scholarship that has viewed the protagonists of Bernice (1919) and Chains of Dew (1922) as compromised in their feminist ethos for sacrificing their own self-empowerment to bolster their male counterparts. Citing Glaspell’s real-life choices in support of George Cram Cook, her professional and romantic partner, Jouve argues that these protagonists’ models of self-sacrifice “turn out to be covert strategies to undermine oppressive structures from within” (204). Jouve’s exhaustively detailed textual analysis helps to cement Glaspell’s place among the trailblazers of modern drama and is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship addressing Glaspell’s contributions. Jennifer-Scott Mobley East Carolina University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 34, Number 1 (Fall 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2023 DANCE Excerpt from Meow Love Werk, Hinny from Love to Love You, Stanley Love: A Memorial Celebration Stanley Love Performance Group Dance English 40-45 minute performance 7:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Stanley Love Performance Group performs excerpts from Meow Love Werk, Hinny selected from choreographer Stanley Love’s vast body of work to honor his life at a memorial celebration in August 2023. “If you dance, you’re a dancer.” – Stanley Love The PRELUDE '23 presentation of the Stanley Love Performance Group has been made possible by the generous support of Claire Montgomery, James MacGregor and LOCATION ONE, Linda Wells and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Content / Trigger Description: Language warning for brief use of curse word (shit) Stanley Love Performance Group (SLPG) was created in 1992 with the inaugural performance at DTW’s Fresh Tracks with Adam and Steve and the company’s first full evening in 1993 with Hello Cruel World. SLPG now works, since Love’s death in 2019, in partnership with The Stanley Love Legacy which exists to safeguard, care for and share the artistic works of choreographer Stanley Love. Instagram: @lovestanleylove Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Making of Pinocchio At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Cade & MacAskill Performance Art 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 17th. About The Film Country Scotland Language English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2021 A true tale of love and transition told through the story of Pinocchio. In this hybrid of theatre and film, shot and edited all in one take, you are invited to go behind the scenes of Cade & MacAskill’s creative process and their relationship, and question what it takes to tell your truth. Artists and lovers Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill have been creating The Making of Pinocchio since 2018, alongside and in response to Ivor’s gender transition. In this digital edition of the work, their tender and complex autobiographical experience meets the magical story of the lying puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’. With an ingenious scenography designed by Tim Spooner, layered with sound by Yas Clarke, lights by Jo Palmer and cinematography from Kirstin McMahon, the show employs split-screen, forced perspective and intimate close ups to constantly shift between between fantasy and authenticity, humour and intimacy, on stage and on screen. The Making of Pinocchio joyfully embraces the importance of imagination in queer worldmaking and the idea of transness as a state of possibility that can trouble fixed perspectives and inspire change. Commissioned by Fierce Festival, Kampnagel, Tramway & Viernulvier with support from Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Battersea Arts Centre, LIFT and Take Me Somewhere. Produced by Artsadmin. Funded by Creative Scotland, Arts Council England and Rudolf Augstein Stiftung with development support from The Work Room/Diane Torr Bursary, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, National Theatre of Scotland, Live Art Development Agency, Gessnerallee, Mousonturm, Forest Fringe, West Kowloon Cultural District & LGBT Health & Wellbeing Scotland. Created by Rosana Cade & Ivor MacAskill Performed by Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill, Jo Hellier & Moa Johansson, Tim Spooner & Ray Gammon Set, Prop & Costume Designer: Tim Spooner Sound Designer: Yas Clarke Sound/AV Technician and show operator: Riwa Saab Cameras: Jo Hellier & Moa Johansson Lighting Designer: Jo Palmer Relighter: Meghan Hodgson, Marty Langthorne Cinematographer: Kirstin McMahon & Jo Hellier Produced by Dr. Nora Laraki & Nene Camara for Artsadmin Creation produced by Mary Osborn for Artsadmin Production Manager: Sorcha Stott-Strzala Assistant Stage Manager: Ray Gammon Outside Eye: Nic Green Movement advisor: Eleanor Perry Captioning: Collective Text, Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill & Jamie Rea Caption Design: Yas Clarke & Daniel Hughes About The Artist(s) The duo holds the audience with a brand of mischievous humour that’s provocative and reassuring in equal measure.’ Exeunt Cade & MacAskill are Rosana Cade (they/them) and Ivor MacAskill (he/him): renowned queer artists and facilitators based in Glasgow, Scotland. Their work, together and individually, straddles the worlds of experimental contemporary theatre, live art, queer cabaret, film, children’s performance, site specific, and socially engaged practices. Their collaboration is born from a shared love of subversive humour, experimentation with persona and text, playful theatricality, and the joy they find in improvising together. They also share a passion for LGBTQIA+ rights and culture. They create strange, rich aesthetic worlds on stage, with unique sonic elements embedded into their work due to ongoing collaboration with sound artist and designer Yas Clarke. In 2017 they were commissioned by Fierce - Birmingham, The Marlborough - Brighton, and The Yard - London, to create Moot Moot which premiered early 2018. This was then selected as part of the British Council Showcase and the Made in Scotland Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2019, where it enjoyed a sell-out run at Summerhall, and they began to tour this show across Europe before the pandemic hit. Since 2018 they have been working on ‘The Making of Pinocchio’, which was supported though residencies at Gessnerallee in Zurich and Mousonturm in Frankfurt, as well as The Diane Torr Award bursary. They also regularly perform across club, music and performance contexts as their experimental concept band ‘Double Pussy Clit Fuck’. Footage from these gigs has inspired the creation of two new video works during the Covid Pandemic: ‘Taps Aff’, and ‘Presenting Our Selves’. The latter was commissioned by The Place - London for Splayed festival 2020, and selected as part of Scottish Queer International Film festival 2021. They are both experienced facilitators and trained volunteers with LGBT Youth (Glasgow). They are currently in the process of setting up a co-operative to open a new LGBTQIA+ second-hand shop / community space in Glasgow. Get in touch with the artist(s) nora@artsadmin.co.uk and follow them on social media Artists: @cademacaskill (Twitter and Instagram)Producer: @artsadm (Twitter and Instagram), @Artsadmin (Facebook)Fierce Festival @fiercefestivalKampnagel @kampnagel_hamburg (Instagram) @kampnagel (Twitter)Tramway @GlasgowTramwayVIERNULVIER @viernulvier.gent (Instagram) @VIERNULVIERGent (Twitter)Attenborough Centre of the Arts @AttenboroughCtrBattersea Arts Centre @Battersea_ArtsLIFT @LIFTFestival Website: https://www.cademacaskill.com/ https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/project/the-making-of-pinocchio/ Social media handles Twitter and Instagram: Commissioners and supporters: Take Me Somewhere @TMsomewhere 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.

The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 Theater, Documentary This film will be screened in-person on May 20th and also be available to watch online May 16th onwards on the festival website for a period of 3 weeks. About The Film Country Poland Language Polish Running Time 53 minutes Year of Release 2022 In the film “Revolution 21” we are introduced to Theatre 21, a Warsaw-based professional theatre group which has been staging performances for the last 17 years. Founded by Justyna Sobczyk, a theatre teacher and director, it consists solely of actors with Down syndrome. They start work on a new performance entitled “A Revolution Which Never Was There”, using the protest of the disabled in Polish parliament as their inspiration. Able-bodied actors are also invited to take part in the performance. Nobody receives any special treatment. Full commitment is required from each member of the cast, everyone is treated equally. The work model in Teatr 21 is very innovative. Most of the rehearsals rely on acting improvisations on the subject set by the director (revolution, sexuality, independence, political cabaret, rehabilitation, etc.), accompanied by live music written by the band POKUSA. This working process arouses heated discussions between the actors on the subject of nudity on stage, the involvement of theatre in politics, the limits of privacy and the courage to ridicule themselves on stage. DIRECTING: Martyna Peszko SCRIPT: Martyna Peszko DOP: Magdalena Mosiewicz EDITOR: Olga Kałagate MUSIC: Zespół POKUSA SOUND: Martyna Peszko, Adam Buka, Konrad Wosik PRODUCTION: Fundacja Teatr 21 COPRODUCTION: Mazowiecki i Warszawski Fundusz Filmowy, Katarzyna Tymusz About The Artist(s) Martyna Peszko » Graduate of the National Academy of Theatre Arts in Krakow and the DOK Pro workshop at Wajda School. She studied at Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique in Paris, Lee Strasberg Institute in New York, and Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. As an actress, she was associated with Teatr Ludowy and Stary Teatr in Krakow, National Theatre and Drama Laboratory in Warsaw. She received the Jan Machulski prize for the best actress. She debuted in 2020 with the short documentary "Tell Me More". AT FESTIVALS: 65th International Festival of Documentary and Animated Film DOK Leipzig, Germany, 2022 (competition) 10th Tripoli Film Festival, Lebanon, 2023 (competition) Get in touch with the artist(s) m.sulecki@teatr21.pl ; a.mahmud@teatr21.pl and follow them on social media https://www.facebook.com/revolution21film Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban Danielle Rosvally By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Real Time Fires As a researcher of the nineteenth century, I am no stranger to the destruction of collective memory vis-à-vis archival failure. Theatre fires are an omnipresent force in dialogues about every aspect of nineteenth century performance history knowledge, particularly speculative thought about what we do not know. Consider, for instance, the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903—the second deadliest single building fire in US history (second only to 9/11). (2) Jane Barnette has explored this historic event through spectator testimonials. (3) Barnette proceeds with caution because, as she argues, the spectator experience, and particularly performed spectator experience, is innately biased. This nuance is reinforced through Jewel Spangler’s exploration of the 1811 Richmond Theatre Fire—when it occurred, it was America’s deadliest urban disaster—in which Spangler reminds the reader that curation of the archive is a communal act of editorial significance. (4) Who is left out of the story is as important as who is kept in. Whose story is told, and how, is continually shaped and re-shaped by the things that are kept: the journals that were deemed important enough to pass down through history, the images that were created and saved and who they depict, and the generations of choices that archivists both formal and informal made about what should take up precious space in physical holdings say as much about the event these holdings document as their contents do. This question of space is greatly nuanced in the digital era as information becomes easier to store in smaller footprints. The question of performance, too, has experienced similar shifts as platforms for theatre and performance have become greatly diversified. While analog theatre spaces continue to host precious and precarious repositories of information, robust archives of performance also exist in the digital realm via many platforms including social media. (5) As I watch congressional proceedings and national conversation surrounding the threatening potential of a TikTok ban in the United States throughout 2023 and into 2024, I cannot help but feel an uncanny similarity between historical theatre fires and the impending potential destruction of a massive repository of performance. What have we lost to the ashes that we might not even know is gone, and what (then) might we lose if history repeats itself? The difference, of course, is that I watch this slow burn in real time; the possibility of a day when I open my phone to find a pile of burnt charcoal in place of the familiar stylized TikTok icon does not seem so far away. I have often longed for a time machine to access unburnt relics of the past, and I feel as though I am being offered just such an opportunity with TikTok. To those of us paying attention, there is the possibility of packing a fireproof safe with a few pieces of content for safekeeping should a ban occur. What is at stake if TikTok, like the Iroquois or the Richmond Theatre, burns to the ground? What would happen if the United States experienced the same ban that has already been enacted in India or Hong Kong? Users from these regions describe how, overnight, their access to the platform and even their own back videos, was completely gone. (6) Too many theatre historians and performance scholars dismiss TikTok as a frivolous platform for Gen Z to make viral dance videos, participate in trends, and review products. (7) This dismissiveness plays right into the current political narrative being pushed by those who actively seek to annihilate the TikTok repository. But there is more to this app than the surface-level reading of its detractors. TikTok is a keystone to contemporary culture-making and a critical artifact of life in the COVID-19 era. (8) Losing TikTok to government action would not simply be a shame for Millennials and Gen-Z micro-influencers, who would no longer have their virtual playground, but would in fact be a significant blow to the preservation of pandemic-era collective trauma memory. Historians are well aware of the wide-ranging impact of a loss like this in myriad ways such as: further marginalizing already-minoritized voices; allowing mass re-writing of historical information and erasing individual trauma from national memory; and pointedly glorifying certain groups while villainize others. At present, TikTok is poised to combat these threats, but only if it can persist as a repository of theatrical information. The Looming Threat As I consider the proverbial contents of my fireproof safe, let us examine the spark that threatens to engulf this collection. For the past several years, TikTok has been at the center of debates in the United States regarding data security. On August 6, 2020, President Donald Trump attempted to use executive power via Executive Order (EO) 13942 to create a ban specifically targeting TikTok citing threats to national security. The arguments he made boiled down to a perceived threat caused by Chinese ownership of TikTok’s parent company (ByteDance) and provenance of data collected via the app. (9) After multiple court cases which ruled in favor of TikTok, President Joe Biden signed further EOs that repealed and replaced Trump’s and pledged to create better policy for regulating sensitive user data across diverse platforms. (10) Since then, TikTok has been a topic of conversations centered in the idea of security risks. In December of 2022, Biden signed a bill that prohibited the app on government devices. (11) On March 7, 2023, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act or the RESTRICT Act (S. 686) was introduced to the senate as a bipartisan bill aimed to ban foreign technologies from operating in the US if they pose a risk to national security. (12) While TikTok is not named explicitly in the bill, it is fairly transparent what is being targeted. On April 14, 2023, the Montana State Legislature passed Senate Bill 419, “An Act Banning TikTok in Montana,” becoming the first US state to ban TikTok. (13) SB419 was signed by Montana State Governor Greg Gianforte on May 17, 2023. (14) The bill was set to go into effect on January 1, 2024 but then TikTok sued the state in an effort to block it (an effort which was ultimately successful as a court ruled on November 30th 2023 that this was a violation of the first amendment). (15) On March 13, 2024, the United States’s House of Representatives passed HR 7521 a bill called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” which would, effectively, ban TikTok in the United States. (16) This bill was later tied to an essential foreign aid package (House Resolution 815), unanimously passed in the House on April 19, passed in the Senate on April 23, and was signed into law by President Biden on April 24. (17) I argue these conversations center around “the idea” of security risks rather than their actuality because all publicly available information in early 2024 indicates that TikTok poses no greater threat to an individual user’s data than any other social media app in common use. In March 2023, the Internet Governance Project, an organization based out of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy whose mission is to perform independent analysis of global internet governance, posted a study done by Milton L. Mueller and Karim Farhat which found, among other things, “The data collected by the TikTok app is very similar to the data collected by its peer competitors. This data can only be of espionage value if it comes from users who are intimately connected to national security functions and use the app in ways that expose sensitive information. These risks arise from the use of any social media app, not just TikTok. They can easily be mitigated without banning the app.” (18) I will return to the specific motivations behind targeting TikTok in spite of the evidence below. In considering this ban, I turn to the wisdom of Stephen King who—in the face of book bans—encourages kids to go to the library, “get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don't want you to know. In many cases you'll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition.” (19) While the information currently available to the public does not point to a TikTok-specific security risk, it does indicate something more sinister about a greater worldview. The consumer tendency to diminish the platform leans into this harmful rhetoric. As Stephen King urges, let us go to the proverbial library by way of a primer on what TikTok is and how it works. TikTok is a social media app where users create, share, view, reshare, and comment on short-form videos. TikTok built on the popularity of Vine, another short-form video-sharing app that lived a brief but formidable life from 2012-2017. Notably: Vine videos were capped at 10 seconds. (20) 2019 saw TikTok begin to flourish in the United States—growth that would continue in the pandemic years to come. (21) It was the “most-downloaded app of 2020” when users were stuck in their homes with no way to connect in real time. (22) Instead, clearly, they connected on TikTok. And, since TikTok archives even as it offers a platform for performance, this makes TikTok the most robust and egalitarian archive of pandemic-era life in current existence. I pause here briefly to consider my use of the term “archive” for this collection. In 2003, Diana Taylor introduced the terms “archive” and “repertoire” to refer to two very different but intertwined systems of knowledge preservation. The “archive,” to Taylor, represents a gathering of materials collected through objects—memories mediated by recording technologies. “‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistance to change.” (23) The “repertoire” is a collection of embodied knowledge, “performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing, in short all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.” (24) In her 2010 meditation on her prior work on Archive and Repertoire, Taylor added that: Digital technologies constitute yet another system of transmission that is rapidly complicating western systems of knowledge, raising new issues around presence, temporality, space, embodiment, sociability, and memory (usually associated with the repertoire) and those of copyright, authority, history, and preservation (linked to the archive). Digital databases seemingly combine the access to vast reservoirs of materials we normally associate with archives with the ephemerality of the ‘live.’ (25) Taylor has never conceived of the “archive” and “repertoire” as a binary (not in 2003 when she first introduced these paradigms, nor 2010 when she revised them to include the digital); rather Taylor has always argued that these three things “overlap and work together and mutually construct each other.” (26) To Taylor, the digital will never replace the archive since they require each other vis-à-vis this mutuality. Social media platforms have always enabled a form of performance; the putting-on of an avatar self to encounter the world in certain ways makes performance via social media innately entwined with social media use. (27) Theatre companies over the years have taken this invitation more literally and created full performance pieces over social media. (28) The pandemic ushered in a new wave of this phenomena: as we became isolated, we sought connection via digital art. Sarah Bay-Cheng asks “If we have seen the performance and the documentation, can we readily distinguish between the two? What if we have not seen the original performance, but we have seen detailed recordings? ... How do I delineate the performance I attended from the digital records I have collected, especially those that are personal to me in my mobile phone?” (29) Digital media blurs these boundaries and presents the opportunity for a broadened definition of memory spaces. (30) When considering TikTok’s applications to the pandemic-era audience and user base in light of the app’s pandemic-era popularity, part of this usage pattern lies in TikTok’s multiple facets as a platform. In addition to providing a viewing space, TikTok has a native editing client which allows users to turn their smartphones into recording suites: they can record, edit, upload, and shape videos all from the app itself. This reduces access barriers and effectively allows anyone with a smartphone to single-handedly become a content creator. (31) TikTok is also incredibly good at creating audiences by connecting users with niche interests. The app’s proprietary algorithm shows users content it believes they will like based on their interactions with other content. Unlike legacy social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, TikTok’s user experience is largely driven by a rotating “for you page” (FYP) that greets users when they open the app. The FYP is a constant scroll of videos that the algorithm has discovered for the user. The more a user interacts with TikTok, the better the algorithm becomes at predicting a user’s interest and providing them with things relevant to these interests. Because of the strength of the algorithm, TikTok enables niche audiences to find each other (a feature, Trevor Boffone and I have argued, which amplifies the voices tend most to be marginalized from mainstream archives, namely: queer, POC, and femme voices). (32) This aspect of TikTok’s usage, along with its prominence as a repository of pandemic-era performance, makes TikTok a vital tool to understanding and remembering life during the COVID-19 Pandemic. TikTok and Collective Trauma Memory Like a theatre, TikTok enables community building and content on TikTok exists in robust multi-modal conversations. Cremation of this theatrical repository would also incinerate these community ties because, unlike an analog theatre, TikTok’s communities are connected almost exclusively via the app and its features. In essence: as a theatrical repository, TikTok enacts collective memory. Collective memory is the idea that memories are not individual experiences, but rather connected to a greater whole. In his 1925 meditation On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs proposes that all memories are collective memories. Even individual memories, that is: something that one individual person remembers in a room by themselves, is connected to a bigger picture. It is impossible to remember, argues Halbwachs, without creating some kind of discourse or connecting with some other perspective of the memory and this makes memory collective. (33) Considering TikTok, this description perfectly encapsulates how the app functions. TikTok allows users to respond to each other directly on posts using various frameworks. There are, for instance, more traditional means such as comments (i.e. simple text responses). But TikTok has one-upped the comment by giving creators the option to either respond in old-school text, or to compose a video response in which the comment will be visible at the top of the screen for whatever duration the creator chooses to set (see Figure 1; Creator @theanissagarza Responds to a Comment with a Video ). (34) Additionally, creators have the option to “stitch” on to other videos (to take another creator’s video and append their own content to the end), or “duet” a video (to have another creator’s video playing in half the screen while they record something going on in the other half). Duet videos allow creators to discourse across time and space—to hear and react in the fractured time-space of the internet but nonetheless more directly than legacy platforms have previously enabled whether the duet shows togetherness (as in Figure 2 where dancers are moving synchronously together to do Bob Fosse’s iconic choreography to “Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity ), or conversation (as in Figure 3 where two singers are enabled to sing in duet even amidst 2020 lockdowns ). (35) In this way, TikTok facilitates not just community-building, but also citational practices since original creators are, by default, identified in stitch and duel videos, as well as para-textual commentary. Sometimes, a call to duet will so wildly circulate on TikTok that it inspires its own sub-movements (called a “trend”). The Rich Man’s Frug became one such trend. In noticing a dominating presence of white dancers putting out Rich Man’s Frug videos, user @djouliet made her own call to action with the sound and choreography—mimicking the trend’s original creator @markstephen60 by doing the dance in her kitchen but calling out “come on, Black girls, let’s go” to invite other femme Black dancers to duet her. User @itsjust_lydia took up the call (see Figure 4; Black Dancers Claim Space with the “Rich Man’s Frug” ). (36) This is one example of how TikTok enabled creators who did not see themselves represented in a certain conversation to take control of the narrative and add their voices to a growing archive. While such interaction paradigms differ from those enacted in more traditional theatrical performance spaces, performance scholarship is already equipped to deal with them. Pascale Aebischer calls such interactions “ platea -based engagement” (referencing the medieval paradigms of locus as the mode of performance where a performer is quietly in a world of their own behind the proscenium arch and the platea as the mode of performance that invites the audience to comment on or engage with the performance in the here and now). (37) Valerie Fazel has argued how Aebischer’s notion of platea -based engagement might be used to more deeply understand marginal commentary on digital performance, especially on YouTube. (38) TikTok is a new generation of platform, but some of its uses are common with its ancestors. As a collective model of platea -based engagement, TikTok’s opus represents a communal construction of memory, and (specifically) pandemic-era memory. But “communal” does not necessarily mean “collapsed.” Because of TikTok’s strength at allowing creators to find other members of their own communities, the platform is unique in its ability to enable vibrant individualism. In her work on theatrical production during the shelter-in-place era, Dani Snyder-Young recognized a melting pot-esque treatment of audiences by performers and platforms. (39) Not a single pandemic-era performance examined by Snyder-Young’s research team displayed exceptionalism when dealing with its audience, but rather treated them as an amalgam and erased nuance. This is not what TikTok does. Because the algorithm is so good at connecting content and audience, TikTok content creators are encouraged to “let their freak flag fly,” and they will be connected with others who enjoy even incredibly niche content. This aspect of the platform effectively democratizes the archive and allows voices that Spangler notes are not frequently preserved in disaster narratives guaranteed spaces in the story. In Spangler’s words: “The archives themselves, and what they contain, are shaped by the understandings, needs, and desires of the powerful. To be sure, we can search out sources that purport to allow the disempowered to speak, or seem less influenced by elite perspectives, yet we have to be aware that so long as the archive is still the well from which professional historians primarily draw, the problem of power will always be with us.” (40) Because of the ways in which the pandemic had an undue impact on communities of color, this is an important ethical element of preserving pandemic-era memory. (41) While TikTok’s user demographics broken down by race are not currently available, a 2021 study done by Pew Research Center speaks to a degree of diversity in TikTok users. (42) According to this study, 31% of Hispanic US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users, 30% of Black US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users, and 18% of white US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users. Accordingly, TikTok’s ability to highlight and encourage individuality is both unique and necessary and underscores the stakes of taking this repository seriously. The COVID-19 pandemic was a moment of global collective trauma, and it is no coincidence that TikTok’s rise to prominence paralleled this. The work of scholars like Dena Al-Adeeb, Noe Montez, and Belarie Zatzman have explored the ways populations who have experienced collective trauma have created collective memory. (43) Past theories of collective memory have located it as a nexus of projects generally connected with nationalization. In an analog world, this makes complete sense. But there are two extraordinary forces at play with collective trauma memory in regard to COVID-19 and TikTok. First: the global nature of the pandemic. Second: the fact that TikTok overcomes geographic boundaries by way of its accessibility and international presence. TikTok connects content creators over broad swathes of the world. Not only is TikTok accessible from a technological standpoint, but language barriers do not stand in the way of the several visually oriented genres that make TikTok’s bread and butter: dance challenges, culinary videos, cosplay trends, lip synch. Because of this, TikTok’s oeuvre is what Astrid Erll would call a study of “transcultural memory,” or a mnemonic device which transcends the containers of a single culture or incident and instead reaches a global community. (44) Erll coins the term “traveling memory” to encompass a sense of “the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders.” (45) TikTok serves as the medium for such traveling memory, and the destruction of the TikTok archive would mean an end to these proverbial transformations. It would mean not just a collective forgetting of the specifics the archive held, but also the destruction of the transformative possibilities that time and space could give to eccentric short-form videos containing incidents from day-to-day life and the creative reimaginings of collective trauma. Terri Tomsky devised the notion of “traveling trauma,” which is trauma which is able to move upon similar pathways as commerce in a digital world; either via analog or digital means. (46) To Tomsky, trauma can be viewed in similar ways that Edward Said views the notion of “theory” and “traveling theory”: it can be interpreted and re-interpreted by the communities who receive it globally. (47) Tomsky also created the idea of a “trauma economy” wherein trauma can be viewed under similar terms as production and capital: when the market is flooded with it, it becomes less valuable or holds less meaning. (48) I can think of few times in history when global trauma was as fungible on an international market than during the COVID-19 pandemic and assorted lockdowns. During this time, global isolation flooded the trauma market and human contact was a critical missing feature in our daily lives. So, while trauma was, perhaps, less meaningful (according to Tomsky’s paradigm) because of its prevalence, connection was more meaningful because of its lack. This market was part of TikTok’s recipe for success. Sarah Bey-Cheng has made the case that “the digital image is … not only a marker of memory… such images may now serve primarily as a kind of social connection.” (49) Boffone further argues that the pandemic-driven need drove massive global audiences to bond over “silly” dances, or share what life in lockdown was like via TikTok. (50) Tina Kendall highlights this function of TikTok in pandemic life, after all it offered “a means of working… performative play.” (51) In addition, Kendall argues, TikTok thrives off of the bingeability of its content— the never-ending scroll allowing a locked-down user endless access to more. (52) Thus TikTok provided a valuable commodity to a hungry market: the commodity of connection. Networking and community creation were a key part of TikTok’s marketing of itself in its early years and (as previously discussed) the app is exceptionally good at this task. (53) The marriage of market need with ready commodity availability is certainly one reason why the pandemic saw an uptick in TikTok usage, and in April 2020 the app crested 2 billion downloads which was the “best quarter for any app ever.” (54) In the United States at least, it is safe to say that TikTok is a commodity of the pandemic. If archival memory is political, and collective memory even more so, so is social forgetting. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William Rosenberg emphasize this: “resistance to remembering is an equally powerful determinant of its moral, political, and social uses, especially if this resistance is abetted by the archives.” (55) Litigious action to try and exterminate the memorial cache that is TikTok threatens the collective memory of this trauma-driven time. There is, of course, a time and place for forgetting. Marita Sturken argues that forgetting is a necessary part of memory formation, and that “to remember everything would amount to being overwhelmed by memory…. Yet the forgetting of the past in a culture is highly organized and strategic.” (56) The politicization of this particular act of cultural forgetting entwines TikTok in the mire of racism that is linked with the pandemic in general. COVID-19, in its early days, was characterized by Donald Trump and far right followers as a “Chinese virus,” and this language has been called out as a root of xenophobia and anti-Asian racism during the pandemic era. (57) It cannot be ignored that the anti-TikTok legislation is flavored with the same type of xenophobia and anti-Chinese sentiment. Returning to an earlier thread: if the issue was about data security, as politicians contend that it is, then why not pass reasonable laws to govern that? Why target a single app? In Montana, the April 2023 attempt to make Senate Bill 419 apply to any “social media applications that send data to foreign adversaries” and shift the language of the bill from addressing threats posed by “the People’s Republic of China” to instead address “foreign adversaries” was rejected. (58) In her very first TikTok ( Figure 5: AOC’s First TikTok: A Statement on the TikTok Ban ), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses these issues and the notion that proposed legislation has been put forth, purportedly, to combat a national security risk. (59) Ocasio-Cortez notes that such risks are, historically, presented to Congress via classified briefing when they are first identified and no such briefing had been provided regarding TikTok and Chinese data infiltration. The racism in anti-TikTok rhetoric became even more clear via the various congressional hearings regarding the app. On March 23, 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was called to testify before congress regarding the app’s usage of data, and the company’s relationship to the Chinese government. (60) The word “communist” appears in transcripts of that testimony 97 times. The phrase “Chinese communist party” appears 51 times, the most frequently-repeated three-word phrase in the testimony. (61) On January 31, 2023, Chew was again called to congress (this time along with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and X CEO Linda Yaccarino) to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the impact of social media on children. (62) During this hearing, all three CEOs were asked detailed questions about child protections on their platforms but Chew (notably the only one of these businesspeople who is not white) was the only CEO asked about his nationality and relationship to China. Senate Republicans Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, and Tom Cotton repeatedly hammered Chew about this relationship, Cotton going so far as to pester Chew about his citizenship through multiple questions as Chew continued to emphasize “I’m Singaporean.” (63) Accordingly, the undercurrents of xenophobia ring strong in the US attempt to institutionalize a massive act of forgetting. Despite allegations of national security threats via the app, the IGT report finds no evidence of a threat via TikTok to the US and, moreover, finds that, “Banning TikTok would impose unfair harms on millions of innocent American users of the app, who have established equity in their creations and followers. It would expropriate investors and eliminate hundreds of US jobs. … The attack on TikTok is really a kind of proxy war waged by a specific political faction in the US.” (64) It is once again time to remember Stephen King. Since the undertones of Anti-Asia(n) racism are now clear in anti-TikTok rhetoric, it is important that we take a closer look at what, exactly, this rhetoric is trying to make us forget. Let us go back to the library and check out some more banned books. Social Media, Social Memory Screens have an important place in the institutionalization of social memory. Sturken cites psychological research that “people often misremember the moment when they first heard of a national catastrophe by reimagining themselves in front of a television set. This particular mechanism of remembering, whereby we imagine our bodies in a spatial location, is also a means by which we situation our bodies in the nation.” (65) In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, this notion of re-envisioning the catastrophe in front of the screen was a process rather than a single moment. While the announcement of preliminary lockdowns certainly caused a wave of psychic shock, it was as the pandemic drew on for years that the true extent of collective trauma would begin to unreel itself. In 2024, we are still unpacking the effects of this trauma. Destroying TikTok’s repository of memory before history has been able to take full account of what is happening thus has destructive potential of unknown capacity. In trying to contend with what social media networks mean to the idea of collective memory, Andrew Hoskins argues that mediated memory can be viewed as a kind of “memory ecology” with each part of memory functioning like a part of a bio-organism. So, what happens when you amputate the leg of memory? Alison Landsberg’s theory of “prosthetic memory” addresses how mediated moments of history that an individual did not personally witness can be appended to a person’s memory like a prosthetic limb might be appended to a person’s body. Prosthetic memory, to Landsberg, is a memory that is “adopted as the result of a person's experience with a mass cultural technology of memory that dramatizes or recreates a history he or she did not live.” (66) While Landsberg’s theory might seem to answer my above query, unlike Landsberg’s prosthetic memories the TikTok archive of our shared pandemic time relates a history we all lived. It is not that dramatizing the pandemic in real-though-not-linear time introduces us to what pandemic living was like, but rather connects and connected us to aspects of this experience that were either very similar to or very different from our own. In this case, the mediated memory allows us to more fully engage with the collective trauma of pandemic living, and better understand how we (as humans living in the world) coped. As a case study, let us consider Stephen Sondheim. On November 26, 2021, Sondheim died at the age of 91. At this time, vaccines were available, but mask mandates were still enacted in states like New York. No at-home treatments were yet available for COVID-19. While Broadway had re-opened in September of 2021, audiences were still required to mask. The day of Sondheim’s death, TikTok user Jonny Perl posted a simple video of himself at a piano playing the opening notes of Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” (the opening number of his musical by the same name; see Figure 6: Jonny Perl at the Piano ). (67) Sondheim had a special relationship with this show. A piece about how artists relate to their work and legacies, Sunday in the Park with George contains lyrics that Sondheim would later use as the titles for two books of collected lyrics and autobiographic stories: Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat . (68) Accordingly, the selection of this music to accompany a short-form video memorial for its composer is fitting. Over the next few weeks and months, other TikTok creators used Perl’s sound to form their own memorial videos. Tyler Joseph Ellis, for instance, filmed a montage of himself visiting George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” at the Art Institute of Chicago ( Figure 7 ). (69) User Sam Black choreographed a short dance piece to Perl’s sound ( Figure 8 ). (70) Other users dueted Perl with the spoken text that an audience would usually hear when this music was played in the theatre ( Figure 9 ). (71) Another user used Perl’s music to underscore a process video of themselves making a Sondheim-themed mask ( Figure 10 ). (72) Individually, these videos serve as touching tributes to a master of American musical theatre. As a conglomeration, they create a communal statement of memory in dialogue with each other. They allowed Sondheim fans to grieve in real time, though geographically distant from each other still in dialogue together. At a time when large gatherings entailed no small amount of risk, this connection created community. Sturken uses the term “technology of memory” to encompass not just the things that help memory (physical mnemonics such as objects, images, memorials, etc.), but also the body. The immune system, she argues, is a subset biological system of memory since it remembers the viruses it has previously encountered. (73) Sturken discusses this in regard to HIV and the AIDS epidemic, a period of history that has been widely compared to COVID-19 not the least because the leading national expect on both diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was the chief American voice during both healthcare crises. As I have contended throughout this essay, TikTok is a crucial technology of memory for the cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic, a virus which is notoriously immune-evasive and tricky for our bodies to fight. This novel coronavirus is something science is working every day to uncover more about, to explain more about how the body does or does not remember encounters with it, and how and why long COVID manifests. The systemic forgetting of a TikTok ban would enable not just the destruction of a specific archive of embodied performance, but also can be seen as none other than a metaphorical blow to the social collective along the very same lines. Forgetting what the pandemic was like at its height is a matter of national security—a matter of protecting those most vulnerable in our society. It is an act of violence to forget how we coped with social distancing, the zany things we did to find connection, and the silly skits we made to try and take ourselves somewhere else. The pandemic is still too fresh for there to be a national memorial or act of institutionalized memory commemorating those lost. (74) TikTok is the closest we have to such a thing. Destroying this repository is baldly political, boldly detrimental, and would constitute an egregious act of erasure. Theatre history scholars would do well to remember how such acts have impacted our work over time, and how burning it down has created hierarchies of remembering in archival footprints. Theatre fires erase massive repositories of information from archival memory that can only be reconstructed through careful piecemeal work that has the high possibility of omitting critical under-represented stories. In the same way, TikTok enables remembering things we cannot afford to forget. Historians and scholars must pay even closer attention to its fate unless we tacitly approve such erasures from collective memory. Editor Note: All videos in this essay are available as a YouTube playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ7A05JBnG_BgJdsklZt9mYtyFFVmNI9V&si=PipeRqsVDapSvMaQ References The author would like to thank Trevor Boffone for his feedback on early drafts of this essay This data can be found on the webpage of the National Fire Protection Agency, the NFPA: “Deadliest Single Building/Complex Fires and Explosions in the US | NFPA,” National Fire Protection Agency, accessed May 6, 2024, https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-research/fire-statistical-reports/catastrophic-multiple-death-fires/deadliest-single-building-or-complex-fires-and-explosions-in-the-us . Jane Barnette, “The Matinee Audience in Peril: The Syndicate’s Mr. Bluebeard and the Iroquois Theatre Fire,” Theatre Symposium: A Journal of the Southeastern Theatre Conference 20 (2012 2012): 23–29. Jewel L. Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory: Telling the Story of Gilbert Hunt, Hero of the Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811,” Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 4 (2019): 677–708, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2019.0086 ; The fire killed over 70 people including the Governor of Virginia. For more information on the fire specifically, see: Meredith Henne Baker, The Richmond Theater Fire: Early America’s First Great Disaster (LSU Press, 2012). Many scholars over the years have argued about this, but the most pertinent argument to this article can be found in: Trevor Boffone, “TikTok Is Theatre, Theatre Is TikTok,” Theatre History Studies 41 (2022): 41–48. An in-depth examination of this was done by Planet Money: “Nervous TikTok,” Planet Money, accessed January 3, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956558906/nervous-tiktok . Trevor Boffone, “‘It’s Just TikTok,’” Conceptions Review, September 13, 2022, https://conceptionsreview.com/its-just-tiktok/ . For more on TikTok’s power to generate culture, see: Trevor Boffone, “The D’Amelio Effect TikTok, Charli D’Amelio, and the Construction of Whiteness,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States , ed. Trevor Boffone (New York: Routledge, 2022), 18. Federal Register. “Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok, and Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency With Respect to the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain,” August 11, 2020. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/11/2020-17699/addressing-the-threat-posed-by-tiktok-and-taking-additional-steps-to-address-the-national-emergency . Bobby Allyn, “U.S. Judge Halts Trump’s TikTok Ban, The 2nd Court To Fully Block The Action,” NPR , December 7, 2020, sec. Technology, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-trumps-tiktok-ban-the-2nd-court-to-fully-block-the-action ; The White House, “FACT SHEET: Executive Order Protecting Americans’ Sensitive Data from Foreign Adversaries,” The White House, June 9, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/09/fact-sheet-executive-order-protecting-americans-sensitive-data-from-foreign-adversaries/ . David Ingram, “Biden Signs TikTok Ban for Government Devices amid Security Concerns,” NBC News, December 30, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-ban-biden-government-college-state-federal-security-privacy-rcna63724 . Mark R. Warner, “S.686 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): RESTRICT Act,” legislation, March 7, 2023, 03/07/2023, http://www.congress.gov/ . “An Act Banning TikTok in Montana,” SB 419 § (2023), https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billhtml/SB0419.htm . Ayana Archie, “Montana Becomes the First State to Ban TikTok,” NPR , May 18, 2023, sec. Politics, https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176805559/montana-tiktok-ban . David McCabe and Sapna Maheshwari, “TikTok Sues Montana, Calling State Ban Unconstitutional,” The New York Times , May 22, 2023, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/technology/tiktok-montana-ban-lawsuit.html ; “ACLU and EFF Applaud Ruling Halting Montana TikTok Ban,” American Civil Liberties Union (blog), accessed December 21, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-ruling-halting-montana-tiktok-ban . Mike Gallagher, “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” Pub. L. No. HR 7521 (2024), https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Protecting%20Americans%20From%20Foriegn%20Adversary%20Controlled%20Applications_3.5.24.pdf . Cathy McMorris Rodgers, “Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2024, and for Other Purposes,” H.R. 815 § (2024), https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr815/BILLS-118hr815enr.pdf . Milton L. Mueller and Karim Farhat, “TikTok and US National Security” (Internet Governance Project, March 1, 2023), 26, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/TikTok-and-US-national-security-3-1.pdf . Stephen King, “The Book-Banners: Adventure in Censorship Is Stranger than Fiction,” The Bangor Daily News , March 20, 1992. TikTok videos recorded in the app are capped at three minutes and must be a minimum of fifteen seconds. One can, however, upload a video not recorded in the app that can be up to ten minutes long. Trevor Boffone, Renegades (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1–3; Trevor Boffone, “The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States , by Trevor Boffone (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2022), 5; Boffone, “TikTok Is Theatre, Theatre Is TikTok,” 42. Jing Zeng, Crystal Abidin, and Mike S. Schäfer, “Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 3161–72. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. Taylor, 20. Diana Taylor, “Save As... Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,” Imagining America 7 (2010): 3. Taylor, 3. For more on this, see: Danielle Rosvally, “The Haunted Network: Shakespeare’s Digital Ghost,” in The Shakespeare User , by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). A few salient examples are Such Tweet Sorrow (a 2010 collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Mudlark Production Company which told the story of Romeo and Juliet via Twitter) and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013, Royal Shakespeare Company) which used the now-defunct Google+ to perform a digital version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27, no. 3 (2017): 330. In another forthcoming essay, I propose the term “meso-archive” for these liminal spaces. For the purposes of this paper since I am not explicitly discussing the intricacies of storage and retrieval, I will use the term “archive” to reference TikTok’s collection of performance. Statistically, this is a large swathe of the US population. As of November 2023, 92% of US adults have at least one smartphone and the rate of smartphone ownership does not vary substantially by race or ethnicity. “How Many Americans Own a Smartphone? 2024 | ConsumerAffairs®,” November 1, 2023, https://www.consumeraffairs.com/cell_phones/how-many-americans-own-a-smartphone.html . Trevor Boffone and Danielle Rosvally, “Yassified Shakespeare: The Case for TikTok as Applied Theatre,” in Applied Theatre and Gender Justice , ed. Lisa Brenner and Evelyn Cruz (New York: Routledge, Forthcoming); Spangler also notes this omission of marginalized voices in her examination of how the voices of enslaved peoples are often lost from narratives about the Richmond Theatre Fire and archives in general: Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory.” Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory , trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 53. @theanissagarza. "Pandemic Theatre!!," TikTok, February 4, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@theanissagarza/video/7060995383224421678 . @oneinkimillion. "Love This Song and Show," TikTok, October 6, 2020. https://www.tiktok.com/@oneinkimillion/video/6880674673688841477 . Unfortunately, since @djouliet has since made her original video private, I cannot tell how many others did but I have seen several examples including: @itsjust_lydia. "Come on Black Girls - Let’s Get into That Fosse!," TikTok, April 30, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjust_lydia/video/6957074188783914245 ; @mahoganymommy. "I’m Rusty, but I Gave It a Shot," TikTok, April 24, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@mahoganymommy/video/6954766488880336133 Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 13–28. Valerie M. Fazel, “‘A Vulgar Comment Will Be Made of It’ YouTube and Robert Weimann’s Platea,” in Shakespeare’s Audiences , by Peter Kirwan and Matthew Pangallo (Abingdon, UK: Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 183–97. Dani Snyder-Young, “We’re All in This Together: Digital Performances and Socially Distanced Spectatorship,” Theatre Journal 74, no. 1 (March 2022): 1–15. Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory,” 677. J. Nadine Gracia, “COVID-19’s Disproportionate Impact on Communities of Color Spotlights the Nation’s Systemic Inequities,” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 26, no. 6 (December 2020): 518, https://doi.org/10.1097/PHH.0000000000001212 . “Who Uses TikTok, Nextdoor,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, accessed January 11, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/who-uses-tiktok-nextdoor/ . To name a few: Dena Al-Adeeb, “Trauma, Collective Memory, Creative and Performative Embodied Practices as Sites of Resistance,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12, no. 2 (2016): 268–74; Noe Montez, Memory, Transitional Justice, And Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017); Belarie Zatzman, “Applied Theatre Encounters at Canada’s National Holocaust Monument,” Canadian Theatre Review 181 (2020 Winter 2020): 1, https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.181.003 . Though, of course, TikTok has subcultures which emerge geographically, as well as regional nuance to its status as culture. TikTok is not viewed or treated the same way in every part of the world. For more on TikTok as regional culture, see the many wonderful projects affiliated with the TikTok culture research network: https://tiktokcultures.com/ Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 11. Terri Tomsky, “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 50. Tomsky, 51. Tomsky, 53. Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology,” 327. Boffone, “The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” 5. Tina Kendall, “From Binge-Watching to Binge-Scrolling: TikTok and the Rhythms of #LockdownLife ,” Film Quarterly 75, no. 1 (September 1, 2021): 43, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.1.41 . Kendall, 42. Milovan Savic, “From Musical.Ly to TikTok: Social Construction of 2020’s Most Downloaded Short-Video App,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 3173–94. Craig Chapple, “TikTok Crosses 2 Billion Downloads After Best Quarter For Any App Ever,” accessed April 14, 2023, https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-downloads-2-billion . Francis X. Jr. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 110. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, and Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism,” The New York Times , March 18, 2020, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/us/politics/china-virus.html . Blair Miller, “Montana House Advances TikTok Ban, Rejects Amendment to Make It Apply More Broadly,” Daily Montanan , April 14, 2023, https://dailymontanan.com/2023/04/13/montana-house-advances-tiktok-ban-rejects-amendment-to-make-it-apply-more-broadly/ ; Jameson Walker, “Amendment to Senate Bill No. 419,” accessed June 5, 2023, https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/AmdHtmH/SB0419.002.002.pdf . @aocinthehouse. "Some Thoughts on TikTok," TikTok, March 24, 2023. https://www.tiktok.com/@aocinthehouse/video/7214318917135830318 . The full hearing can be seen here: “Full Committee Hearing: ‘TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms,’” House Committee on Energy and Commerce, accessed May 31, 2023, https://energycommerce.house.gov/events/energycommerce.house.gov . Justin Hendrix, “Transcript: TikTok CEO Testifies to Congress | TechPolicy.Press ,” Tech Policy Press, March 24, 2023, https://techpolicy.press/transcript-tiktok-ceo-testifies-to-congress . A full transcript of this hearing can be found here: Hugh Allen, “Senate Hearing with CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Discord About Child Safety 1/31/24 Transcript,” Rev Blog, accessed February 29, 2024, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/senate-hearing-with-ceos-of-meta-tiktok-x-snap-and-discord-about-child-safety-1-31-24-transcript . For a video of this incident, see: ‘I’m Singaporean!’: TikTok CEO Fires Back at GOP Senator Pressing Him about Possible Ties to China | CNN Politics , 2024, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/02/02/tom-cotton-shou-zi-chew-singaporean-tiktok-testimony-vpx.cnn . Mueller and Farhat, “TikTok and US National Security,” 26. Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering , 26. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 28. @jonny.perl. "Original Sound," TikTok, November 26, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@jonny.perl/video/7035053268883590405 . Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (New York: Knopf, 2010); Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (New York: Knopf, 2011). @tylerjosephellis. "May His Memory Be a Blessing. Forever," TikTok, November 29, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@tylerjosephellis/video/7036160901216570630 . @samtheboynextdoor. "Sam Black," TikTok, December 14, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@samtheboynextdoor/video/7041666130166942981 . @ward027. "#duet with Jonny.Perl," TikTok, November 27, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@ward027/video/7035420095564270895 . @thebadjujudesign. "Sometimes People Leave You, Halfway through the Woods," TikTok, November 27, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@thebadjujudesign/video/7035113597479030062 . Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering , 12. Though several local memorials have been built, and there is at least one effort to create a national memorial: “Home,” COVID-19 Memorial Monument, accessed March 7, 2024, https://covidmemorialmonument.org/ . About The Authors Danielle Rosvally is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo. Her forthcoming monograph ( Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century New York City , State University of New York Press, 2024) considers the commodification and economization of Shakespeare’s work in America’s nineteenth century. Danielle's interest in the digital has fueled past work on database methodologies in humanist text, social media, and the personification of Shakespeare by performers/users. Her next project, Yassified Shakespeare (co-authored with Trevor Boffone; @yassifiedshax on TikTok), is a multimedia exploration of how iterations of Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare’s cultural capital critically intersect with drag and drag aesthetics. Her work has been seen in Theatre Topics, The Early Modern Studies Journal, Studies in Musical Theater, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Fight Master Magazine. She is the co-editor of Early Modern Liveness (Bloomsbury 2023), and the forthcoming special issue of Shakespeare dedicated to contingency titled "Inessential Shakespeares: Contingency, Necessity, and Marginalization in Early Modern Drama." Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Editorial Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF We are honored and delighted to be the incoming co-editors of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . We have a long connection to the journal through our mutual alma mater at The Graduate Center, CUNY where the journal is housed at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and supported by the work of students in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance. We would like to thank James F. Wilson and Naomi Stubbs for more than a decade of stewardship of the journal and for their editorial guidance and labor to keep the journal positioned at the forefront of issues facing American theatre. We will do our utmost to not only continue, but also build upon their legacy and those that came before them. The journal’s association with the American Theatre & Drama Society is also significant as we are both active members of the society and strongly believe in its mission. We are also grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers who make scholarly publication possible. The field of drama, theatre, and performance in the Americas continues to expand in scope, form, style, representation, and content. We are deeply invested in continuing to support work that covers the entirety of the Americas while exploring intersectional issues of identity and history within this vast geographic area and ensuring diversity in both authorship and subjects covered in the journal. We welcome articles with a primary basis in history and/or theory that explore issues of identity across race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and age. JADT's publication schedule consists of two issues per year: one general issue co-edited by us, and another special themed issue curated by a guest editor. We will continue with this model moving forward. We accept articles on a continuous basis and encourage authors to reach out to us with ideas for articles in advance. All full-length articles go through the traditional peer review process. We remain committed to keeping the journal open access and digitized through the generous work of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center directed by Frank Hentschker. In addition to submitting articles, we hope you will support the journal by reading it as we welcome feedback from all sources. This issue features the first collection of articles, interviews, and reviews that have fallen entirely under our purview. We begin with Valerie Joyce’s analysis of Rags , a short-lived Broadway musical meant to be a successor to Fiddler on the Roof . By looking at the way choreography tells the story of immigrants, assimilation, and acculturation, Joyce makes a case for the importance of choreography in the process of creating audience empathy for immigrant characters, which is clearly an important topic to this day. Next, we move to Danielle Rosvally’s exploration of TikTok as an important digital archive of performance, particularly of performances during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rosvally likens the proposed bans and restrictions of TikTok to theatre fires and other major losses of archival information in the pre-digital age, deftly weaving this digital performance archive together with more traditional brick and mortar theaters of the past and present. The following article, by Thomas Arthur, chronicles Jamaican actor Sidney Hibbert’s life in terms of his post-colonial experiences performing in a variety of different national contexts. This microhistory both highlights and contextualizes Hibbert’s extraordinary abilities among the transitional period of history his life spanned. Our final article is a roundtable conversation between Jim Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Daniel Diego Pardo about the archival materials left by noted theatre critic, translator, and historian Michael Feingold who died in 2022. Nicola, Elder, and Pardo discuss and work through a small sliver of the material left in boxes after Feingold’s death. In doing so, they peer into Feingold’s legacy and uncover often-overlooked pieces of queer history he engaged in, the backstory of downtown theatre, and the founding of yale/theatre which later became Theater magazine. The issue also features four book reviews that mark the end of Maya Roth’s tenure as our book review editor. We thank her for her years of service and careful curation of the book review section. We are also delighted to feature our first collection of performance reviews in this issue. Performance reviews will continue to be a feature of the journal going forward, and we are happy that this section will continue to support our mission of spotlighting performance throughout the Americas. We hope our readers enjoy all of the excellent contributions in this issue and we welcome submissions of articles, interviews, book reviews, and performance reviews. Reach out to us at jadtjournal@gmail.com . 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 . Bess Rowen (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” Other recent work can be found in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders & Sexualities , Theatre Survey , and The Eugene O'Neill Review , among other publications. She also serves as the LGBTQ+ Focus Group Representative at ATHE and as the 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. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2024 An Hour With Francesca D’Uva FRANCESCA D'UVA 8-9 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Francesca will present material from her solo show, This Is My Favorite Song , which will premiere at Playwrights Horizons in November. The show, written over the last three years, examines her relationship to comedy before and after her father's death. Directed by Sam Max Originally commissioned by Abrons Arts Center, currently being produced by Playwrights Horizons 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). Francesca D'Uva is an experimental comedian living in Brooklyn. Often employing her background in electronic music, she alternates between improvised storytelling and meticulously crafted mini-musicals that take the audience on a chaotic and strange journey inside her mind. She has performed all around New York City and at venues like MoMA PS1, MOCA and Ars Nova. Francesca was the 2022 Performance AIRspace Resident at Abrons Arts Center, culminating in her solo show, This Is My Favorite Song , which will have its Off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons in November. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

< Back The Art of Assembly Florian Malzacher The Art of Assembly surveys theatre today to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. Drawing on numerous examples from around the world in performance, visual art, and activist art, curator and author Florian Malzacher examines works that draw on the particular possibilities of theatre to navigate the space between representation and participation, at once playfully and with sincerity. In a time of wide-ranging crisis, The Art of Assembly is a plea for a strong definition of the political and for a theatre that is not content merely to reflect the world’s ills, but instead acts to change them. More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Jose Fernandez By Published on December 13, 2016 Download Article as PDF The early works of Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez reflect some of their aesthetic, social, political, and ideological convergences that coincided with the tumultuous period of social protest during the 1960s and 1970s. Both playwrights defined their social and artistic work by engaging with issues of race, ethnicity, justice, and nationalist aspirations for their respective groups at a critical juncture in American history. The death of Malcolm X marked an ideological shift in Baraka’s artistic work when he formed the Black Arts Repertory in Harlem in 1965; for Valdez, it was the Delano grape strike of 1965 that led to the creation of the strike’s artistic unit, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Worker Theater). Their dramatic work during this influential period of black and Chicano theater was closely connected by their critique of social and economic conditions of marginalized members of their respective groups—blacks living in major urban cities and Chicano farm workers in California.[1] Several scholars have discussed the aesthetic, cultural, and social significance of the works of Baraka and Valdez within their respective groups and the larger American theater tradition,[2] but only Harry Elam has studied their work comparatively. In his study Taking It to the Streets, Elam systematically explores their social protest theater by focusing on their points of convergence and similarities.[3] Elam argues that living in a multi-ethnic society, “demand[s] not only that we acknowledge diverse cultural experiences but also that we investigate and interrogate areas of commonality. Only in this way can we move beyond the potentially polarizing divisions of race and ethnicity.”[4] Cross-cultural studies, Elam adds, should “challenge the internal and external social restrictions and cultural expectations often placed upon critics of color to study only their native group.”[5] My comparative analysis of Baraka and Valdez is informed by Elam’s emphasis on the importance of comparative studies that stress points of convergence between African American and Chicano theater in order to examine the parallels of both groups’ trajectory in their fight for social inclusion that is reflected in their artistic output. In this essay, I examine Baraka’s The Slave (1964) and Valdez’s Bandido! (1981) and how both plays imaginatively challenge prevalent historical narratives of their respective groups by reexamining significant historical events—the legacy of slavery and the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) respectively—through their use of the revolutionary archetype in order to situate the history of African Americans and Chicanos within the larger U.S. historical narrative. An element that distinctively connects The Slave and Bandido! is their use of experimental elements that reflect some of the characteristics associated with postmodernism, such as the challenge of historical accounts by dominant groups, the marginalization and fragmentation of subjects who destabilize a totalizing historical narrative, and in the case of Bandido!, the use of self-reflexivity to disrupt and undermine its own narrative. A comparative analysis of the plays’ emphasis on the history of violence, oppression, and discrimination, and their aesthetic representations of revolutionary figures, reveals points of convergence in the playwrights’ artistic work that in turn reflects larger commonalities within the African American and Chicano theater traditions. The Slave engages with the era of slavery through the representation of Walker Vessels as a revolutionary leader in a contemporary context who carries the legacy of armed resistance dating back to the antebellum era. The Slave innovatively reshapes special and historical chronologies by presenting Vessels at the beginning of the play as a field slave in the antebellum South. The play’s events abruptly move to a race war between a black and a white army at an unnamed city and in an unspecified future. Vessels, now the leader of a black liberation army, returns to confront his ex-wife, Grace, and her current husband Bradford Easley, and to take his two daughters, who live with their mother and remain upstairs sleeping for the duration of the play. Their altercation results in the shooting of Easley by Vessels. As the advancing black army approaches the city and the shelling increases, the house is hit and Grace is fatally wounded. Before the house collapses, Vessels doubts the goals of his revolution and tells Grace that their two daughters are dead, possibly by his own hands. Bandido! recreates the life and myth of Tiburcio Vásquez, a historical outlaw and alleged revolutionary figure, and revisits the plight of Californios, the Spanish-speaking population in California, after the U.S.-Mexican War. Vásquez belonged to a prominent California family of Mexican descent who eventually lost his land and social standing after the war. Vásquez lived as an outlaw in California for years but was eventually captured. Bandido! covers key events in Vásquez’s last two years before his capture and prison sentence for his involvement at a store robbery at Tres Pinos, in Northern California, where three white Americans were killed. The play moves back and forth between vignettes of Vásquez’s life as an outlaw, his romantic life, and scenes at a San Jose jail before his execution. Before his capture, Vásquez confesses his intent to incite a revolution against the Anglo majority in California, but his plan fails to materialize, due in part to his own ambivalence regarding the consequences of a violent revolution. The Slave is often characterized as a representation of the volatile and racially charged politics of the sixties and Bandido! as a reflection of the conciliatory multiculturalism of the eighties;[6] however, both plays grapple with the ambivalence of presenting, to different degrees, the idea of overt armed revolution, which remains an unresolved tension throughout the plays. Although The Slave and Bandido! were originally staged in different periods,[7] Valdez’s play is a continuation of his previous work during the sixties, a time when both playwrights shared similar aesthetic and political views related to people of color’s shared struggle against oppression. It is significant that the revolutionary theme surfaces at a period in the playwrights’ careers when they wrote commercial plays targeted to broader and mixed audiences.[8] Before his more militant period working at the Black Arts Repertory, Baraka wrote critically recognized plays, most notably Dutchman (1964); similarly, when Valdez moved from Delano in order to professionalize El Teatro Campesino troupe, his project reached its peak with the Broadway production of Zoot Suit in 1979.[9] This is a contrast to the period when they produced social protest plays that were performed for predominantly black or Chicano audiences.[10] My analysis of the dramatic texts explores what Jon Rossini describes as the “aesthetic[s] of resistance” inscribed in Bandido! that are similarly applicable to The Slave.[11] The Slave stages a black revolution, and although Bandido! is considered a less confrontational play, or even containing “proassimilationist themes,” as Yolanda Broyles-González maintains,[12] Vásquez explicitly considers inciting an armed revolution in California against whites. Revolution and History in Baraka and Valdez Baraka and Valdez embraced nationalist aspirations for their respective groups and were attracted to revolutionary ideas during the early sixties, an influence that, although clearly reflected in The Slave, is also present in Bandido! Baraka and Valdez, as Elam explains, were not only artists, but also they were activists and social theorists of their respective movements.[13] In their early activism and plays, Baraka and Valdez shared a social and artistic vision that emphasized racial and ethnic consciousness based on militancy and nationalistic ideas. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Valdez acted as one of the intellectual theorists of El Movimiento (the movement), the more militant and nationalistic branch of the Chicano civil rights movement. Valdez’s early writings focused on the development of a Chicano identity embedded with nationalism, indigenous myths, and Catholic symbols.[14] After Valdez moved from Delano, he commented that El Teatro Campesino’s performances moved beyond farm workers’ concerns and increasingly engaged with other broader social issues such as the Vietnam War and racial discrimination.[15] Both Baraka and Valdez were similarly influenced by the Cuban Revolution, which presented a powerful example of a successful armed uprising in the American continent. In the case of Baraka, he described his travel to Cuba in the early sixties as a turning point.[16] The Cuban Revolution was also an important event for Valdez. Jorge Huerta explains that before his involvement with César Chávez and the farm workers’ strike, Valdez traveled to Cuba in 1964 and became an open sympathizer of the revolution.[17] Although the aesthetic output and social activism of Baraka and Valdez converges in the late sixties and then diverges stylistically and ideologically in the late seventies, the influence of revolutionary thought is similarly present in The Slave and Bandido! The Slave and Bandido! resonate with postmodern premises advanced by Linda Hutcheon and Phillip Brian Harper regarding the history and social position of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. As W. B. Worthen has noted, Valdez’s disruption of historical objectivity in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964) and Bandido! not only takes elements from Chicano history, but its treatment reflects some postmodern characteristics such as the subversion and fragmentation of historical events. Worthen explains the use of the term “postmodern” in his analysis of contemporary Chicano/a playwrights by noting that “the thematics of Chicana/o history plays are inseparable from their rhetoric, typically from the use of discontinuity and fragmentation, appropriation and hybridity, heteroglossia and pastiche. This formal complexity might appear to verge on the blank aesthetic of the ‘postmodern.’”[18] In an earlier and often-cited discussion on history and postmodernism, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon argues that a characteristic of postmodern narratives is the author’s challenge of the past as an objective and monolithic reality rather than a constructed set of discourses. Hutcheon describes this type of narrative as “historiographic metafiction,” in which authors both revise and undermine the past as it “reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge.”[19] A postmodern interpretation of history, however, does not render the past an undetermined reality; rather, it creates competing views that are open to multiple interpretations. The Slave and Bandido! reflect Hutcheon’s characterization of history as malleable by challenging its objectivity in relation to the past history of their respective groups. Moreover, Harper has argued that the some of the aesthetic works by minority authors can be interpreted as engaging with elements of the postmodern experience, particularly their engagement with marginality. In studying the emphasis on the fragmented and decentralized self that forms part of the postmodern condition, Harper argues that the alienation, despair, uncertainty, and fragmentation characteristic of postmodernism have been present in the work of some minority writers prior to the sixties since their postmodernist tendencies “deriv[e] specifically from [their] socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised status.”[20] The “social marginalization” that creates a “fragmented subjectivity” in these texts, Harper argues, does not stand as the sole characteristic of the postmodern subject; however, social fragmentation should be considered part of such marginalization.[21] The Slave and Bandido! explore two revolutionary archetypes and their condition as marginalized and decentered subjects based on their past and current social limitations. Emerging from groups on the margins of society, the revolutionaries’ call for armed confrontation against whites inventively contests their alienated social position. Amiri Baraka’s The Slave The Slave aesthetically engages with the history of violent militant resistance by minority groups that at times tends to be overlooked in contemporary social discourses in favor of a historical narrative that invokes the nonviolent struggle by civil rights activists. The Slave has commonly been studied as a radical and confrontational social protest play that attempts to raise racial and ethnic consciousness and nationalist sentiments through representations of armed confrontation.[22] The prospect of armed resistance and militant confrontation by some people of color also contributed to social change, and Baraka’s play is significant since it counterweights the prevalent narrative that the social gains of the sixties and seventies by people of color were achieved only through nonviolent resistance. Baraka’s confrontational rhetoric, shared by emerging radical activists such as Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, is evident in his non-fiction of the early sixties, collected in Home: Social Essays (1965), which condemns the conditions of blacks living in urban cities and the nonviolent methods to solve racial and economic inequality advocated by black civil rights leaders. Baraka defiantly argues that the “struggle is not simply for ‘equality’” but “to completely free the black man from the domination of the white man.”[23] Baraka frames his confrontational stance and social demands based in part on his first-hand experiences dealing with inequality and discrimination in urban enclaves such as Harlem.[24] Echoing the seemingly senseless violence during the race riots in some major urban areas such as Watts, Detroit, and Newark in the 1960s, The Slave mirrors blacks’ simmering frustrations and responses to a deep-rooted sense of despair. The Slave challenges received histories regarding the era of slavery by creatively dislocating and extending the scope of the militancy of the sixties by presenting Walker Vessels both as a revolutionary leader and a slave—presumably a rebel leader—who carriers on the legacy of black armed resistance from the antebellum South. Some critics have focused on how Baraka engages with the era of slavery in an experimental form in other plays such as Slave Ship (1967) and The Motion of History (1976);[25] however, almost no attention has been given to the experimental engagement with history already found in The Slave.[26] Baraka’s play invokes the figure of the slave revolt leader, a figure that prior to the sixties tended to be mediated through the texts of white historians and writers,[27] to address historical misconceptions regarding the treatment of slaves. In his nonfiction, Baraka challenges the myth of the content slave and the attempt at myth-making in historiography and social discourses that present blacks during slavery as passive subjects who “didn’t mind being [slaves].”[28] Baraka rejects this view by emphasizing the tradition of armed slave resistance, since according to Baraka, “the records of slave revolts are too numerous to support” the “faked conclusion” that slaves coexist harmoniously with their masters.[29] Baraka subverts white historiography on stage by invoking the tradition of black self determination dating back to David Walker and armed resistance by slave revolt leaders such as Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey by, as Werner Sollors points out, naming The Slave’s main character Vessels.[30] Baraka’s use of the slave rebel figure, however, is experimental and differs from other conventional representations of armed resistance by black authors such as Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936), a fictional recreation of the historical 1800 Gabriel’s Rebellion. In The Slave, Vessels is not the historical reincarnation of Walker or Vesey propelled into the future; instead, Vessels’s initial position in the play as an outspoken and discontent slave is a symbolic figure of resistance who projects the legacy of slave rebellions and violent suppressions into a hypothetical future. The Slave’s prologue presents Vessels as a character who attempts to articulate his grievances but fails due to his position as a field slave, which reflects his social marginality. The prologue purposefully obscures chronological time as Vessels appears as an “old field slave” who is “much older than [he] look[s] . . . or maybe much younger” at different periods during the play.[31] Vessels initially takes the form of a seer, elder statesman, or a black preacher, but as he attempts to express his thoughts, he grows “anxiou[s],” “less articulate,” and “more ‘field hand’ sounding” (45). Scholars agree on the cryptic nature of Vessels’s opening speech;[32] nonetheless, Vessels’s restlessness and belligerent intent while still a slave is evident when he remarks that “[w]e are liars, and we are murderers. We invent death for others” (43). Vessels’s condition as a slave makes him unable to articulate a coherent message; as a result, his inability to effectively communicate marginalizes him and, at the same time, connects him to the emerging restlessness and frustration among disenfranchised blacks that finds a physical expression in an altered social context in the play’s subsequent acts. Signaling the ineffectiveness of rhetoric, Vessels turns to physical violence as a tool to address his social grievances. Vessels’s initial position as a “field hand” is significant for Baraka in the context of slaves’ hierarchies and class distinctions among blacks since he believes that the source for black liberation in past and contemporary times will be carried out by marginalized subjects rather than blacks in relative positions of authority or class standing. In the introduction to The Motion of History, Baraka makes the distinction between slaves who were “house servants and petty bourgeoisie-to-be” and “field slaves” who represented the majority and the authentic revolutionaries.[33] Hence, Vessels’s initial position as a marginalized field slave connects him to the majority of disenfranchised blacks rather than to the black middle class leaders of the civil rights era, who in Baraka’s view, asked blacks to “renounce [their] history as pure social error” and look at “old slavery” and its legacy of social and economic disparities as a “hideous acciden[t] for which no one should be blamed.”[34] Vessels’s position as a field slave functions as a social critique of black civil rights leaders and their methods, thus presenting a clear ideological contrast between his radical militancy and their nonviolent social activism. The Slave destabilizes dominant historical narratives of slave suppression on stage by presenting a decentered subject who carries the legacy of armed resistance and has the potential to challenge the status quo through open revolution. The play’s first act propels Vessels into a contemporary city in the 1960s where he becomes the leader of a “black liberation movement” who is able to mount an effective military offensive against whites (58). As Larry Neil observes, Vessels in the contemporary context “demands a confrontation with history. . . . His only salvation lies in confronting the physical and psychological forces that have made him and his people powerless.”[35] Vessels refers to the source of his actions when he maintains that he is fighting “against three hundred years of oppression” (72). Vessels, moreover, echoes the intent of former slave rebel leaders such as Nat Turner when he boasts that he “single-handedly. . . promoted a bloody situation where white and black people are killing each other” (66). Neil contextualizes the violence depicted in The Slave by arguing that despite Western society’s aggression toward the oppressed, “it sanctimoniously deplore[d] violence or self-assertion on the part of the enslaved.”[36] Vessels’s armed resistance—taken as a continuation of past instances of slave rebellion—figuratively subverts the historical record since an organized and open slave revolt in the U.S. did not last more than a few days. The Slave attempts, as Baraka notes in his often-cited essay, “The Revolutionary Theatre” (1964), to take blacks’ revolutionary “dreams and give them a reality”;[37] as a result, Baraka’s play goes beyond the representation of the militancy and radicalism of the sixties by creating a fictional counterview of the historical record of slave revolt suppressions. Despite the inclusion of a race war in The Slave, the play shows the limits of a military and bloody confrontation between blacks and whites on stage; instead, it concentrates on the tension between Vessels’s revolutionary goals and his ambivalent feelings toward whites due to his former acceptance of racial pluralism. Although the war has been raging for months and has tangible consequences, since it is noted that Vessels’s “noble black brothers are killing what’s left of the city,” or rather “what’s left of this country” (49), it is only alluded to intermittently rather than enacted. The war serves mainly as a background to the verbal abuse, physical violence, and aggression in the living room among Vessels, Grace, and Easley.[38] The animosity between Vessels and Grace derives also in part from Baraka’s radicalization and his own personal struggles to reconcile his black nationalism and his marriage to Hettie Jones, a white woman.[39] The emotionally charged scenes and recriminations between the three characters expose the simmering feelings of rage and racial animosity that remained under the surface before the war. The Slave presents a clash between a black radical and a white liberal, and Vessels’s confrontation with Easley symbolizes his attempt to overcome his past and continue his revolution. Samuel Hay maintains that in The Slave and other plays of the same period, “Baraka repeats Baldwin’s theme [in Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964)] that burning all bridges to white liberals is the first step toward liberation.”[40] Vessels does not direct his hatred against prejudiced whites but against Easley, a college professor with a “liberal education, and a long history of concern for minorities” (52). Consequently, Vessels’s shooting of Easley represents the end of possible coexistence between blacks and whites, echoing the radical view—embraced by Malcolm X and other black militants—that white liberals could not contribute to the struggle for black liberation. Grace realizes, however, that in trying to overcome his former relationships with whites, Vessels risks destroying himself and his family. Even though Vessels’s role as a revolutionary leader fulfills a long-awaited dream and struggle for liberation that has extended for centuries—exactly what Baraka exhorts in “The Revolutionary Theatre”—The Slave depicts the revolution’s toll on Vessels and his inability to successfully navigate his own racial allegiances.[41] The Slave’s ending ultimately negates Vessels’s prospects for a successful revolution—even within the fictional setting created by the play—and reveals the fate of his family when he asserts that his two daughters are dead, most likely by his own hands. Following the death of Easley, the fate of his children in The Slave’s final scenes becomes the focus of attention; however, Vessels’s actions and statements suggest that he arrived at Grace’s house with the intention of ending his children’s lives. Vessels mentions at different times that he returned to Grace’s house because he “want[s] those children” (65), but the stage directions at the beginning of act one suggest that he could have already taken their lives before confronting Grace. After the shelling increases and the house is hit, Grace is fatally hurt. When Grace asks him to “see about the girls,” he repeatedly tells her that “they’re dead” (87, 88). Scholars are divided regarding the fate of the children, suggesting that they could have died in the burning building, Vessels could have taken their lives, or that the scene is vague and unclear.[42] Although the play’s ending appears perplexing, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions gain meaning by taking into consideration that he arrived to Grace’s house with the premonition that his revolutionary fight may not succeed. During a moment of weakness or sincerity, Vessels confesses to Grace: “I was going to wait until the fighting was over . . . until we have won, before I took [the children]. But something occurred to me for the first time, last night. It was the idea that we might not win” (68). Baraka in later years conceded that some of his plays preceding Malcolm X’s death, including The Slave, were “essentially petty bourgeois radicalism, even rebellion, but not clear and firm enough as to revolution.”[43] Based in part on Baraka’s own acknowledgement that Vessels lacked revolutionary conviction, some scholars have described Vessels’s fight as futile.[44] Jerry Gafio Watts inconclusively suggests that the ambiguous fate of the children is “more annoying than provocative,” leaving the ending of the play without “any resemblance of meaning.”[45] Vessels’s actions and the fate of his children, however, achieve an important symbolic meaning in the context of Vessels’s former self as a slave when, during the antebellum period, some slaves took the extreme action of ending their children’s lives in order to spare their fate as slaves. The ending of The Slave inventively engages with the era of slavery by drawing parallels with tragic episodes during the antebellum era such as the well-known case of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave, who took the radical measure of taking her daughter’s life before her capture as an alternative to slavery, an episode masterly rendered in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Henry D. Miller observes that in Baraka’s plays, characters “are not human beings at all, but political abstractions.”[46] Although the absence of Vessels’s daughters during the play may suggest a metaphorical interpretation of these characters, his disturbing actions toward them are also pragmatic, as Vessels reasons that the fate of non-whites may be in jeopardy after a possible military victory by the white army. Vessels returns to Grace’s house because he believes he is “rescuing the children” from an unspecified danger (69); his rescue takes the form of a desperate form of protection. Morrison’s use of Garner’s story continued a tradition in antislavery writing that called attention to slaves’ attempts to gain their freedom since, according to Paul Gilroy, the “horrific” story of Garner was often used by some abolitionists to raise awareness for the antislavery cause.[47] In a similar manner, and in relation to calls for a black revolution in the sixties, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions in The Slave dramatize the way in which oppressive race relations cornered individuals into taking desperate actions, as Garner’s story also demonstrates. As a result, the children in The Slave represent the unfulfilled aspirations of a black revolution just as Garner’s daughter symbolizes slaves’ negated freedom. In Baraka’s rendering of this parallel episode, Vessels’s dreams for liberation are shattered for him and his children as they ultimately perish, and he returns to his slave-like state at the end of the play. Beyond reflecting Baraka’s radicalization and frustration regarding the marginalized conditions of urban blacks during the sixties, The Slave craftily contextualizes its radical and militant message by merging Vessels’s revolutionary aims with historical instances of armed resistance by blacks. The play’s endurance rests in its reminder that the gains for social recognition during the sixties were not only achieved through acts of nonviolent resistance, but also through the prospects of violent confrontation. Aesthetically, The Slave uses innovative techniques that reflect postmodern anxieties in relation to the challenge and subversion of dominant historical narratives about the era of slavery; Vessels’s discomforting revolutionary message that stresses militancy, nationalist aspirations, and radical actions in the face of racial oppression stands as a form of historical memory that reflects the contentious history of race relations—not only during the sixties but also at different junctions in American history. The play’s engagement with the position of marginalized subjects and their past history of resistance found in black theater is similarly present in the Chicano theater tradition. Luis Valdez’s Bandido! Critical discussions of Valdez’s works are often divided within the framework of Valdez’s collaboration with El Teatro Campesino and his post-80s projects; however, Bandido! has not been commonly explored as the continuation of the nationalist and revolutionary themes and creative engagement with history already present in his pre-El Teatro Campesino play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which introduced the use of the archetypal revolutionary for the first time in Chicano theater.[48] Scholars have pointed out that the characters of the two brothers in Shrunken Head, Joaquín and Belarmino, reflect—and physically appropriate—characteristics of two historical figures of resistance, Joaquín Murrieta and Francisco Villa.[49] The ethos of Villa is staged both in a “realistic” and “surrealistic” manner as their father, Pedro, allegedly fought alongside Villa during the Mexican Revolution while Belarmino acts literally as the missing head of Villa.[50] The play is explicit in relation to Villa’s symbolism as a “peasant outlaw” and as “revolutionary giant.”[51] Shrunken Head shows an imaginative treatment of history and the revolutionary figure that is recovered and situated within an American historical context in Bandido![52] The emphasis on the history of the Southwest in Bandido! serves to reclaim past events of war and conquest and to situate early Mexican Americans within a geographical space neglected to them in prevalent historical narratives. Huerta correctly notes that with Bandido!, Valdez offers Chicanos a historical “presence in the state of California.”[53] Previously the largest group in the state, Californios were considerably outnumbered only a decade after the discovery of gold in 1848. They faced social and economic discrimination—and more importantly—they lost most of their land and social position despite the protections granted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Before the 1860s, Californios owned the most valuable land in California, but “by the 1870s, they owned only one-fourth of this land” and by “the 1880s Mexicans were relatively landless.”[54] The historical Vásquez traced his ancestry to the first Californios who arrived in the eighteenth-century, and his loss of land and social status forms the basis and context for Vásquez’s actions in Bandido!; he mentions that a “hundred years ago, [his] great grandfather founded San Francisco with [Juan] De Anza. Fifty years ago José Tiburcio Vásquez was the law in San José”;[55] but Vásquez laments that he “cannot even walk the wooden side-walks of either city without a leash” (110). Vásquez’s reversal of fortune represents the fate of Californios after the U.S. annexation of the territory. Valdez’s play challenges dominant narratives of the U.S. westward expansion that exalts the economic success stories of white Americans by focusing on Vásquez as a marginalized subject who, similar to Vessels in The Slave, revolts against the social order. In the introduction to Bandido!, Valdez subverts such narratives by contending that the “American mythology” that constitutes the history of the Old West remains “under constant revision” (97). Bandido! presents an alternative interpretation to the meaning and symbolic significance of Vásquez despite, or because of, his ominous ending since, as Valdez also notes, Vásquez holds the distinction of being the last man to be publically executed in California in 1875 (97). There has been a shift in analyses of Bandido! from looking at the play as a distortion of history to reevaluating the play as recontextualizing history and questioning its neutrality. Scholars and reviewers who saw the 1994 staging of Bandido! were critical about what they perceived as “revisionary history” (89).[56] Broyles-González, for instance, argues that the plight of the historical Vásquez in Bandido! is “wholly distorted by omissions.”[57] Valdez’s intent, however, is to take advantage of the malleability of historical accounts—as the play’s introduction suggests—to create his own revolutionary archetype. As a contrast to Baraka’s loose amalgamation of figures of resistance in The Slave, Bandido! is based on the historical Vásquez; however, rather than simply contesting negative historical characterizations and presenting the true Vásquez, Valdez’s play carves its own figure of resistance based on competing interpretations. Although the revolutionary dimension of the historical Vásquez has been disputed by historians,[58] the revolutionary figure in Bandido!—just as in The Slave—is used as a symbol of resistance able to embody, as Huerta notes, Chicano’s “struggle against oppressive forces.”[59] Rossini rightly observes that Vásquez in Bandido! stands as a rebel archetype since Valdez “reject[s] the easy label of criminal and tak[es] seriously Vásquez’s revolutionary potential.”[60] The representation of Vásquez in Bandido! is more complex than a simple revisionist rendering of Vásquez’s life on stage; rather, Bandido!’s portrayal of Vásquez reflects what scholars such as Juan Alonzo have identified as the reconceptualization of the figure of the nineteenth-century outlaw and bandit after the eighties.[61] Bandido! balances two seemingly contradictory accounts in relation to the historical character of Vásquez and presents two Vásquez figures: a bandit innocent of shooting three Americans who becomes a figure of nonviolent resistance, and an armed rebel who attempts to incite a revolution in California. On one hand, Bandido! rejects the simplistic characterization of Vásquez as a petty thief and makes him a symbol for Californios against the American expansion into the Southwest that similarly echoed the nonviolent actions by Chávez during the Delano strike in the 1960s. In Bandido!, Vásquez acknowledges his “twenty years as a horse thief and stage robber,” but contends that his “career grew out of the circumstances by which [he] was surrounded” (127). Vásquez’s actions reflect the changing circumstances of Mexican Americans as he adds: “I was thirteen when gold was discovered. As I grew to manhood, a spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had many fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen” (127). In the play’s early scenes, Vásquez acts as a scrupulous bandit who restrains himself from shooting victims during his raids. Vásquez informs his band before the raid at Tres Pinos that his “[f]irst cardinal rule” is “no killing” (116). When Vásquez is captured and sentenced for his involvement in the robbery, his hanging takes the form of an act of arbitrary justice, but also symbolizes the limits of passive resistance by Mexican Americans after the annexation of California. On the other hand, Bandido! employs the rebel figure inscribed in the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest to articulate a message of resistance. Valdez connects Vásquez’s rebellious actions to early California outlaws such as Murrieta and “Mestizo” revolutionaries such as Villa already present in his militant play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.[62] As the play progresses, Bandido! imaginatively uses Vásquez’s revolutionary potential—whether historical or fictional—to insert a militant message as Vásquez shares his plans to begin a revolution in order to liberate California from U.S. control. After the raid at Tres Pinos, Vásquez is once again on the run when he reaches the San Fernando Mission. There, he finds refuge in the estate of Don Andrés Pico, a historical figure, who during the U.S.-Mexican War “defeated the U.S. Cavalry at the Battle of San Pasquel [sic]” (138).[63] During their meeting, Vásquez invites Pico to join him in fighting Americans one more time when he confesses: “I’m talking about a revolution. With a hundred well armed men, I can start a rebellion that will crack the state of California in two, like an earthquake, leaving the Bear Republic in the north, and [a] Spanish California Republic in the south!” (137). Vásquez, however, is subsequently captured without enacting his plan. The scene is significant for its symbolism since Vásquez’s desire to begin a revolution is explicit. Rather than resolving these two facets of Vásquez’s life—as an innocent outlaw and a revolutionary—Bandido! purposefully complicates these two competing narratives. An element that differentiates The Slave and Bandido! is that Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits and interrogates the facts and myth of Vásquez’s life as it accentuates and undermines the play’s own historical significance through the use of parody and the inclusion of fragmented and competing narratives within the play. Hutcheon explains that “[p]arody is a complex genre, in terms of both its form and its ethos. It is one of the ways in which modern artists have managed to come to terms with the weight of the past.”[64] Bandido! creates two parallel narratives through the “play within a play” device in which some of the play’s scenes are a reenactment of a play written by Vásquez himself about his life staged by Samuel Gillette, a theatrical “impresario,” while Vásquez awaits his sentence in a San Jose prison (98, 100). Gillette’s artistic vision, when reenacting Vásquez’s life on stage, and the writing and rewriting of Vásquez’s own story in Bandido! examine and parody the process of theatrical representation and historical certainty. Hutcheon describes parody as the “perfect postmodern form” since “it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies.”[65] Under this view, Bandido! calls attention to Vásquez’s significance while simultaneously undermining the veracity of such assertion. A marked difference between The Slave and Bandido! is that although both plays revolve around the possibilities of armed resistance and revolution by minority groups against a larger white population, the style of The Slave is tragic; in contrast, Bandido! combines realistic elements with melodrama.[66] Huerta, for example, argues that Bandido! is divided in two distinct sections and explains that “[w]hen we are with Vásquez in the jail cell, we are observing the real man; when the action shifts to the melodrama stage we are sometimes watching the Impresario’s visions and sometimes we are actually watching Vásquez’s interpretation.”[67] Other scholars, however, have observed that the line between the melodrama sections and the realistic jail scenes becomes blurred and problematic as the play progresses.[68] The use of melodrama, ultimately, adds an additional dimension to Vásquez as a multifaceted character. Bandido! weaves Vásquez’s competing nonviolent and revolutionary message as Vásquez himself directly writes and rewrites his own story while in jail, thus mediating a set of seemingly contradictory positions. After the first staging of Vásquez’s play by Gillette, Vásquez complains about Gillette’s emphasis on his private life as “melodrama” where Vásquez’s alleged romantic exploits are accentuated through his relationship with Rosario, a married woman (109). Rather than resolving the tension between Vásquez’s personal life and his public persona, Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits the apparent contradictions. Gillette expresses skepticism regarding Vásquez’s desire to prove his innocence during the killings at Tres Pinos and to enhance his pacifist stance, while at the same time trying to incite an armed revolt that reflects his revolutionary aspirations. When Vásquez and Gillette are negotiating the terms for staging Vásquez’s play in San Francisco, Vásquez tells Gillette: “If I’m to be hanged for murder, I want the public to know I’m not guilty” (110). Gillette objects to this request as he wonders: “Twenty years as a vicious desperado and never a single, solitary slaying?” (110). At the same time, Gillette agrees to buy Vásquez’s revised play and stage it in San Francisco but with “none of this Liberator of California horseshit” since he would “be laughed out of the state if [he tries] to stage that” (140). Vásquez’s own crafting of his story and Gillette’s assistance as theater producer and businessman combine to mediate the play’s layered message. Despite its revolutionary message, Bandido! portrays an unsuccessful revolution as Vásquez questions his actions due to his ambivalence regarding his intent to incite a revolution and his hybrid cultural identity as he decides—before his execution—to avert an armed confrontation. Before Vásquez’s capture, Cleodovio Chávez, one of Vásquez’s band members, is attracted to the possibility of gathering a group of armed men and “slaughter[ing] every gringo [they] meet” since he reasons, “[I]f they’re gonna hang us, it might as well be for something good—not petty thievery” (145). In a subsequent scene, Vásquez averts the possible confrontation by sending a letter to Chávez, who has not been captured, asking him “not to get himself and a lot of innocent people killed” (150). The possibility for armed confrontation—which is set in motion in The Slave—is averted in Bandido! due to Vásquez’s own hybrid cultural identification as a Californio and an American. A significant gesture in Bandido! is that although Vásquez was chased in his homeland and persecuted by American authorities, he considers himself a product of his mixed Mexican and American background. Vásquez displays what Ramón Saldívar has identified as an “in-between existence” present in Mexican American narratives since the formation of the U.S.-Mexican border.[69] In Bandido!, Vásquez has the opportunity to stay in Mexico, but he returns to California; when asked about his motives, Vásquez responds that he has “never relished the idea of spending the rest of [his] days in Mexico” since California is “where [he] belong[s]” (138). The character of Vásquez signals a transition in Valdez’s drama from presenting the memory and ethos of Villa, a Mexican revolutionary, in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa as an archetypal figure to Vásquez in Bandido!, a Mexican American figure of resistance, who belongs to the history of the U.S. and the Southwest. Conclusion The Slave and Bandido! use innovative dramatic techniques that reflect postmodern concerns in post-sixties minority theater regarding the malleability and fragmentation of historical narratives to question historical representations of their respective marginalized groups. Both plays reclaim previously overlooked figures in dominant historical discourses and offer them agency to recreate and alter the historical memory of each group. The plays transform marginalized subjects, from a slave and an outlaw, respectively, into revolutionary figures to create a historical continuity between previous instances of armed resistance and revolt from past to contemporary times. Both revolutionary leaders engage, in different degrees, in a quest to gain their freedom and previously negated historical spaces—a black nation and an independent California respectively—that can be achieved through violent means. The Slave and Bandido! revolve around the haunting memory of race relations in the U.S. and episodes of armed resistance by altering historical narratives as Baraka’s contemporary revolutionary figure carries the history of slave rebellions, while Valdez’s play disrupts historical representations by allowing its revolutionary figure to write and rewrite his own legacy. The Slave and Bandido! ultimately present unfulfilled revolutions even in their fictional settings and show a similar ambivalence regarding their revolutionaries’ actions and intents toward whites. Despite its representation of a race war, The Slave is less radical than commonly assumed since Vessels struggles unsuccessfully to jettison his previous racial pluralism and his past relationships with whites. Vásquez in Bandido! similarly struggles to incite a revolt against whites in light of his hybrid cultural identity. Although both plays appear to respond to different social and political historical periods, they interrogate and grapple with ever-present questions of race and ethnic identity, and the position of people of color in the U.S., that continue to define American society in contemporary times. The Slave and Bandido! represent an instance, among others, in which the themes, tropes, and techniques used by black and Mexican American playwrights and writers after the sixties converge to show that some of the aesthetic work by authors of color share deeper commonalities. Dr. Jose Fernandez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Western Illinois University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. His current research focuses on the commonalities and points of convergence among African American and Latino/a authors after the 1960s. [1] The term Chicano/a refers to individuals of Mexican descent living in the Southwest. For a detailed description of the social and political connotations of the terms Chicano/a, Mexican American, and Mexican in the context of Chicano theatre, see Jorge Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken: Chicano Theatre in the 1960s,” Theatre Survey 43, no.1 (2002): 23. [2] See Jorge Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press, 1982), 11-45; Yolanda Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 3-35; Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26-44; Larry Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989), 62-78; Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 259-90; and Henry D. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre: Art Versus Protest in Critical Writings, 1898-1965 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 179-216. [3] Elam’s expansive analysis covers their one-act and extended plays from 1965 to 1971, concentrating on their plays’ shared themes and elements such as the influence of the social context, the content and form of the dramatic texts, and their performing spaces. Harry J. Elam Jr., Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 17. [4] Ibid., 4. [5] Ibid., 7. [6] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 82-83; and Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 235-36. [7] The Slave opened in the St. Marks Playhouse in Greenwich Village in December 1964 while Bandido! was first staged in San Juan Bautista in 1981, and then at the Mark Taper Forum in California in 1994. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 205; and Jon D. Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 88-89. [8] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 232; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83; and Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 134. [9] Huerta, Chicano Theater, 61; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 170-71, 189. [10] Scholars have discussed the role of audiences in relation to The Slave and Bandido! by focusing on Baraka’s goal of creating a black militant consciousness and Valdez’s attempt during the eighties to avoid the confrontational rhetoric characteristic of El Teatro Campesino’s plays. See Guillermo E. Hernández, Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 50; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 172-73, 229, 235-36; and Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83. [11] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 92. [12] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 235. [13] Elam, Taking it to the Streets, 3. [14] Valdez states in his manifest-poem, Pensamiento Serpentino (Serpentine Thoughts), that “To be CHICANO is to love yourself / your culture, your / skin, your language.” “Pensamiento Serpentino,” in Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico, 1990), 175. [15] Luis Valdez, “Notes on Chicano Theatre” in Luis Valdez—Early Works, 10. [16] Baraka wrote about his experiences visiting the island and witnessing first-hand the results of the revolution led by “a group of young radical intellectuals” much like himself; “Cuba Libre,” In Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 38; See also, Amiri Baraka, Conversations with Amiri Baraka, edited by Charlie Reilly (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 132; and Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 52-54. [17] Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken,” 25. [18] W. B. Worthen, “Staging América: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 2 (1997): 103. [19] Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 89. [20] Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. [21] Ibid., 28-29. [22] For discussions on The Slave, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 134-138; Lloyd Brown, Amiri Baraka (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 147-50; Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 67-74; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 78-84; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 205-11. [23] Amiri Baraka, “Black Is a Country,” in Home: Social Essays, 84. [24] Amiri Baraka, “Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow (Streets of Despair),” in Home: Social Essays, 94-95. [25] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 269-73, 445-49. [26] In his analysis of The Slave, Brown discusses briefly the significance of Vessels’s position as a “field slave” as an archetypal figure of black militancy. Brown, Amiri Baraka, 150. [27] Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) (Baltimore: Lucas & Denver, 1831), 6. Gray describes Turner during his 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia as “fiendish” and “savag[e]” and guided by a fundamentalist vision of retribution and conflict enacted in religious scriptures. [28] Amiri Baraka, “Street Protest,” in Home: Social Essays, 98. [29] Ibid., 98. [30] Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 135. [31] Amiri Baraka, The Slave in Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays by LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1964), 43, 44. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [32] For discussion on The Slave’s prologue, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 137; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 78-79; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 209-210. [33] Amiri Baraka, introduction to The Motion of History and Other Plays. (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 13. See also, Amiri Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?” in Home: Social Essays, 137. [34] Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?,” 135, 137. [35] Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 70. [36] Ibid., 71-72. [37] Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in Home: Social Essays, 211. [38] Neil correctly observes that The Slave “is essentially about Walker’s attempt to destroy his white past. For it is the past, with all of its painful memories, that is really the enemy of the revolutionary.” Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 70. [39] As Baraka comments in his Autobiography, his increasingly militant stance against whites opened a chasm between him and Hettie Jones, which forms the basis of the confrontation between Vessels and Grace in The Slave. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), 195-96. [40] Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95. [41] Years later, Baraka observed that Vessels’s revolutionary goals were hindered due to his inability to shed his past. Baraka asserts that going “through the whole process of breast-beating, accusations, and lamenting meant” that Vessels still had “a relationship with his wife, with his past.” Conversations, 134. [42] See Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 210; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 82-83; Hay, African American Theatre, 95; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 137. [43] Baraka, Introduction to The Motion of History, 12. [44] See Watts, Amiri Baraka, 80; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 136. [45] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83. [46] Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 210. [47] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 66. [48] Huerta describes the significance of Shrunken Head since it marked the first time that “a Chicano playwright began to explore the idea of being marginalized in this country” and “became the first produced play written by a Chicano about being Chicano.” “Looking for the Magic: Chicanos in the Mainstream,” in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 38. [49] See Jorge Huerta, introduction to The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater: Six Plays about the Chicano Experience, ed. Jorge Huerta (Houston: Arte Publico, 1989), 143-44; Huerta, Chicano Theater, 53-54; and Worthen, “Staging América,” 111, 118. [50] Luis Valdez, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater, 154. [51] Ibid., 155, 160. [52] Huerta points out that Valdez’s experimental style in Shrunken Head “set the tone for all of [his] later works, none of which can be termed realism or realistic” (Chicano Drama, 60). Similarly, the importance of history for Valdez was closely connected to Chicano identity and this theme is present at different stages during his career. Reflecting on the role of history within the Chicano movement, Valdez explains that he and other Chicano artists during the 1960s were “forced to re-examine the facts of history, and suffuse them with [their] own blood—to make them tell [their] reality.” “La Plebe,” in introduction to Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Knopf, 1972), xxxi. [53] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 30. [54] Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1981), 104. [55] Luis Valdez, Bandido! In Zoot Suit and other Plays (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992), 110. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [56] Rossini discusses the negative reviews by theater critics of the 1994 staging of Bandido! in Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 89-90. [57] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 232. [58] The historical Vásquez was aware of the symbolic meaning of his actions and told at least one reporter about his intent to incite revolution in California. Before his execution, however, “Vásquez made no claim of being a revolutionary and offered no excuses for his lengthy criminal career” and “never took any steps to carry out a revolt against the Anglo majority.” John Boessenecker, Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vásquez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 372. [59] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 31. [60] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 92. [61] Juan J. Alonzo. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 135-39. [62] Valdez, “La Plebe,” xxvi-xxvii. [63] The Battle of San Pasqual was a short-lived battle of the U.S.-Mexican War fought between Stephen Kearny’s troops and a group of Californio lanceros (California lancers) led by Andrés Pico. After a brief scrimmage, the battle turned into a standoff with Kearny’s brief siege of the village of San Pasqual. John S. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico: 1846-1848 (New York: Random House), 222-26. [64] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 29. [65] Hutcheon, Poetics, 11. [66] For discussions on Valdez’s use of melodrama in Bandido!, see Huerta, Introduction to Zoot Suit. In Zoot Suit and other Plays, 18; Worthen, “Staging América,” 113-15; Huerta, Chicano Drama, 29-30; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 78-87. [67] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 30. [68] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 137, 232; Worthen, “Staging América,” 114; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 89. [69] Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 17. “Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido!” by Jose Fernandez ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido!” by Jose Fernandez “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland" by Stephen Hong Sohn www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Robert Thompson By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF Trance mediumship was a popular form of entertainment and potential source of spiritual education for audiences throughout most of the nineteenth century. Performing in trance began with public demonstrations of mesmerism in which a mesmerist would put a subject into an altered state of consciousness using a series of hand motions. Encouraged by the tales of Edgar Allan Poe in which entranced subjects forestalled death and reported visions of the afterlife, audiences came to expect amazing supernatural feats at these demonstrations. ([1]) In the 1850s, trance performance blossomed into a national obsession with the rise of spirit mediumship. Like the mesmeric subjects before them, a host of mostly female mediums began performing in a similarly dissociative state except that they claimed to be possessed by the spirits of the dead. Mediums would take their place at a rostrum or platform, fall into trance, and then follow their audience’s prompts in answering questions on science, philosophy, and religion in the voice of their possessing spirits. A panel then judged—based on what the medium had to say—whether the spirits had truly spoken through the medium or not. One of mediumship’s most infamous and colorful platform performers was the women’s rights advocate and free love radical Victoria Woodhull. ([2]) In addition to her mediumship, she was the first woman to run for president, operated the first woman-owned stock brokerage, and wrote for a newspaper she ran with her sister, The Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. Woodhull fit all of these undertakings into the space of about five years in a public career that burned brightly before flaming out. She arrived fairly late to trance performance, giving her first spirit-inspired lectures in 1870, and she made significant alterations to the frame of the performance to suit her purposes. Whereas traditional trance mediums foregrounded the spontaneity of their performances in making the case that their lectures were directly inspired by a supernatural source, Woodhull read from notes that her spirits had helped her to prepare in advance. These notes touched on questions of politics, sex, and marriage at a time when her fellow mediums had begun to turn their attention to more metaphysical and religious questions. While other mediums were discussing the nature of God and the fate of the soul, Woodhull was arguing for a woman’s right to divorce her husband and to vote. The content and form of Woodhull’s spirit-inspired lectures were deeply intertwined. To borrow from anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, the standard trance performance was transformative in that it sought to close the gap between the visible world of the performance and the invisible world of the spirits, rendering the spirits actually present in the body of the medium. ([3]) By contrast, Woodhull employed a more transportive style in which she did not bring her spirits into the room but rather suspended her audience’s disbelief in them long enough to make the case that they were the true origin of her ideas. She employed a kind of Brechtian theatricality insofar as she performed in a way that raised her audience’s awareness that they were experiencing an event that had been planned in advance. I argue that this gave her spirits plausible deniability in the face of her radical ideas while she maintained enough of their supernatural presence to give weight to the politics she espoused. At a time when audiences were still fairly new to hearing a woman speak about her own ideas, this style of platform speech allowed her to shift the audience’s focus from seeking proof of a supernatural presence to an engagement with terrestrial social and political principles. By making her human influence more palpable in her spirit-inspired performances, Woodhull was able to use trance mediumship as a platform to deliver a this-worldly message about sex and gender and to espouse a progressive vision for the future. Unfortunately for her, this performance strategy also gave her little cover in the face of the controversies she stirred up and ultimately led to her undoing as a national public figure. A Brief History of Trance Performance Trance as a genre of performance began with demonstrations of mesmerism. In 1836 and 1837, the French-born mesmerist Charles Poyen, inspired by Franz Anton Mesmer’s experiments in magnetic trance, traveled New England with his mesmeric subject, Cynthia Gleason. Poyen demonstrated his ability to put Gleason into a deep trance by passing his hands from her shoulders to her hands and argued that this trance was a means of curing disease and relieving pain. ([4]) The inability of observers to wake the mesmeric subject or somnambulist was an important feature of the demonstration. Gleason was subjected to sounds and sensations intended to rouse her like smelling agents, feathers, and the firing of a pistol, but only the mesmerist, Poyen, could bring her back to consciousness. ([5]) Mesmer, who invented the mesmeric technique in eighteenth-century France and demonstrated it at the French court, believed that this deeper state was achieved through the influence of the mesmerizer’s magnetic power over a fluid inside the subject, but nineteenth-century American mesmerists tended to understand mesmerism as a purely psychological act. Practitioners discovered that mesmerized subjects could access dimensions of knowledge not ordinarily accessible to the conscious subject. The fact that the somnambulist was unconscious but still able to communicate allowed their observers to peer into the hidden depths of the mind. Mesmerists developed a popularly disseminated idea that “the ‘deeper’ levels of consciousness opened the individual to the qualitatively 'higher' planes of mental existence.” ([6]) Historian Robert C. Fuller describes audiences, investigators, and practitioners marveling at the unconscious subject’s ability to perform feats of “telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.” ([7]) Gleason, for example was able to identify objects held behind her when Poyen asked her to allow her mind to “leave the brain” and “come out of the body.” ([8]) Academic psychology was only in its infancy and would not properly address the concept of the unconscious until the 1880s, leaving mesmerists to define the mesmerized state as a possible opening onto transcendent realms of knowledge. By the 1840s, trance had become the subject of a growing public fascination. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe published “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” about a man at the point of dying who is kept from death while spending months in a mesmeric trance. Poe may have been inspired by watching “the Poughkeepsie Seer,” Andrew Jackson Davis, perform a lecture while mesmerized. ([9]) In 1847, Davis published The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, transcribed while he was in a trance state. Davis was building on the precedent set by Poyen and Gleason as well as the example of eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. ([10]) While entranced, Davis claimed to be able to enter a state like death and travel to other dimensions of being, namely the “Spirit World” where he was educated on the nature of existence. ([11]) Davis struggled to achieve popular recognition in the first years of his career, but he soon became a pivotal figure in the further development of trance performance because of his involvement with American spiritualism. Modern spirit mediumship began as a popular religious movement and form of entertainment on March 31, 1848 when the Fox family first communicated with a series of mysterious taps sounding throughout their home in Hydesville, New York. Sisters Kate and Margaret Fox spoke to the taps as if the taps could hear them and persuaded the disembodied intelligence producing the taps to repeat sounds and count on their cue. ([12]) News of the mysterious taps spread and soon the sisters became national celebrities, touring the country performing “rapping séances.” The Fox sisters’ mediumship became the prototype for physical mediumship which focused on physical manifestations of spirit communication like tapping sounds, tilting tables, and eventually materialized spirit bodies while Davis paved the way for a new genre of public speaking done in the voice of the spirits of the dead. By arguing in his Principles of Nature that he was able to visit a spirit world while in trance, Davis had presaged mediumship by over a year. ([13]) And so when spirit mediumship captured broad interest via the Fox sisters, he quickly attached himself to the movement, becoming a leading proponent and practitioner of what came to be called trance or platform mediumship. In this way, the spiritualist movement appropriated mesmerism's trance state, replacing the mesmerist's influence with the spirits of the dead and offering those spirits as the explanation for the trance subject's superhuman understanding. As a male performer, Davis was an outlier. While there were male trance speakers, most public demonstrations of trance communication were performed by women. Women were thought to have spiritual “sensitivities” and considered to be natural outlets for spirits to communicate through. In her feminist analysis of historical spiritualism, Ann Braude points out that, “[i]n mediumship, women’s religious leadership became normative for the first time in American history.” ([14]) In the mid-nineteenth century women were discouraged from speaking publicly but the performer's effacement by her spirits created an opening. As Braude argues, the fact that these women spoke as their spirits and not as themselves eased social tensions and made their performances more permissible. ([15]) A potentially threatening form of border-crossing defined the practice of mediumship. Mediums crossed the line between the living and the dead and, in the case of female mediums, gender lines. To deflect any censure that might come from violating these taboos, the medium put the focus on her spirits. The more the spirits could become co-present with the audience through the performance, the less challenging these transgressions became. Placing the focus on the relative reality of the spirits emphasized the audience’s critical role in judging the performance and enhanced the impression that trance was for entertainment. Mediums sought to prove themselves like circus performers attempting a daring feat or magicians performing a baffling illusion. After a short introduction, often including a prayer and hymn, the medium would take center stage channeling one or more spirits who would proceed to address the crowd. Usually, this central lecture or discourse was followed by a question-and-answer session. Here was where the critical, entertainment function was most apparent. The historian R. Laurence Moore describes how mediums were evaluated: They invited the audience to choose a jury from among themselves that would in turn select a topic of discourse for the medium. Announcing the subject to the medium, the audience then gave her a few moments to enter trance. Once in a trance, she would proceed to talk, usually for longer than an hour. The address constituted the test of her powers. ([16]) The topics chosen for trance lectures tended to be scientific (chemistry, physics, naturalism, or agriculture) or philosophical, theoretically beyond the medium's knowledge and intellectual capacity. From the audience’s perspective, this assured that the medium would have to rely on the spirits in order to adequately address the topic at hand. Not only the content of mediums’ speeches but also the style of their delivery was necessary to persuade audiences. Trance mediums had to mitigate the impression that the performance being given was theatrical in the sense of being scripted or otherwise rehearsed. Historian Simone Natale argues that trance allowed mediums to connect their performances with the “dreams, illusions, and artistic inspiration in the automatic actions of the brain and perceptual organs” which leant them a quality of authenticity for nineteenth-century spectators. “An aesthetics of creative absorption” gave the performance a feeling of spontaneity and detracted from any sense that the medium was carefully executing a trick to fool the audience. ([17]) According to theatre scholar Alice Rayner, the “theatrical occasion” is “a repetition of the loss at the edge of or alongside consciousness.” ([18]) What is lost is full conscious awareness of an originary moment that was never there in the first place. Theatre raises the audience’s awareness of the gap in time between the moment of perception and the subsequent conscious reflection on an experience. It emphasizes the fact that the meaning of the originating event—in this case, the medium's grand spiritual revelation—is always contingent on the humans who process and interpret it. In so doing, it “returns the event to its original condition of passage and persistence, of being unrecoverable and a repetition.” ([19]) Trance mediums fully dissociated and in so doing sought to deny any repetition in their performances by performing their spirits as immediately present. While their display was theatrical in the sense of being performed on a stage for an audience, it also sought to deny its own theatricality—in Rayner's sense of the word—by framing the performance as wholly spontaneous. Theatricality was particularly fraught in the mid-nineteenth century. Mediums traded on their authenticity—the promise not to be faking the spiritual intelligence they claimed to channel—but actors carried a stain of inauthenticity wherever they went. In his seminal study of anti-theatricality, Jonas Barish argues that Romanticists accused theatre artists of being insincere. Lord Byron, for example, had a penchant for closet drama because he felt that production “not only trivializes plays and introduces irrelevancies, it desecrates; it defiles the artistic integrity of the original script.” ([20]) For Byron, his poetic vision was most pure in the interior of his own mind, and the more it became exteriorized, the more it was subjected to the inherent profanation of expression. This attitude was likely spurred by a growing tension over actors' melodramatic performance style which was often highly theatrical, as opposed to the more natural ideals of the Romantics. According to David Grimsted, actors had to move quickly from role to role often with little or no rehearsal time and so the actor “almost had to have a set of mannerisms ready-made with which [s]he could embellish any character.” ([21]) Barish argues that the rising attitude among audiences and actors through the Romantic period was that the theatre “threatens to sap [actors'] authenticity, and its inescapable artificiality must be combatted with all the naturalness at the artist's command.” ([22]) These were the seeds that would ultimately blossom into Konstantin Stanislavski's system for psychological realist acting at the turn of the century. The Traditional Trance Medium( )For trance mediumship’s more successful performers, audiences discovered their authenticity in the gap between their humble and unsophisticated origins and the knowledgeable and sophisticated performances they gave for their audiences. Women were regarded as less worldly and informed, making their spirit-inspired revelations on scientific and philosophical questions all the more amazing. Many mediums’ performance of self had focused on their lack of education and skill. Trance mediums wanted spectators to believe that they were not capable of performing their spirits' messages without otherworldly intervention. The impression they created was that they were not clever enough to fake their spirits, and so when the spirits communicated complex theological or scientific truths through them it was more plausibly supernatural because the medium lacked the knowledge and skill to pull off the spirits' level of understanding and erudition on her own. As a teenager, Cora Scott Richmond, one of America’s most prominent trance performers, succeeded in persuading the chemist James J. Mapes—who received “marvelous scientific answers” to the questions he put to her spirits—and this spring-boarded her to national attention. ([23] )Richmond, born in 1840 near the town of Cuba in Allegheny County, New York, moved with her family to Wisconsin where she was raised on a farm. Her biographer, Harrison D. Barrett, described her as “in no way different from other country girls, reared and educated as country girls are.” ([24]) She discovered her mediumship before she was ten and began trance speaking when she was only eleven, giving up school at the age of twelve to devote herself full-time to trance performance. ([25] )Nettie Colburn, best known as the medium who served Mary Todd Lincoln, was sick for much of her childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, so much so that she received almost no formal schooling. After learning of her mediumistic power at a séance, she began trance speaking in 1856 at the age of fifteen. ([26]) Both Colburn and Richmond had no vocation or training outside of mediumship, and according to the ethos of the day, weren’t worldly enough to fool a crowd of men. To further erase themselves in favor of the spirits, mediums often described themselves as absent for the spirits’ performance. Trance writer and medium Achsa Sprague fell ill with rheumatic fever at the age of 20 but after seven years made a full recovery and credited her health to the intervention of the spirits. ([27]) She went on to become a spirit-inspired poet and trance lecturer until her death in 1861. In her trance-written poetry, Sprague described her first days as a medium in “The Angel's Visit:” “Enrapt, like one inspired of old, / Forth from her lips such teachings rolled, / Till lost to self the voice would say, / ‘Tis Angels speak to you to-day. / This form has languished long in pain, / But we have given it life again...’” ([28]) In her poem, Sprague referred to herself in the third person as “this form” which became “lost to self.” It wasn’t Sprague who lectured but rather the angels or spirits addressing her audiences directly using her voice. In 1897, Cora Scott Richmond published an account of her “Psychic or Supermundane Experiences” describing what happened to her when she entered the trance state. She said, “while passing into this state I experience no physical sensations that are describable; a sense of being set free, of passing into a larger realm.” ([29]) She traveled to another metaphysical plane, meeting spirits and encountering “visions of surpassing loveliness that no language, no gift of art, even with genius portraiture, could describe.” ([30]) Like Sprague, Richmond's spirits performed the work of speaking to her audiences while Richmond's consciousness was elsewhere; receiving a mystical education in the spirit world. Through these various techniques of self-effacement, the medium sought to literally become her spirits in the presence of the audience, but in order to fully realize this metamorphosis, the medium had to shut down the audience's critical gaze. If the audience was watching and listening in order to question whether a spirit was truly present then the spirit could only ever half emerge during the performance itself. And so, despite the fact that mediums were evaluated by a panel of jurors and critiqued in the newspaper, they argued that when the spirits spoke in performance, their speech was beyond what the performance could convey and so beyond human judgment. ( [31]) Achieving this transcendence was the work of several decades. In the early days of her mediumship when Richmond was seventeen years old, she concluded a speech in Newburyport, Massachusetts by saying, “We think this will be conceded by all minds who reason from the strict rule of philosophy and of logic. We think it must be conceded by all who view the human soul as being the child of Deity, by all who claim to worship a heavenly Father and a divine God.” ([32]) In other words, her message could be validated with human rationality if the humans in question had a spiritual basis to their understanding. Three decades later, she asserted that the spirits, communicating from beyond the limits of time and space largely resisted being encapsulated within the terrestrial confines of the language, let alone performance. Her spirits said that “[r]evelation proceeds from the unknown, the absolute, to the known; from the boundless, limitless, to the limited, the relative, the enchained.” ([33]) Their “enchained” revelations, given through Richmond, were incapable of teaching any of the most significant truths about the spirit world: “No external thing can reveal God. The Soul alone, being of the nature of God, perceives God. Nothing can teach that there is God.” ([34] ) Richmond’s effort to move her spirits further and further beyond the limits of human understanding may have been a response to a culture increasingly hostile to trance performance. While trance mediumship succeeded, for a time, in capturing an American audience, by the 1870s, it began to suffer from a rising prejudice against the value of altered states of consciousness among proto-psychologists. In the decade after the Civil War, conscious control or will became a major feature of psychological thought in America. In his Principles of Mental Physiology, the influential neurophysiologist and ardent critic of spiritualism W. B. Carpenter devoted an entire chapter to the significance of the will. For Carpenter, our judgments, beliefs, and worldview are governed by a controlling will which consciously selects the ideas that best suit our perspective: “[t]he records of ‘absence of mind’ afford abundant examples of the absurd incongruities which occur, when the Will is temporarily prevented by the mental preoccupation from summoning Common Sense to check the ideas which external impressions suggest.” ([35]) A passive medium like Richmond or Sprague failed to exert “self-direction” on their mental experiences by virtue of the fact that they had no control over the trance state and opened their mind to an infinitely variable supply of beliefs and ideas which may or may not have been entirely absurd. According to historian Cathy Gutierrez, Davis recognized that “both trance and insanity occupy the nebulous ground of alternative consciousness” and attempted to save trance. Davis argued that the entranced were not suggestible whereas the insane could be easily influenced by others' stronger will. ([36]) But for Carpenter, there was no difference between subjecting oneself to the influence of the spirits and the will of a living person. The medium was like the dreamer and should not trust any of the impressions she received while her consciousness was inoperative. According to the historian of psychology S. E. D. Shortt, “[m]ost [alienists] would have accepted Carpenter's notion that the control of mind ultimately rests with the will.... For Victorian neurology, as for social theory generally, the essential capstone was the concept of individual volitional control.” ([37]) Spiritualism, which pre-dated Darwin's Origin of Species and the rise of materialist neuroscience, was ill-equipped to address rapid changes in the standards of empiricism as they moved steadily toward the establishment of formal academic psychology in the 1880s. ([38]) If dissociative states were viewed as the source for extreme error and insanity then mediumship required a new approach to the role of consciousness. Victoria Woodhull’s Radical Mediumship Victoria Woodhull took up the platform to deliver trance lectures fairly late in the genre’s development, but her career represented a revolution in what trance mediumship could achieve. In the 1870s, Woodhull broke with the standard protocols of mediumistic performance in order to promote radical cultural change. She had worked as an actor before taking up mediumship, and for Woodhull, theatricality proved central to her unique approach to mediumistic performance and allowed her to promote an agenda that pushed beyond the already progressive attitudes of mainstream spiritualists. Woodhull spoke to Congress on the topic of women's suffrage and ran for president in 1872. She published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto and she advocated for free love which at the time meant a woman's right to divorce her husband and enjoy voluntary and pleasurable sexual encounters. She was accused of being a polygamist and a prostitute and jailed on obscenity charges. And she claimed to do all of this at the direction of the spirits of the dead. Unlike the chronically ill Sprague or the rural Richmond, Woodhull's entry into public life began with a short stage career. In her late teens or early twenties, she was living in San Francisco with her first child and husband, a carousing, alcoholic physician named Canning Woodhull. According to Woodhull's contemporary and biographer Theodore Tilton, her husband made hardly any financial contribution to the family, and so to help support herself and her child she took a job as a cigar girl. But Woodhull was too “blushing, modest, and sensitive” for the job. ([39]) Luckily, around this time she met an actress named Anna Cogswell who was looking for a seamstress “to make her a theatrical wardrobe.” ([40]) But Woodhull didn't earn enough making dresses to support her family and so Cogswell suggested that she try her hand at acting. Her first role was as the Country Cousin in New York by Gas-light and she went on to perform for six weeks in a variety of roles, earning fifty-two dollars. Her final role was in The Corsican Brothers, adapted by Dion Boucicault from the French original by Alexandre Dumas, pere. Suddenly, during the ballroom scene, a spirit voice addressed Woodhull, calling her to come home, and she gave up acting to rescue her sister, Tennie, from her abusive parents. ([41]) Woodhull received word from her spirits that she should “repair to Indianapolis, there to announce herself as a medium, and to treat patients for the cure of disease.” ([42]) She was raising money in part to liberate Tennie. Tennie was also working as a healing medium, but her father “add[ed] to much that was genuine in her mediumship, more that was charlatanry,” including selling lye as a cancer cure and burning away the skin of his clients. Using the money she raised, Woodhull “clutched Tennie as by main force and flung her out of this semi-humbug, to the mingled astonishment of her money-greedy family, one and all.” ([43]) With her sister by her side, Woodhull launched into a public career that was rooted in trance mediumship but ranged widely from politics to the stock market to the newspaper business. While Woodhull's stage career was short, Tilton made a point of praising Woodhull's ability to memorize. According to Tilton, “the text was given to [Woodhull] in the morning, she learned and rehearsed it during the day, and made a fair hit in it at night.” ([44]) At the time Tilton was writing his biography of Woodhull, the pair were friends and so this tidbit about memorization likely came from Woodhull herself and was included with her approval. She was proud of her skill, but her skill posed a direct challenge to the spontaneity trance mediums traditionally projected onto their performances. The fact that Woodhull was in the regular habit of memorizing lines would have introduced an opportunity to create a fraudulent trance performance that she had rehearsed in advance except that Woodhull made no claim to direct and immediate spiritual inspiration on the platform. Woodhull took ownership of her skill to prepare, memorize, and perform her lectures because she made a significant change to the frame of the trance performance. Woodhull did not perform as her spirits but rather with her spirits, trading on the audience's impression that her speeches were supernaturally inspired while maintaining her conscious presence in the room as a performer. Woodhull performed as herself, reading from the spirit-inspired notes transcribed in advance of her speaking engagements. She spoke about her spirits in the third person in contrast to more traditional trance mediums, whose spirits spoke in the first person. Richmond, who was frequently controlled by a group of spirits, used pronouns like “we” and “us.” Sprague spoke of herself while in trance as “our own medium.” ([45]) By contrast, Woodhull talked in terms of being educated by her spirits in advance of her lectures. In her speech, “The Elixir of Life,” for example, she argued for women's sexual and political freedom based on the authority of “Spirits, who have never deceived me, have informed and shown me why it must be so.” ([46]) Woodhull did not so much compose in the voice of her spirits as write in conjunction with their voices. While this may seem like a small distinction, it actually held major implications for the way Woodhull performed and was perceived by her audiences. To begin, Woodhull's manuscripts, whether composed consciously or unconsciously, did not comprise the whole of her remarks. Critics frequently observed how she would put down her notes and speak extemporaneously. The Newburgh Telegraph, for example, described how “She began her lecture by reading from [her] manuscript, but gradually warming with her subject, she placed the manuscript on the table, and spoke as she felt, citing numerous dramatic incidents in her extended career since she began the 'Social Crusade,' as proofs of the peculiar views she holds.” ([47]) The Argus of Albany, New York reported that Woodhull delivered her “peroration... without looking at the manuscript” and Albany's Evening Post said that “[w]hen Mrs. Woodhull speaks without notes, she is a better orator than either Anna Dickinson or Olive Logan.” ([48] )At her speaking engagements, Woodhull’s spirits served a background role, writing Woodhull's manuscript before the performance but leaving Woodhull to consciously convey, elaborate, and express her own opinions on their theories as herself. While Woodhull was generally more consciously aware than her fellow trance performers at her speaking engagements, her style should not be read as a complete break with traditional trance performance. Tilton contended that, like Richmond and Sprague, Woodhull was entirely beholden to her spirits. She “lived her life” according to their dictates and entered into the spirit realm on a daily basis. ([49]) As for her lectures, “every characteristic utterance which she gives to the world is dictated while under spirit-influence, and most often in a totally unconscious state. The words that fall from her lips are garnered by the swift pen of her husband, and published almost verbatim as she gets and gives them.” ([50]) Tilton’s description of Woodhull's process was very likely her biographer's attempt to respond to the at least partially true assertion that Woodhull's speeches were written for her by her second husband, James Harvey Blood, and the social reformer Stephen Pearl Andrews, a frequent contributor to Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. ([51]) The key distinction between Woodhull and other female trance mediums is that Woodhull's spirits did not dictate her speech while in performance but in advance of the performance. If her critics are any indication, Woodhull largely succeeded in maintaining the aura of spiritual inspiration while assigning her spirits an offstage role. An admirer at the Cincinnati Inquirer observed that the “expression of her face sometimes, when she got warmed up to her subject, grew almost spiritual.” ([52]) Writing for the spiritualist publication The Banner of Light, Allen Putnam said, Mrs. Woodhull may, for aught we know, be herself very able—may be a highly talented human being. But she avows, and we believe that, in the main, her higher, bolder, more startling and yet coherent productions are passed through her brain by an expanded, disembodied intelligence. Consequently, we are surveying her as the instrument of some super-mundane being or beings, and not as a self-controlling actor and speaker. ([53]) Whereas other trance speakers like Richmond and Sprague explicitly performed in a dissociative state as their spirits, Woodhull created an ambiguous performance that blurred the line between the medium and her spirits. Her audiences were often unsure as to whether they were listening to Woodhull the orator or spirits speaking through her. This ambiguity shifted the audience's focus from the truth claims of the spirits to the talents of the speaker herself. Critics and commentators frequently noted Woodhull's skill as an orator. The Evening Post writer said that Woodhull “would have made a glorious actress. She has just the looks and brain-power necessary to become the early and successful rival of any actress who ever lived.” ([54]) The Ohio State Journal said “Mrs. Woodhull possesses a voice, an enunciation and a manner that would have made her a fortune upon a tragic stage. At times she grows terribly earnest and fires off her words as if they were red hot and unpleasant occupants of her mouth.” ([55]) Woodhull encouraged this association with the theatre by having her sister, Tennie, read a scene from Macbeth before her 1875 lectures. While Woodhull was willing to share credit with her spirits for the content of her performances, she succeeded in taking sole credit for the quality of her delivery. All of this served to render Woodhull’s performances a more secular affair in contrast to her fellow trance mediums. Richmond framed her trance lectures with prayers and hymns, foregrounding the religious dimension of trance speech. Woodhull opened her performances with Shakespeare or the poetry of Richard Sheridan. Woodhull's ability to convey a this-worldly perspective while maintaining a connection to her spirits had much to do with how she situated the moment of spiritual revelation in relation to the moment of performance. Richmond and Sprague may have been personally enlightened by the spirits but their spirits performed as themselves, having no use for the medium's own understanding. Since Woodhull performed as herself, her personal enlightenment was the originating event that she recreated and repeated in her performances. As such, the lecture’s higher meaning was not hidden in the mysterious realm of the spirits but brought down to earth in the person of the medium who claimed a full understanding of what the spirits meant to convey. This is the difference between the oracle and the augur. The oracle speaks in the voice of the gods, but her message can be incomprehensible and often requires further interpretation. The augur interprets the signs etched by the gods in this world in a way that is fully comprehensible but subject to human error. The spirits reside in an unconscious or subliminal space and the medium straddles the unconscious and conscious mind, tending toward one side or the other depending on the depth of the trance. In Woodhull's performances, the intervention of her conscious will allowed her to appropriate the sacred power of the spirits to achieve terrestrial ends. Conscious use equates to profane use, cutting up the infinite truth of the transcendent source by enchaining it in a finite vessel. Woodhull was focused on wielding her spirits for practical ends, and the greatest truths for Woodhull had their test in creating actual change in the human world. Her most celebrated causes were the sexual liberation and political enfranchisement of women. In 1870, she spoke to a special committee of Congress, arguing that women already had the right to vote since the 14(th) and 15(th) amendments—passed to end the socio-political disenfranchisement of African Americans following the Civil War—guaranteed that right for all citizens. She argued that, The right to vote cannot be denied on account of race. All people included in the term race have the right to vote, unless otherwise prohibited.... Men are also essentially just; and when the thought shall really come home to them, with the cogency of conviction, that they have, through thoughtlessness, been all along acting unjustly to their mothers and wives and daughters, by depriving them of political rights, it may happen that there will come up a great swelling-tide of reactionary sentiment which will make a sudden revolution. ([56]) This speech made no reference to the spirits or supernatural motives or designs but was, rather, a fairly straightforward argument for her cause. In 1872, she was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party, even though the government still denied her right to vote in the election. As a candidate, her speeches dwelled on grand themes like freedom and justice but remained heavily rooted in practical politics. She argued that “no personal merit or demerit can interfere between individuals so that one may, by arbitration or laws, be placed unequally with another” and “every individual is entitled to all the natural wealth that he or she requires to minister to the various wants of the body.” ([57]) Just as Woodhull hybridized the form of her trance performance—being neither fully dissociated nor fully separated from her spirits—she also hybridized her content. Her practical goals maintained some connection to spiritual ends. As an advocate for free love—which, to Woodhull, meant a woman's right to seek out a healthy monogamous relationship—she argued that men and women should be allowed to dissolve their marriages at any time for any cause. In her 1875 lecture “Breaking the Seals; The Key to the Hidden Mystery” she told her audiences that a spiritual-sexual apocalypse she envisioned was presaged in the Bible, which, when read using her spirits' “cabalistic key” described the means by which individuals could achieve immortality. The key involved interpreting the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the human body and sexual congress as the union of creative forces to generate an “elixir of life” or a “perfected blending of the positive and negative creative powers, from which shall come the constant rejuvenation or building up of the body.” Woodhull held this secret back from her audience: “do you ask what is the process by which this is to be gained? This I am not permitted to tell now. But I know what it is. I have been shown by the spirit of truth all things that relate to this wonderful mystery.” ([58]) She suggested that her listeners return to their Bibles and, using the clues she had provided them with, discover the secret for themselves. Significantly, the secret belonged first to the spirits and then to Woodhull, but it remained a secret. The truth, this “Elixir of Life,” came closer to this world but, in line with the ambiguity of Woodhull's spiritual inspiration, kept one foot in the other world. It had practical consequences—life-enriching sexual union—and could be known in practical terms, but it remained secret and required spiritual and intellectual work to discern. In her “Elixir of Life” lecture which she toured with in 1873, Woodhull envisioned a literal closing of the gap between the spiritual and human worlds, hinging on practical changes to social codes and sexual habits. Nineteenth-century marriage, which condemned women to sexual slavery, had precipitated “growing disgust sexually, between the sexes.” ([59]) Social and political circumstances in the form of women's disenfranchisement were holding the spirits back from bringing an apocalyptic new age to the people of earth. Many couples joined in happy sexual unions were required to create a supernatural erotic energy, welcoming the spirits to descend to earth and sanctify humanity: “[i]t will be readily understood that, when the final union has occurred; when Spirits become materialized, and human beings become Spiritualized, that the bodies in which both shall appear will be of the same etherealized material.” ([60]) In this vision, otherworldly spiritual designs and this-worldly practical designs overlapped in a perfect synthesis and Woodhull's political program became a spiritual quest, realizable through human political and social change. The Orator as Effigy Woodhull’s radical secular and spiritual quest would eventually lead to her downfall as a public figure. Joseph Roach argues that when a performer troubles society's boundaries, she can function as a surrogate or effigy sacrificed on the altar of a culture's superfluity: “‘burning in effigy’ is a performance of waste, the elimination of a monstrous double, but one fashioned by artifice as a stand-in, an ‘unproductive expenditure’ that both sustains the community with the comforting fiction that real borders exist and troubles it with the spectacle of their immolation.” ([61]) Woodhull's secularization of trance as a form of entertainment coupled with the artifice and theatricality of her performances rendered her as just such a stand-in. She became expendable; a curiosity and sideshow that ultimately had to be dispensed with for society to carry on as usual. Unlike Richmond or Sprague, Woodhull did not seek to displace herself with her spirits as a crosser of boundaries. By embodying the medium's conscious empowerment and advocating for women's social and sexual liberation, Woodhull directly attacked the effacing premise that had made female trance mediumship possible. This profaned the spirits through practical use for political and terrestrial ends and crossed well beyond the heavily-patrolled borders of religious and sexual propriety, forcing a crisis that demanded a monstrous double—Woodhull herself—be burned in effigy. Her various causes were often too progressive even for the spiritualists or women's rights advocates she circulated among. Suffrage leaders like Susan B. Anthony and leading spiritualists were uncomfortable aligning themselves with Woodhull's free love politics, and so those politics rested firmly on Woodhull's own shoulders. Actors are not responsible for the actions and opinions of their characters, but by performing as her spirits' knowledgeable interpreter, Woodhull collapsed the distinction between herself and her source, serving as both actor and character. In turn, she became responsible and let her spirits off the hook for all of the things her audiences disliked about her speeches. In an editorial from the Troy Daily Whig, a writer professed to having been at least partially won over by hearing Woodhull speak and meeting her afterward. Comparing her to Joan of Arc and Emmanuel Swedenborg, he interpreted her spirits as a kind of inherent genius but questioned whether Woodhull was putting that genius to good use: “[s]he has such an intense nature... that I presume she sees visions—as many angels as St. John perhaps—as many devils as Luther.... she is an abnormal growth of democratic institutions—thoroughly sincere, partly insane, and fitted to exaggerate great truths like self-denying love, into theoretical free love and some practical mischief.” ([62]) The writer believed that Woodhull saw visions but that she embellished them, distorting her spirits’ inspiration through her own mischievous designs. Woodhull understood that she was quickly falling into the role of sacrificial victim and sought to replace herself with a substitute. Substitution is common in the use of both ritual and mythological sacrifices. In the history of ritual sacrifice, poor children were substituted for the children of kings, animals were substituted for humans, and bread for animals. In mythology, Artemis substituted a deer for Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia, and the God of Abraham accepted a sheep in place of Isaac. ([63]) In theatre, ancient heroes try and fail to locate a scapegoat for the divine curses that haunt them; Renaissance protagonists often bring down a series of other characters on their way to the grave; and melodramatic heroes seek villains to die in theirs or their loved one’s places. Woodhull’s choice for substitute was a novel and convenient one: the abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher and Woodhull happened to both include Theodore Tilton in their close circle of friends. Beecher was having an affair with Tilton's wife, Elizabeth, and in 1872 Woodhull discovered the poorly kept secret. Beecher had been speaking out vehemently against Woodhull's radical free love politics, and Woodhull saw this affair as an opportunity to reveal her opponents' hypocrisy. Being in overlapping social circles with Beecher, she attempted to persuade him to get out ahead of her plan to expose the affair and confess in a joint public address, officially aligning himself with the free love movement. Beecher appeared to be willing to go along with Woodhull, or at least so she believed, until the last moment when he failed to show at their speaking engagement. This prompted Woodhull to take to the pages of the Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly to publish news of his marital transgressions. ([64] ) But airing Beecher’s affair kept Woodhull in the role of her own champion. She had failed to coerce Beecher into standing in front of her as a substitute. Woodhull’s article drew the attention of notorious moralizer Anthony Comstock who prosecuted Woodhull, her sister, and her husband. ([65]) Comstock had them charged with distributing obscene materials through the mail because of a secondary article in the Beecher issue about two wealthy men debauching a pair of teenage girls. Comstock's raid and destruction of Woodhull's office and subsequent libel suit depleted her financial resources and imperiled her health. She was arrested and briefly jailed which gave Woodhull another opening for a theatrical display. Having been released from the Ludlow jail, a second order for her arrest had been issued and the police planned to apprehend her at a scheduled speaking engagement. Woodhull dressed as an old Quaker woman and worked her way to the front of the crowd, throwing off the disguise as the crowd gathered around her, shielding her from the police for the duration of her speech. ([66]) “I come into your presence from a cell in the American Bastille,” she said, painting herself as a revolutionary, “to which I was confined by the cowardly servility of the age.” ([67]) She participated in a series of very public trials in which she was prosecuted by Comstock and sued by L. C. Challis—one the men she and her sister had accused of corrupting teenagers. This culminated with Tilton's lawsuit against Beecher in 1874 and 1875 for which she served as a witness. The Comstock prosecution and scandal that followed wore Woodhull down and eventually put an end to her political and speaking careers; an immolation in the name of her sexual and spiritual border-crossing. ([68]) In 1877, she sailed for England and never regained the celebrity she'd enjoyed as a radical mediumistic orator. Woodhull utilized a progressive style of paradoxically conscious trance performance as a vehicle to spread a progressive social agenda. She knew from the reactions of her detractors that her viewpoints were radical. Even if she had chosen to present free love and women's enfranchisement in the form of direct spirit communication, her highly critical audience would have quickly discredited both her and her spirits. Whether driven by ego or cunning, she chose to put herself between her spirits and her audience. In this way, her spirits were able to maintain a kind of authority even in the face of audiences who disagreed with her. While this routine succeeded in keeping Woodhull and her politics in the spotlight for much of the first half of the 1870s, it could not be sustained forever. Operating on the vanguard, her role was to introduce the public to ideas they had never before considered. These ideas included new approaches to sex, marriage, and the family but also the nature of performance and consciousness. Often viewed as an aberration and curiosity by her contemporaries, Woodhull is better interpreted as a free-thinking innovator, willing to adopt and share unpopular opinions and happy to play to fans and critics alike as long as she could draw a crowd. References 1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) and “Mesmeric Revelation” (1849) in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016). 2. “Free love” in the 1870s generally referred to more liberal marriage laws rather than the communal partner-sharing of the 1960s. 3. Barbara Myerhoff, “The transformation of consciousness in ritual performances: some thoughts and questions” in By Means of Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 247. 4. Charles Poyen, Proofs of Animal Magnetism in New England (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Co., 1837). 5. Poyen, Proofs, 130-131. 6. Robert C. Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious (London: Oxford U. P., 1986), 36. 7. Fuller, Americans, 31. 8. Poyen, Proofs, 138-139. 9. John DeSalvo, Andrew Jackson Davis: The First American Prophet and Clairvoyant (Morrisville, North Carolina: Lulu, 2005). 10. Swedenborg experienced a series of dreams or visions which became the basis for his own Biblical theology. Mesmerists took inspiration from the fact that Swedenborg's revelations had come in an altered state of consciousness. See A Compendium of the Theological Works of Emmanuel Swedenborg (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1974). 11. Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (New York: S.S. Lyon and William Fishbough, 1847). Davis said, “there is another distinct principle, which appears and is evident to me as Spirit. Also there is a mediator, or medium connecting the spirit with the body. This mediator I know as sensation. And when this medium becomes disunited, there is a physical dissolution, and a spiritual elevation to a different sphere of existence” (42). 12. D. M. Dewey, History of the Strange Sounds or Rappings, Heard in Rochester and Western New York and Usually Called the Mysterious Noises! Which are supposed by many to be communications from the spirit world, together with all the explanation that can as yet be given of the matter. (Rochester: D. M. Dewey, 1850), 15. By rapping through the letters of the alphabet, the taps eventually identified themselves as having been produced by the spirit of a peddler who had been killed by some previous owners of the house and buried in the basement. 13. Davis argued in his Principles of Nature that “the free, unshackled spirit... can receive impressions instantaneously of all things desired,--and with its spiritual senses, communicate with spiritual substances.” Of his own mesmerized state, he said, “When you ask me a question, I am then existing in the medium or sphere of the body; but in investigating and finding the answer, I pass to the sphere where I can associate with the truth and reality” (43-44). 14. Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1989), 82. 15. Braude, Spirits, 82. 16. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 113. 17. Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 27. 18. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2006), 17. 19. Rayner, Ghosts, 26. 20. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1985), 334. 21. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 94. 22. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 347-348. 23. Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (George H. Durhan, Co., 1926; Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), I: 134. 24. Harrison D. Barrett, Life Work of Cora L. V. Richmond (Chicago: Hack and Anderson, 1895), 8. 25. Braude, Radical Spirits, 86. 26. Nettie Colburn Maynard, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? Or Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium (Philadelphia: Rufus C. Hartranft, 1891), 1-23. 27. Athaldine Smith, “Achsa Sprague and Mary Clark's Experiences in the First Ten Spheres of Spirit Life,” (Springfield: Star Publishing, n.d.) 28. Achsa Sprague, The Poet and Other Poems (Boston: W. White and Co., 1864), 300-301. 29. Cora L. V. Richmond, “Psychic or Supermundane Experiences,” The Arena (July 1897). 30. Cora L. V. Richmond, “Psychic or Supermundane Experiences,” The Arena (July 1897). 31. In one of the harshest criticisms Richmond received, the Christian Inquirer said that her performance was “chiefly a prolonged school-girl's essay, with allusions to the fragrant flowers, and bespangled with talk about the glittering stars. Now and then there was a striking sentence, but as a whole it was vague, sentimental and exceedingly weak” (21 August 1858). 32. Cora L. V. Hatch, “A Discourse on the Immutable Decrees of God and the Free Agency of Man,” delivered in City Hall, Newburyport, Mass. 22 November 1857. http://www.interfarfacing.com/ ImmutableDegreesFreeAgencyMan.htm (accessed 9 August 2022). 33. Cora L. V. Richmond, The Soul in Human Embodiments (Richmond, 1888; reprint, St. Louis: MAS Publishing, 1999), 10. 34. Richmond, Soul, 13. 35. W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind and the study of its morbid conditions (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1875), 391-392. 36. Cathy Gutierrez, Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (London: Oxford U. P., 2009), 163. 37. S. E. D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the Practice of Late Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry (London: Cambridge U. P., 1986), 117. 38. Wouter Hanegraaf, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 471. 39. Theodore Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch,” The Golden Tracts no. 3 (New York: Office of the Golden Tracts, 1871), 17. Although Tilton would go on to resent Woodhull for her role in the Beecher scandal, at the time he wrote his biography of her, they were close friends. This gave him unique access to the details of Woodhull's personal life but also colored his narrative heavily in her favor. 40. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 17. 41. Tennie Claflin was born Tennessee Claflin but changed her name to Tennie C. after leaving her parents'; home with her sister. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 17-19. 42. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 19. 43. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 22. Woodhull had a contentious relationship with her immediate and extended family throughout her life. 44. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 17-18. 45. See, for example, Cora L. V. Tappan, “The History of Occultism and its Relations to Spiritualism,” Banner of Light 39, no. 22 (26 August 1876): 1. 46. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Elixir of Life; or, Why Do We Die? An Oration Delivered before the Tenth Annual Convention of the American Association of Spiritualists, at Grow’s Opera House, Chicago, Ills., by Victoria C. Woodhull, September 18, 1873” (New York: Woodhull & Claflin, 1873). 47. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 9, no. 8 (23 January 1875). Woodhull made a regular habit of reprinting notices about her performances in her own newspaper. In reprinting these reviews, she tacitly approved of or gave the impression that she approved of their characterization of her. 48. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 10, no. 14 (4 September 1875). 49. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 8. 50. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 9. This process is a direct echo of the way in which Andrew Jackson Davis composed his Principles of Nature with his scribe, William Fishbough. This suggests the possibility that Woodhull was intentionally assuming a more masculine trance role. 51. Myra Macpherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2014), 54-55. 52. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 9, no. 10 (27 November 1875). 53. Banner of Light (20 November 1875). 54. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 10, no. 14 (4 September 1875). 55. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, 10, Number 26 (27 November 1875). 56. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Memorial of Victoria C. Woodhull, to the honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled, respectfully showeth regarding women voting” New York, 1870. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.12800900/ (Accessed 9 August 2022). Some members of the women's suffrage movement were annoyed with Woodhull for having brokered this address to a congressional committee because they viewed her as an attention-seeking upstart who had not yet earned her place among them. 57. Victoria C. Woodhull, “A Speech on the Impending Revolution,” in Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull, ed. Cari M. Carpenter, (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2010), 67. 58. Victoria Woodhull, “Breaking the Seals; The Key to the Hidden Mystery an oration delivered by Victoria C. Woodhull, First in Martin House, Albany, N. Y., Friday Evening, Aug. 2 1875, and since at various other cities in the east,” Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 10, no. 17 (25 September 1875). In this speech, Woodhull took a strange turn toward occultism, using a 'cabalistic' key to reveal the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the human body. She gave this speech at the same time that Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott had attracted the notice of America's spiritualists with their new Theosophical Society which drew heavily on Egyptian occult themes in its early days, and so it's likely Woodhull was attempting to capitalize on a new vogue for occultism. That having been said, the speech's reference to an “elixir” helps to create continuity with her earlier work on “The Elixir of Life.” 59. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Elixir of Life; or, Why Do We Die? An Oration Delivered before the Tenth Annual Convention of the American Association of Spiritualists, at Grow’s Opera House, Chicago, Ills., by Victoria C. Woodhull, September 18, 1873” (New York: Woodhull & Claflin, 1873). 60. Woodhull, “Elixir.” Woodhull loops all the way back to trance's mesmeric roots by discovering her “elixir” in the magnetic poles of two sexual partners. Complementary positive and negative poles cure disease in the afflicted partners and promote health and longevity. 61. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia U. P., 1996), 41. 62. E. H. G. C., Reprinted in the Banner of Light 30, no. 4, (7 October 1871), 2. 63. Gabriele Weiler, “Human Sacrifice in Greek Culture” in Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. Diethard Romheld, Armin Lange, and Karin Finsterbusch (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 64. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly (2 November 1872). 65. New York Times (3 November 1872). 66. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly (23 January 1873). 67. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Naked Truth or the Situation Reviewed,” in Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull, ed. Cari M. Carpenter, (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2010), 125. 68. Woodhull was in such terrible shape at the nadir of the scandal that news circulated that she had died. Later, corrections were issued that she was only seriously ill. New York Times (7 June 1873). For his part, Beecher's reputation survived Woodhull's attempt to expose him. To this day, a statue of Beecher stands in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, New York. There is, to my knowledge, no corresponding statue of Woodhull. About The Authors Robert C. Thompson is Associate Professor of Theatre and the Director of Performing Arts Programming at Chesapeake College on Maryland's Eastern Shore. He publishes on paranormal tourism and American occultism and is the host of Occult Confessions, a history podcast about alternative religious traditions. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Oh, Mary! Philip Brankin By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Oh, Mary! By Cole Escola Directed by Sam Pinkleton Lucille Lortel Theatre New York, NY March 5, 2024 Reviewed by Philip Brankin Thinking about Oh, Mary!–– a play set during the close of the American Civil War––I cannot help but conjure up a line from the comedic persona Philomena Cunk as she ruminates on the life of Abraham Lincoln in the BBC mockumentary Cunk on Earth. In her noted droll style, she deadpans, “Lincoln’s story didn’t have a happy ending. Five days after the North won, a terrible fate befell him. He was forced to go to the theatre to watch a play.” This is the level of dark-humored irreverence found in Cole Escola’s sold-out smash hit that opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City and is now about to open on Broadway. But in this play, Lincoln is not the subject, only the by-product. Everything about the play and its production is meant to center Mary and highlight its star’s feral talent. Cole Escola (they/them) has created a career-defining production after years of paying their dues on a spectrum of stages from YouTube to Joe’s Pub at New York’s Public Theater. The production of Oh, Mary! is seemingly an autobiographical study of sorts of Escola’s own self-perception as a fledgling cabaret talent told through the removed lens of a mock biography of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln in the events leading up to the death of her husband, President Lincoln. The queering of this momentous history is enacted through turning the lens on the First Lady, re-positioning her as an ahistorical antiheroine, and essentially making every character/historical figure homosexual or utterly camp, particularly when revealing their true selves on stage. Escola’s gag is to make Mary’s super-objective to be a cabaret star, or rather, to make a comeback to the stage as the star she sees herself as. Escola’s artistic license is fully on display in this production as they present a queer revision of history. Mary’s boredom with her life, fueled by alcoholism and an inflated ego, are exacerbated by her husband’s barely veiled homosexuality. Lincoln is her distant, bewildered husband who we learn early on is more beleaguered by Mary’s obsessive fixation on stage stardom, fueled by alcohol, than the War. Abe indulges her by hiring an acting coach in the form of none other than his secret (and jealous) lover John Wilkes Booth. So, everything is in service of Mary. The program conspicuously lists the cast all not by their names but their relation to Mary (i.e. Lincoln is listed as “Mary’s husband”). Despite this, the casting is consequential. Both Lincoln and Booth are played by stars of the all-queer helmed film Fire Island , another recent entry for queer comedy. Booth convinces Mary that he has secured for her an audition for none other than the fateful production of Our American Cousin , the play the president would later be assassinated at while watching from his box seat. But this bit of history is immaterial to the audience as we are following Mary’s journey towards stardom or self-destruction. I have been following Cole Escola and their career since the early days of content creation on social media, the place I consider to be the birthplace of their dexterity as a character actor and comedy writer. Escola’s work has always focused on queering culture and historically minded camp sensibilities. After years of digital shorts, pithy tweets, and one-person shows in cabaret spaces, this production feels like the culmination of Escola’s ability to fully realize their singular vision. As Mary Todd Lincoln, Cole Escola sets the same tone for the play from her first line. She desperately cries to Washington’s portrait in the Oval Office, “Oh mother! Why did I marry him?” Oh, Mary! is as much concerned with queering sacred American history as it is with queering other deconstructions of history on Broadway, such as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton . Oh, Mary! is a testament to the current generation of mad, queer excellence and those who might find kinship with the idiosyncratic Escola. The play takes the historical subtexts of Mary and Abraham and blows them campily out of proportion, centering the marginalized aspects of their personalities, such as Mary’s mental health or Abraham’s sexuality. By showing these characters navigate those blatantly erroneous identities and making all the wrong choices, the production frees the audience of expectation or the normative urge to conceive that anything could or should be thought of as sacred. Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Oh, Mary! might be one of the most offensive comedies to play Off-Broadway, but its subversiveness plays like a labor of love for the idea of the overshadowed and oft-misunderstood First Lady, or any woman that sits at the fulcrum of history. Though the play was delivered with a massive laugh greeting nearly every single line, in a work helmed by Escola there usually comes a moment when an earnest truth is allowed just enough room to peak through and catch the audience off-guard. Diehard fans of Escola will recognize this nuance from the recent digital short film Our Home Out West in which Escola plays a Gold Rush-era Madam, in Belle Watling drag––paradigmatic of the Escola oeuvre––and works as a felicitous, subdued counterpart to their high energy Mary Todd. At one point in the film, the brothel owner’s orphaned ward asks her, “Why do people hate you so much?” In contrast to Oh, Mary! ’s atmosphere of scatological farce comes an eschatological homily on the nature of bigotry. As Cole explains, “I think because life is basically not very fair and so people like to make up their own little rules… they believe that if they follow their rules nothing bad will happen to them. So, when they see someone who’s not following their rules and doing just fine makes them scared that their rules don’t really matter and when people get scared, they get mad.” Oh, Mary! harkens back to past texts of queer import like Charles Busch’s Die, Mommie, Die! (a drag, psycho-biddy send-up of Aeschylus’ Oresteia ) or Split Britches’ Belle Reprieve (a drag satire of A Streetcar Named Desire ). All of them share a similar approach to remixing history and the historiography of Western drama. The play has some structural similarities to Roxie Hart’s journey that leads to the final, triumphant stage number that rounds out the story in the denouement of Chicago . Yet, when watching the “madcap medley” of Mary ’s grand finale, the ludicrous joy of watching the play is more akin to seeing “Little” Edie Beale of Grey Gardens finally become the singer and dancer she always said she could be (technical talent be damned!). Little Edie and Mary are both characters steeped in American (presidential) history by association, yet who enjoy basking in their own self-made mythologies. The production is a celebration of an anachronistic, gonzo-style approach to historical fiction on stage. For one thing, the setting predates what we understand and refer to as cabaret, and the cabaret finale includes music from over one-hundred years later, including the kitschiest hits of the 1970s and 80s, all while twirling and dropping a baton. Though Escola and director Sam Pinkerton are not at all interested in fidelity to dramaturgical accuracy, the production creates a consistent vision of this pivotal moment in American history. That consistency is defined in the program as “the lens of an idiot.” Escola has stated that they “wrote the show from the point of view of the audience, which is our collective third grade understanding of who Mary Todd Lincoln was.” The curls in Mary’s wig are not meant to resemble the true style of the period, but are there to accentuate her every manic move. The set, by in-demand designer dots, is meant to resemble the Oval Office, yet evokes Our American Cousin pastiche in childlike, broad strokes with blown-up proportions and spurious designs contrived from a capricious imagination. For example, the books are all clearly not real, except for the one hollowed out and hiding the hooch. The saloon setting in the latter half could be pulled from a shooting gallery in a Western theme park. Did the DC-area have saloons with swinging doors and player pianos at this time? The answer is likely “Who cares?” but more importantly, “Look at Mary go!” Everything acts as a campy gesture to the past—right down to the mock gas footlights. But the gesture is always purposefully pointing in the wrong direction and with a middle finger. Tony Macht, Bianca Leigh, and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Everything feels very correct in its incorrectness —a kind of purposeful queer failure à la J. Jack Halberstam. The show embraces its own failure to grasp historical accuracy and dramaturgical dignity. The camp of Oh Mary! lies in its ability to resist the normative desire of biographical texts that prop up the sedate figure of sober greatness that stands behind every great man. There’s an alienation in camp fit for Brecht. But the Verfremdungseffekt is most potent for the queer initiated of the audience. We are meant to be alienated from canonical history. Escola’s success represents a generation of queer alt-comedians with origins from social media platforms like Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, or X (formerly known as Twitter). These queer performers have carved out spaces and followings for themselves that slowly but surely gained them due recognition that they could parlay into the more dominant or traditional spaces of culture. In a time when queer subculture and counterculture are becoming the culture, what’s lost along the way may be up for debate. But what is clear from Oh Mary! is that it is leading the queer vanguard and delivering mainstream audiences a high priestess of camp. References About The Authors Philip Brankin is a Visiting Professor of Theater Studies at Emory University and a doctoral student in Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Georgia where he received an MFA in Dramatic Media. His research involves queer performance cultures in digital media, focusing on social media platforms as a locus for queer identity formation today. As a practitioner, he has worked as a director, producer, actor, dramaturg, writer, and media designer. A Chicago native, he has worked with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Second City, The Piven Theatre Workshop, About Face Theatre, Bailiwick, Chicago Opera Theatre, and Nothing Without a Company, among others. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Michael Valdez By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography. Arnold Aronson. London: Methuen Drama Publishing, 2018; Pp. 254. Arnold Aronson originally published The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography in 1981 when the term "environmental," then recently popularized by Richard Schechner, had not yet lost ground to terms with more current purchase like “site-specific” and “immersive.” In this revised edition, after reprinting the first nine chapters save for minor alterations, the author attempts to incorporate the scenographic developments over the last four decades into his original argument, centering around the “environmental tradition.” While the two new chapters do not sustain the same level of deep, historical engagement, the small but poignant edits to the original text and the addition of illustrations throughout help to streamline and illuminate Aronson’s argument. Organized along a loosely chronological sequence, Aronson works along a continuum of environmental theatre, from completely “frontal” productions which starkly divide the audience and actors, to productions that totally incorporate the spectator into the frame of the performance. To Aronson, who echoes Schechner, environmental theatre refers to the relationship between audience, performer, and space, stipulating that a performance is not environmental if the audience retains a detached, frontal relationship to the performance even though it might take place outside of a theatre proper. The first chapter lays out myriad modes of performance that negotiate the shared space between performer and spectator, from actors reaching out through the fourth wall to outdoor, processional, multi-space, mobile engagements. Chapter two historicizes these spatial experimentations and innovations in what he terms the environmental tradition, lucidly displaying that non-frontal uses of performance space can be found in religious, non-Western and folk traditions, citing Christian mumming plays, the fêtes of the French Revolution, and the Indian festival of Bhavana. Aronson’s scenographic approach to performance history allows him to examine amusement environments such as fairs, carnivals, and processions in how attendees and audience are incorporated as performers within the larger space, and to anticipate later experimentation from Schechner’s work with The Performance Group to Reza Abdoh’s perambulatory use of New York City’s meatpacking district. While the author is the first to that this is far from an exhaustive study of non-frontal performance, his book nonetheless remains an invaluable resource for scholars and designers, offering critical touchstones in the influence of political and theoretical movements on performance forms and theatre architecture in the 20th century. Centering performances, manifestos, and theoretical sketches by Appia, Jarry, Marinetti, Reinhardt, and Piscator among others, Aronson organizes his third chapter around early 20th century reactions against the limitations of the proscenium stage. Aronson brings to light the environmental aspects of Futurist, Surrealist, and Dada presentations, from Marinetti’s tactile theatre that necessitated audience engagement via touch to André Breton’s call for the Surrealists to take to the streets. Bauhaus artists and architects are the focus of the fourth, where Aronson highlights Frederick Kiesler’s attempts to architecturally integrate the spectator into the scenography of the performance. The fifth and sixth chapters comprise a cogent overview of revolutionary Russian scenic innovation from the 1890s to the 1930s. Well-researched, detailed, and attentive to the broader political, sociocultural, and artistic influences from both Western Europe and the US, I believe that these chapters are best suited for scholarly use. Using Meyerhold’s progression of Constructivist experimentation as an organizational through-line, Aronson argues that environmental and post-revolutionary Russian performance share a core concern with the perception, creation, and use of space, going as far as to say the first “truly” environmental theatre productions were produced by Nikolai Okhlopkov between 1932 and 1934. Meticulously attending to disparate vectors of influence, Aronson shows that while Russian practitioners theorized these architectural innovations within contemporary Communist principles, scenographic roots can be found in Medici and revolutionary French pageants, fêtes, and processions. Chapters seven, eight, and nine survey popular postwar performance forms outside traditional theatre spaces: Happenings, found environments and transformed spaces. Aronson highlights performance experiments that attempt to manipulate and alter perception, breaking spectators out of conventional viewing habits, often using specific characteristics of spaces not originally intended for theatrical performance. Chapter eight has the only explicit section on dance; here Aronson explores the uses of found and created space in the postmodern dance movement, taking Meredith Monk’s dance-theatre work Vessel, which took place across three locales in New York City, as emblematic. Read historiographically, the first nine chapters offer a glance into early Performance Studies, revealing the author's close proximity to the work of Richard Schechner. Not only does the text lean on one of Schechner’s coined terms, but his six axioms are reprinted in their entirety. Aronson finds a way to link back to Schechner’s work in every chapter, regardless of the time periods. Juxtaposed with the chapters on revolutionary Russian theatre architecture written with a honed eye for historical and cultural detail, the two new chapters seem like an additive gesture rather than a thoughtful reconsideration of the larger project. By framing “site-specific” and “immersive” theatre squarely in the continuation of the “environmental tradition,” Aronson glosses over key questions of perception, audience agency, history, and politics inherent to these theatrical innovations. As the author states in the introduction to the revised edition, the narrow focus on spatial organization is limited, and as such, is best read in tandem with texts like James Frieze’s edited collection Reframing Immersive Theatre, which augments a strictly scenographic analysis with broader inquiries into the political and cultural implications of these developments. Aronson’s 1981 edition has been and surely will continue to be, cited and used in introductory theatre studies and theatre design texts. Similarly, Aronson’s edited volume The Routledge Guide to Scenography is required reading for anyone in the discipline. Thus, I am left wanting at the end of this revisited monograph, having anticipated more. Still, Aronson’s text remains an important jargon-free point of entry to the intersection of theatre theory, performance, and architecture in Europe and the US, serving as jumping-off point into more nuanced, theoretically ambitious works such as Dorita Hannah’s Event-Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde and Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance by Josephine Machon. At its core, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography lays out a vastly useful if not sparse rubric, against which students and researchers can find their bearings in the history of a number of non-frontal performance traditions. Michael Valdez University of Minnesota, Twin Cities The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 32, Number 2 (Spring 2020) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE axes, herbs and satchels Melissa Moschitto/The Anthropologists Theater English 30 minutes 7:30PM EST Thursday, October 19, 2023 The Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Rooted in the history and embodied wisdom of doulas and midwives, "axes, herbs and satchels" is a celebration of traditional knowledge held in the Black birth worker community and a potent examination of maternal mortality. Early development of this play was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Content / Trigger Description: Please be advised that this showing contains descriptions, depictions, and language surrounding maternal mortality, racism toward the Black birthing body, infant mortality, descriptions of birth and various medical procedures. If you need to step out, please be aware of your exits and take care of your health. ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. The Anthropologists is dedicated to the collaborative creation of investigative theatre that inspires action. Fusing research, expressive movement, and rigorous dramaturgy, we create dynamic plays rooted in social inquiry. We use theatre to engage with challenging questions, to re-contextualize the present and reimagine our collective future. Founded in 2008. www.theanthropologists.org Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 3 Visit Journal Homepage Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre Karen Bowdre By Published on November 16, 2014 Download Article as PDF Karen Bowdre/ Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is well known as an anti-lynching advocate and activist, but she is less well known for her involvement with the theatre. In this essay, I argue that she played an instrumental role in creating new attitudes concerning the theatre and artistic expression. She engaged in persuasion campaigns in the early twentieth century that stretched the moral boundaries African American communities placed on entertainment. In order to affect this cultural shift she sought to bring the dramatic arts to Chicago through the Pekin Theater shortly after its re-opening in March 1906. The Pekin Theater was the city’s, and one of the nation’s, first theatres owned, managed, and operated by African Americans.[1] In her artistic crusade she battled not only the biases held by middle and upper-class African Americans toward the theatre but also the religious and moral panic patronizing the theatre often brought about in these communities. Her intervention took place over fifteen years prior to Art Theatre Movement, or Little Theatre Movement, and Alain Locke’s “Steps Toward the Negro Theatre,” published in 1922. It also came a decade before W. E. B. Du Bois’s defined Black Theatre as theatrical works “about us [African Americans], by us, for us, near us.”[2] Though Wells-Barnett can be linked to uplift ideology, she disrupted uplift tenets by being a female leader with a lower class background.[3] While Wells-Barnett gained class status from her job as a journalist as well as international recognition as a reformer, her gender and her original class status (her parents were slaves and later working people), as well as her attitudes about Black leadership, complicated her “elite” position. Nevertheless, she used her voice to create new spaces for Black cultural expression. Using the chapter from Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, entitled, “A Negro Theater,” this essay delineates how Wells-Barnett challenged, through her words and deeds, the low opinions various African American communities held regarding the theatre. Wells-Barnett was one of the most influential African American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[4] She was a teacher, journalist, editor, newspaper owner, anti-lynching advocate, and an activist for the social and political equality of Black Americans. Her anti-lynching crusades in the United Kingdom heightened the awareness of the crime throughout the United States and abroad, while her articles inspired African Americans to challenge racial oppression. Though born enslaved in 1862, her emancipation came when she was three years old. The premature death of her parents and youngest brother due to yellow fever in 1878 led to Wells-Barnett’s decision to leave college and become a teacher to support her family.[5] One of the first events that reflects Wells-Barnett’s refusal to willing submit to racial oppression occurred during her time as a teacher. While sitting in the ladies’ car on a train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, in 1884, the conductor demanded she move to the other car..[6] She refused on the basis that she had bought a first class ticket. When the conductor realized she would not move, he tried forcefully to remove her, and Wells-Barnett responded by biting him. The conductor then obtained assistance from a baggage man to remove her, and she got off the train refusing to remain on it in the smoking car. She then hired a lawyer and sued the railroad company. Initially, she succeeded in her suit, but, when the railroad company appealed the decision, the state Supreme Court reversed the decision. Wells-Barnett’s disappointment in the reversal was not only because of the betrayal of her initial lawyer and his retaliation against her, (for he did not appear concerned about winning the appeal and Wells-Barnett removed him from the case, and the debt generated by the court cases), but also because she hoped this ruling would extend to all African Americans.[7] In spite of this set back, she published an account of this lawsuit in the Living Way, a weekly religious newspaper.[8] This incident was demonstrative of how Wells-Barnett resisted the status quo in several areas of her life. She did not tolerate discrimination and consistently challenged the Jim Crow laws that dehumanized Black people. She documented injustice, and through her writings she hoped to go beyond delineating racial oppression in order to encourage African Americans to mobilize and demand equality. Wells-Barnett’s strong sense of self, and her belief that all African Americans should have full rights as citizens, contrasted sharply with the white sentiment towards Blacks in the South. Her writings also reflected her passion for Black Americans to experience the benefits of citizenship.[9] Another event that reflects Wells-Barnett’s morality and willingness to stand for her beliefs was between 1900 and 1901 when the pastor of the Bethel A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal), Reverend Abraham Lincoln Murray was accused of making inappropriate advances towards a married female member whose spouse was on the church board. After receiving promises from the one of denomination’s leaders, Bishop Abraham Grant, that Murray would be removed from his position, the Bishop acceded to the opinion of the congregation and allowed Murray to return to the pulpit. She was shocked that “such immoral conduct” was being condoned and let the Bishop know that in spite of her long attendance at the church, (married there and establish Chicago’s first black kindergarten at the church), she and her family would be leaving the church.[10] Shortly after becoming a member of her new church, Grace Presbyterian, Wells-Barnett was asked to lead the men’s Bible study. In this group, she and the young men, ranging in age from eighteen to thirty years old, examined the Scriptures and discussed ways to apply the Word to their lives. From her writings it is very clear that the Bible inspired her to take action against injustice in all of its forms. Hence, it was not surprising that her Bible study would follow in her footsteps. Disturbed by the riots in Springfield, Illinois that led to three Black men being lynched in 1908, some members from the Bible study and Wells-Barnett formed the Negro Fellowship League in order to address racial violence and discrimination.[11] These episodes make clear that Wells-Barnett’s personal convictions and her faith emboldened her to stand for what was right even if these actions did not line up with Black male leaders. Her knowledge of the Bible and her desire for justice would not allow her to follow pastors, particularly when she knew they were not living to the standard put forth in God’s word or advising members on issues where their knowledge was often limited such as the dramatic arts. The start of her anti-lynching activity occurred when a close friend and two of his associates were lynched in March 1892, the year in which the number of recorded lynchings reached an all-time high. Prior to their deaths, Wells-Barnett, like many African Americans, believed that mob violence by whites directed against both Black men and women was due to the presumed rape of white women. Since Wells-Barnett knew her friend and his partners did not commit this crime, she was motivated to question not only the death of these men but also the majority of lynchings. Through her research, she found that the only “crime” her friend and his colleagues had committed was being a business competitor to the white grocer in town. The death of her friend started a chain of events that shaped and altered her life significantly. At this time she co-owned and edited Memphis’s Black newspaper, the Free Speech and Headlight, and she wrote an editorial that refuted the charge that these men died because they were rapists. Wells-Barnett emphasized that the men owned a business that put them in competition with a white grocery store and this was the central reason for the false rape charges. She also intimated that in addition to lynchings being triggered for economic reasons, not rape, they were also the result of the discovery of consensual sexual relations between African American men and European American women. After her editorial was published, an angry white mob destroyed the newspaper office while other associates of Wells-Barnett were attacked. Thankfully, they all survived. Wells-Barnett was in New York City when the Free Speech’s office was assailed and did not return to Memphis because of the threats on her life. A month after the destructive events in May 1892, she wrote an article for the New York Age that was later published as the pamphlet Southern Horrors, her first examination of lynchings using data and interviewers from primarily white sources.[12] Her desire for African Americans to experience the rights and benefits of citizenship was not limited to the political and economic arenas. She saw the potential for creativity in the performing arts that compelled her to contest the negative attitudes some African American communities held toward the theatre. For her, the possibilities the Pekin allowed Black performers, producers, writers, musicians, and audiences were worth the battle and effort to change the viewpoint many Black communities had toward the dramatic arts. Wells-Barnett worked to create artistic spaces of independence for African Americans. As the country became more segregated and opportunities for Blacks grew more limited, she supported various outlets that encouraged Black improvement or uplift. One of these activities was the dramatic arts. Wells-Barnett was a long time “theatre bug,” and as a young woman she studied the “part of Lady Macbeth’s ‘sleepwalking scene’ for a public reading.”[13] In a chapter from her autobiography, she discussed her efforts to encourage other Blacks to attend quality African American entertainment in the Chicago area in 1906. In the early twentieth century, the stage was still considered morally dubious.[14] Her retelling of the events that culminated in the success of the Pekin Theater, indicates that she felt the dramatic arts were a part of the full range of activities, political, economic, and social, that Black people should be able to experience without bias and prejudice. After meeting Bob Cole in Buffalo, New York, where she was delivering an address, she noted, “Mr. Cole remarked that Chicago had an institution of which we ought to be proud. He spoke of Mott’s Amusement Hall in connection with this saloon, and he said the decorum of the place was what had attracted his attention, and the acts put on there he thought quite creditable.”[15] Wells-Barnett stated she had “never been to Mr. Mott’s Amusement Hall and this was the first complimentary criticism I had ever heard about it.”[16] Hearing this positive review of the amusement hall from the renowned Mr. Cole made an impression on Wells-Barnett. As part of the Cole and Johnson vaudeville team, Cole significantly influenced early Black musical theatre. The shows his company performed moved away from minstrel stereotypes and brought in talented artists who did not rely on blackface caricatures. With this endorsement, it was not surprising that when Wells-Barnett was invited to the opening of Robert Motts’s Pekin Theater. She happily obliged. Her invitation stated that Motts “had abandoned the saloon.”[17] The removal of the drinking establishment and its conversion into a theatrical space along with Cole’s recommendation were positive actions that Wells-Barnett desired to encourage. The more steps Motts took towards making the theatre a reputable place, the more Wells-Barnett believed she could commit to supporting it. Moreover, removing the alcoholic establishment from the property created an opportunity for women to attend the theatre, as good Christian women, especially since those from middle-class Black families would not patronize a business serving liquor. Wells-Barnett was excited about the new opportunities this recent establishment could provide for African Americans. She wrote, “I at once went to his place and saw Mr. Motts for the first time to my knowledge and told him that I had come to congratulate him on the change of business - that the reports I had from his place had given me many a heartache and that we, Wells-Barnett and her husband, would be very glad to cooperate with him in his new venture.”[18] Shortly after receiving the invitation, she visited Motts. Though this was her first meeting with him, in her usual forthright manner, she did not hesitate to tell him how his previous business practices aggrieved her. Her boldness in this and other endeavors demonstrated why she often proved a formidable opponent or ardent promoter. Fortunately for Motts, Wells-Barnett and her spouse assisted Motts in this unique endeavor. Motts’s business associates had not been as supportive of his new theatre venture as he had hoped. As Wells-Barnett commented, “Realizing his disappointment, I told him that if he would give me use of the place in which to have a benefit for the [Frederick] Douglass Center, I was sure I could bring to him the support he ought to have, and at the same time make some money for the center.”[19] Wells-Barnett was aware that in order for campaigns for justice or businesses to succeed, they needed support, financially and otherwise. She was also conscious that her efforts would meet with some resistance. For some in Chicago’s African American communities, Motts’s theatre would always be linked to drinking, gambling, and other unsavory activities.[20] Nevertheless, Wells-Barnett was willing to go against popular opinion to do what she felt was right. Despite Mott’s past actions, Wells-Barnett felt the theatre was a worthwhile undertaking because it would be a space for the development of African American dramatic and musical talents. However, these activities would need financial support. With her past experiences as an activist for equality and justice for Blacks, Wells-Barnett was more than capable of raising funds and obtaining new patrons for the theatre. The money gleaned from the benefit would be used by the Fredrick Douglass Center, an organization founded in 1904 by Celia Parker Woolley, a white Unitarian minister and pastor from the north side of Chicago, to assist in its operations. The Douglass Center was created to foster communication between African Americans and European Americans “to promote better race relations, remove discriminatory practices, and encourage equal opportunity.”[21] While Wells-Barnett was aware that having the second annual benefit for the Douglass Center at the Pekin Theater would raise eyebrows, she moved forward with the fund raising event confident that after seeing the theatre and enjoying the various performers at the benefit, many in Chicago’s African American communities would start to regularly visit the theatre.[22] Using her connections, Wells-Barnett called together female associates to plan the benefit. “When some of them objected, I said that now Mr. Motts was engaged in a venture of a constructive nature, I thought it our duty to forget the past and help him; that if he was willing to invest his money in something uplifting for the race we all ought to help.[23] Wells-Barnett did have a challenge in convincing her colleagues that Motts had changed. According to Wells-Barnett biographer, Mildred Thompson, Robert T. Motts was a “reputed gambling lord.”[24] In spite of his reputation, she willingly invested her time and gathered support for this enterprise. The fact that he was developing a creative, theatrical space for African Americans was exciting to her. Since one of her lifetime goals was to see the improvement of Black people from all walks of life and because Motts’s theatre would provide opportunities for African Americans performers, writers, directors, stage managers, and musicians to advance and excel in their crafts, this plan resonated deeply with her. When one of the women complained that the project was merely free publicity for Motts, Wells-Barnett stated that “I, for one, was quite willing to give him the benefit of all the advertising we could do.”[25] Her prior experiences made her very aware that enterprises often succeeded or failed based on publicity. She knew that the theatre could succeed but that the “right” publicity would be essential for this success as some potential patrons may have to be persuaded to understand the benefits. This statement also marked Wells-Barnett’s active participation in the project. Once she gained Motts’s approval of her plan, she set about to execute a successful fund-raiser. Wells-Barnett’s passion for this plan was evident as she outlined Motts’s project: “I described the beautiful little gem of a theater which he had created; told of the stock company of colored actors he had gathered together; of the Negro orchestra composed entirely of our own musicians, and how all employees from the young man in the box office were members of our race, and how proud I was to see a payroll upward of a hundred persons employed by him.[26] Her description of the theatre as a “beautiful little gem” was further evidence of her attachment to the project.[27] Whatever history had been tied to the theatre she was willing to be one of the authors of its new history. The success of this new theatre would not only aid Motts but also enrich the lives of those who enjoyed dramatic entertainment as well as the lives of the employees. African American men and women in the theatrical arts would have a venue where they could hone their skills. And, based on the success of the enterprise, the acting troupe would be able to broaden and expand because they would have a permanent residence. Additionally, Black musicians would also have the chance to increase their technical and artistic proficiency. Aside from these advantages the theatre would provide, Wells-Barnett added one more. As she remarked, “I felt that the race owed Mr. Motts a debt of gratitude for giving us a theater in which we could sit anywhere we chose without any restrictions.”[28] Being able to choose where one sat was no small thing for Black people in the early twentieth century. Jim Crow laws had stripped away the rights of African Americans and segregated them at this time, making every day a day of indignity for them. Hence, Motts providing a theatre went beyond employment opportunities and a space for artistic performance and enjoyment; it also meant freedom from unjust treatment when engaging in leisure activities. Having spaces in which African American women (and men) could exist without fear of racial oppression was critical for the development of an identity outside of societal expectations. These spaces were usually all-Black and the stage became a place where people felt there was an opportunity for self-expression. While Black entertainers could not be entirely free when they performed before European American audiences, there were fewer inhibitions when they performed for African American audiences. Actresses could portray dramatic and romantic figures – parts they were not encouraged to take on in front of majority crowds.[29] In addition to the increased freedom performers had in Black theatres, patrons had expanded freedom as well. African American audiences were not relegated to the balcony or “nigger heaven” as they would be in segregated white venues. They could choose their seats and how they would enjoy their entertainment. Gaining these options through this space is clearly one of the reasons the creation of an African American theatre was so important to Wells-Barnett. She was able to see the wonderful potential, creatively and otherwise, that this establishment could bring to Black people. Wells-Barnett’s organizational skills were well suited for theatre fund-raising. After selecting 100 women to be patronesses, the group established ticket prices. “The price of the tickets was raised from twenty-five, thirty-five, and fifty cents to $1.50 to $2.00 for box seats. Being a novel idea, it became very popular.”[30] Like any good economic strategist, Wells-Barnett knew what she could ask of her contributors. She was clearly targeting African American women of middle class or higher standing because the cost would not have been practical for other communities. The endeavor became very popular, and she attributed part of the success of the project to the creativity of her committee. Another reason for the benefit’s future success was because of the interest it generated in local churches. In addition to lobbying for spaces where African Americans could develop their artistic talents, Wells-Barnett tackled reservations Blacks may have held against the theatre on religious grounds. In her campaign to alter attitudes, she directly addressed concerns about the Pekin and its former reputation by providing the facts she knew about the establishment from her interactions with owner Robert Motts. These were the same tactics and techniques she deployed in her anti-lynching work where she was able to confront the lie of rape and other character attacks on lynching victims through her interviews with those involved in the lynching and her research on what actually triggered these murders. While some may have been intimidated to challenge church leaders, Wells-Barnett took on Chicago clergy’s myopic view of the dramatic arts through her literal battle with religious leaders because she orchestrated a benefit for the Douglass Center at the Pekin Theater. The benefit fundraising efforts proceeded smoothly until one of the local pastors heard about the event. According to Wells-Barnett, “Rev. A. J. Carey, Sr., then pastor of Bethel A.M.E. Church, preached a sermon which he prefaced by saying that members of his church had received invitations to be patronesses at the benefit at the Pekin Theater and had asked his advice. He then launched out into a denunciation of the movement, the theater, and the owner.”[31] As pastor of one of the major African American denominations, Reverend Carey was very influential in Chicago. Hence, his sermon rebuking those associated with the fundraiser may have intimidated other women. Wells-Barnett, however, was not one to shy away from a challenge. She was cognizant of the negative associations many held regarding the theatre, but she also knew that talented men, like Bob Cole, were creating art that celebrated the Black experience. She would not allow the short-sightedness of Reverend Carey and other clergy to inhibit opportunities for African American development. Moreover, Wells-Barnett was not deterred by Carey’s remarks because he had supported the previous Bethel A.M.E. pastor Abraham Lincoln Murray, who had been accused of sexual harassment. She had left Bethel A.M.E because of Murray’s actions and the fact that the church’s leadership did not remove him from his post.[32] The Pekin Theater would be a respite for Black women and men from racial oppression, provide a space for performers to further develop their artistic abilities, and for theatre-goers to experience open-seating. Undeterred by Reverend Carey, Wells-Barnett viewed the incident as positive publicity. She sarcastically observed that “Mr. Carey was serving splendidly as a press agent for the benefit. He wrote a synopsis of this sermon which he sent to every Negro newspaper on the South Side.”[33] Carey’s efforts to publicize his sermon throughout Chicago could have influenced many African Americans not approached by Wells-Barnett’s committee. Her attitude toward Carey reflected that of a woman experienced with verbal intimidation. Clearly, Reverend Carey had forgotten this woman knew how to overcome threats, verbal and otherwise, as she did in the years when she campaigned against lynching. Moreover, she did not view his attack on the benefit as being directed against her but against the theatre (and possibly it’s morally questionable owner Motts). She was also aware that Carey’s intention to derail the event would very likely not come to fruition; she had confidence that Black people would see the Pekin Theater as a chance for cultural entertainment. And she knew how to thwart Carey’s attempt to circulate his sermon through city newspapers. As a former journalist and editor, Wells-Barnett retained her connections with newspapers even after she had retired from that profession. One of those editors gave her a copy of Carey’s text. She learned that another editor from the Chicago Conservator had planned to publish the sermon.[34] At this point, Wells-Barnett’s husband, Ferdinand, assisted his wife by hiring a lawyer, Edward Wright. “Mr. Wright thereupon prepared a notice which was served upon the owner of the Conservator, the editor, and the Western Newspaper Union which printed it. The notice declared that if the article [Carey’s sermon] denouncing the benefit appeared all three would be sued for damages in the name of the center.”[35] This series of events demonstrated not only Wells-Barnett’s conceptualization of herself outside of societal expectations (Black or White), but also her skills as a strategist. Her knowledge of press operations assisted her in circumventing Carey's attack. The employment of a lawyer was clearly demonstrative of Wells-Barnett's past approaches to challenges, but ironically, her maneuvers appear to have confused her male opponents, who did not anticipate a woman acting in such a manner. Needless to say, the article was not published, but the fracas did not end there. Reverend Carey was a resilient foe and the following Sunday he "gave us another hour's denunciation from his pulpit. He read the notice which had been served on the editor, signed by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Robert T. Motts, [and he described them as a] would-be race leader and the keeper of a low gambling dive.”[36] Carey went on to deliver another sermon at another church, Olivet Baptist, and continued his disparaging remarks. While his comments regarding Motts were not surprising, his phrase describing Wells-Barnett revealed his contempt at being challenged by a woman. Carey's attempt to disregard her multiple contributions to African American communities displayed his desperation. He was clearly not accustomed to people, especially women, disagreeing with him, and Wells-Barnett's disregard and determination to follow her own well developed morality provoked his ire. Furthermore, his attempted dismissal of Wells-Barnett was demonstrative of the sexism other Black male leaders like Carter Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois showed as well.[37] As a devout Christian and Bible teacher, Wells-Barnett knew that one should respect pastors and clergy. Nevertheless, her knowledge of the Bible, as well as her sense of self, would not allow her to blindly follow the direction of misguided leaders. She not only resisted white hegemonic notions of Black femininity, but Black male sexism as well. She occupied a unique position because though she was an influential African American female leader in Chicago in her later life, she did not conform to elitist notions of class. If she had conformed to Black ideas regarding the theatre at the turn of the century, she would have sided with Carey and the other clergy. Moreover, she learned from Motts first-hand how his theatre would operate and the kinds of material to be showcased. If Motts’s plans had been morally objectionable, she never would have held her fund-raising event at the Pekin Theater. Although the support of local clergy would have made the campaign for the theatre less controversial, Wells-Barnett did not allow the opinions of uninformed church leaders to persuade her. Carey continued his campaign against the theatre and brought his concerns to an alliance of ministers. These clergy formed a committee and attempted to stop the benefit by appealing to Mrs. Wooley, a Unitarian pastor and founder of the Douglass Center, to stop the center’s involvement and promotion of the theatre.[38] As part of their request, the group of clergy “promised to set aside a Sunday and take a collection for the benefit of the center if it really was in need of money.”[39] The willingness of the clergy to redirect their own church offerings to the center exposed how serious they were in wanting to prevent the benefit from occurring at the theatre. The pastors had apparently forgotten that one of the three families Mrs. Wooley contacted when she decided to establish the center was the Barnetts. The Ministerial Alliance had also not foreseen the strength of the connections that Wells-Barnett had developed in Chicago. Not only was she notable for her national and international social activism and her work in Chicago (she established a kindergarten for Black children at Bethel A.M.E. Church and a women’s club was named after her), her husband was an attorney and prominent politician. “Mrs. Wooley heard them through, reminded herself of their opposition to the establishment of the center itself, and that at no time during its existence had the ministers ever visited her in body before, simply told them she had asked Mrs. Barnett to give some one big thing, out of which money might be made for the needs of the center and that she did not feel justified in interfering with the plans I had made.”[40] The pastors had not anticipated that their previous opposition to the center would have future ramifications. Mrs. Wooley created the center because she wanted a place where African Americans and whites could meet, discuss issues, and improve relations between the races. Since these men had resisted the center, Mrs. Wooley now was leery of their offer of assistance, even if it was from their own offerings. Wooley’s support may have had more to do with not wanting to cross Wells-Barnett on this particular issue as the women did not always see eye-to-eye.[41] Wooley also “declined to accept their offer of a collection, reminding them that their churches all were in debt and she thought they would need their offering for themselves.”[42]This statement, from Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, concurred with her distrust of those who abused their pastoral authority – these clergy had not determined the facts, attempted to incite their congregations against the theatre, condemned its owner, and were willing to use their offerings as a bribe for an establishment, the Frederick Douglass Center, which they found reprehensible two years ago. Since none of these men was her pastor, and they proved to be questionable regarding the Pekin Theater, Wells-Barnett felt justified in disregarding the request of the clergy. Wells-Barnett encountered two other setbacks prior to the benefit. The first came from the editor of the Daily News. Wells-Barnett had wanted the paper to print her announcement of the event. Charles Fay, the editor, declined to do so based on the past reputation of the theatre. Though this was disappointing, she was able to use other newspapers to publicize the event. The second impediment was the cancellation by one of the groups performing for the benefit. Anna Morgan ran a successful studio and “had promised to have that year’s graduating class give us a play.”[43] Unfortunately, Morgan did not notify Wells-Barnett of her change of plans until after “tickets and some literature had been printed.”[44] Though Morgan did offer to repay Wells-Barnett for the expenditures incurred, Morgan felt she had to cancel this engagement “because she had learned of the Pekin’s notorious reputation; that the young ladies in her school of acting had come from the best families of the city and that she could not afford to take them into such a place.”[45] Morgan had been able to train women from reputable families and was concerned for the reputation of her students. One could argue that she had legitimate apprehension in light of Motts’s and his establishment’s character. What complicated and nullified her concern was the fact that Wells-Barnett and her colleagues were sponsoring the event. Wells-Barnett would not have attached herself to an occasion that would impugn the reputation of African American women. Most of her activism involved making it clear to the general public that Black women were hard working and virtuous. Morgan’s withdrawal may have been encouraged as a final effort on the part of the Ministerial Alliance. Clearly disappointed by Morgan’s actions, Wells-Barnett’s response exemplified her frustration with those who allowed themselves to be controlled by public opinion. “My reply to Miss Morgan was not very diplomatic, I grant, but I said to her that her young ladies could not have a very secure hold on their reputations if giving one night’s performance would cause them to lose them.”[46] Though Wells-Barnett was active in dispelling myths about the moral degeneracy of African American women, she also knew there were times when one had to honor prior commitments. One performance at the Pekin Theater for the Frederick Douglass Center should not mar the reputation of Morgan’s students. For Wells-Barnett, addressing injustice and inequality often demanded functioning outside of societal norms. If she had adhered to the mores of educated, middle-class African Americans, she never would have started her campaign against lynching. Fortunately, Wells-Barnett believed that the issue of lynching (and other injustices) urgently needed to be exposed and stopped. Since she knew she was a woman of high moral standards, Wells-Barnett did not allow sexist ideologies to prevent her from being in the public sphere. “In spite of all the opposition,” Wells-Barnett writes, “the benefit was a huge success. The society leaders vied with each other in their box parties and the house was filled with the most representative members of our race. It gave them a chance to see what perhaps they would have been years in realizing, what a very auspicious effort was being made right here in our town by a man who sincerely wanted to do better things.”[47] The event’s success was not only demonstrated by the amount of money raised, $500 which was the average cost of a car in 1906, but also viewed as an achievement by the local papers who praised the event as well.[48] It also was a triumph because Wells-Barnett was confident the event had planted a positive vision about the theatre in the minds of others. Through the benefit, many Blacks witnessed that the theatre was not disreputable. The Pekin provided a space where African American performers, writers, and musicians could operate and develop their respective skills without having to cater to European American audiences. The Chicago American noted in 1906 that it was, “the only theater in the country, probably the only regular playhouse in the world, owned, managed, and conducted by colored people, presenting with a stock company of colored artists, original musical comedies, farces and plays written and composed by colored men in this city.”[49] In March 1906, the first play presented in the remodeled theatre (a fire had destroyed the interior of the theatre) was the three-act musical comedy The Man from ‘Bam, written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, who went onto to write the Broadway hit and Black musical comedy Shuffle Along in 1921, “book by Collin Davis, lyrics by Arthur Gillespie, and music by Joe Jordan.”[50] In its initial months, the theatre exhibited new and mostly original productions, usually musical comedies or farces, every two to three weeks. Other shows performed at the Pekin were “The Mayor of Dixie, Two African Princes, My Friend From Georgia, In Zululand, Captain Rufus, Count of No Account, One Round of Pleasure, and Doctor Dope.”[51] The Pekin’s stage manager was Charles Sager, its producing director was J. Ed. Green, the resident director of music was Joe Jordan, and its composers Will Vodery and Lawrence Freeman.[52] Some of the acting talent developed at the Pekin “included Lawrence Chenault, J. Francis Mores, Charles Gilpin, the prima donnas Lottie Grady and Rosa Lee Tyler, Pearl Brown and, later, Abbie Mitchell.”[53] Green was an actor, playwright, and manager as well as the producing director. In addition to Gilpin, who gained national prominence in Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Emperor Jones, Green and actor Harrison Stewart were two of the brightest stars of the theatre according to theatre scholars Errol Hill and James Hatch. Hence as Wells-Barnett noted, “It has been a very great pleasure to remember that many of the leading actors and actresses in the race got their first training in Bob Motts’s stock company. The same is true of the musicians.”[54] Shortly after the benefit, prominent Black organizations in Chicago used the Pekin for events and one of the pastors who vowed never to step foot in the theatre made a speech there for a political meeting. With the theatre’s increased popularity, Motts tried to build upon its reputation. He sent “two recent productions [Captain Rufus and The Husband] to New York during the summer for a short two-week stay at Hurtig and Seaman’s Music Hall in Harlem” in 1907.[55] Though Motts seemed to have wanted to attract investors to his theatrical endeavors, his scheme made New Yorkers desire their own all Black playhouse with performers and musicians. Wells-Barnett’s efforts to alter attitudes about the theatre in Chicago occurred simultaneously to critics of the stage gaining importance in national newspapers. Black newspapers informed Black communities about political, economic, and social events, and many papers also shared their views on how these events affected African Americans. These organs also covered African American entertainers and were not shy about criticizing performances they felt perpetuated racist ideas about Blacks. Sylvester Russell was the first African American theatre critic to receive recognition nationally. He was a former singer and wrote for the Indianapolis Freeman from approximately 1900 to 1910 and later for the Chicago Defender.[56] Scholar Henry T. Sampson notes that Russell’s “graphic and detailed show reviews and other theatrical commentary” reflect the ways Black entertainment was viewed by a “contemporary observer.”[57] Though some performers disliked his criticism, it gained favor when entertainers and audiences realized his desire was to improve the quality of African American performance.[58] As Russell grew in stature, other Black newspapers hired writers to examine the dramatic arts. Another prominent writer is Lester Walton, who wrote for The New York Age as their drama (and later film) critic. Like Russell, Walton was involved in the theatre as a song writer, playwright, manager, and producer both prior to and after his assignment with The Age. Walton was a founding member of the Frogs, Inc., a theatrical club in New York City with other African American entertainers such as Bert Williams and George Walker.[59] Walton and Russell brought seriousness and respectability in their examination and review of Black entertainment and their writings along with Wells-Barnett’s bringing new audiences to the Pekin theatre change how African Americans thought about the performing arts. As perceptions about the theatre changed, the Pekin inspired other African Americans nationally to create local legitimate professional Black theatres. Wells-Barnett observed that “other parts of the country encouraged by our success also established theaters of their own among our people and many of them were called Pekin Theaters.”[60] According to Bernard Peterson, there were at least seven other Pekin Theaters in existence in the early twentieth century and the Indianapolis Freeman noted in an article dated 10 May 1910 that there were 53 Black theatres “owned and managed by Negroes.”[61] Though she had faced opposition, Wells-Barnett belief in the importance of this project created a vision that went beyond Chicago. Theatres for African Americans throughout the nation spoke of self-reliance and entrepreneurship along with the formation of Black theatrical companies, managers, and musician staffs. Though not all of the theatres were owned and operated by African Americans, these were spaces where Blacks did not have to endure discrimination and had the opportunity to develop artistically. With the benefit of hindsight (she wrote her autobiography in the 1920s or 1930s), Wells-Barnett could celebrate the success of the Pekin Theater. Not only was it a theatre with an African Americans stock company, it was the first and for many years the only playhouse where plays were created and produced by Black talent.[62] Wells-Barnett swayed public opinion in African American communities at a time when Black women were invisible and not considered human beings by the larger public. It was also a time when ideologies in Black communities, particularly middle-class groups, restricted women’s work. While some African Americans would have been troubled by the career of a married woman, the public life of Wells-Barnett demonstrated how women could conduct themselves in public. Interestingly, she found the stage a place where a greater opportunity for African American self-expression existed. Despite the moral concerns regarding entertainment and the racist images and imaginings about Black women throughout American culture, she worked to dispel myths regarding the theatre; she would not allow public perception of proper female behavior to prevent her from challenging negative attitudes about the theatre. Her belief in herself empowered her to constantly consider the possibilities and not the barriers. Moreover, Wells-Barnett desired to inspire others and ensure that African American achievement in the dramatic arts and beyond would not stop with her death. Karen Bowdre is currently an independent scholar, who has published on African American media and romantic comedies in Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Falling in Love Again: The Contemporary Romantic Comedy, and Cinema Journal. Her research interests include race and representation, gender, early African American theatre history, adaptation, romantic comedies, telefantasy, and telenovelas. Her book Shades of Love: African Americans and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. She is also the co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Critical Perspectives on Tyler Perry which is forthcoming with University of Mississippi Press. [1] According to Professor Edward Robinson, the Pekin first opened as the “Temple of Music” on 18 June 1905 and was rebuilt in 1906. See Edward A. Robinson, “The Pekin: The Genesis of American Black Theater,” Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 4, Black Theatre Issue (Winter 1982): 136-138. The only mention of Wells-Barnett’s work with theatre I have found was in Errol Hill and James Hatch’s comprehensive work on Black theatre: Errol Hill and James Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 191. [2] Hill and Hatch, History, 216-217. Errol Hill ascribes Du Bois’ description of Black theatre to an article believed written by the latter in The Crisis, XXII:3 (July 1926), 134 titled “‘Krigwa Players’ Little Theatre Movement.” See Hill, “Black Black Theatre in Form and Style,” The Black Scholar 10, no. 10, Black Theatre (July/August 1979): 29-31. Another example of a Black female intellectual and her contributions to theatre being overlooked can be found in Monica Smith Ndounou’s exceptional essay on Anna Julia Cooper. Ndounou, “Drama for ‘Neglected People’: Recovering Anna Julia Cooper’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism from the Shadow of W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 2012): 25-50. [3] Uplift ideology is described by Kevin Gaines as a “self-help ideology” employed by the Black elite to separate themselves as being better than other African Americans because of their education and class status. Gaines views these elites as being ministers, intellectuals, journalists, and reformers and throughout his text references Wells-Barnett as an elite. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 13, 44-45, 79-80. Though Gaines does acknowledge her elite position was often dismissed by sexist Black men, she does not fit neatly in this category, as her views about class alter over time. For example, when Wells-Barnett had two suits pending in the Tennessee Supreme Court regarding her removal from the ladies car of a train, she resented the fact that affluent Blacks used their money to “bypass the indignities of discrimination rather than [defend] their race.” Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 57. [4] Historians Mia Bay and Paula Giddings document how during Wells-Barnett’s lifetime her accomplishments were not acknowledged by other African American leaders and in Black history; both attribute this to sexism operating within Black communities. Bay, To Tell, 3-13. Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad, 2008), 1-7. [5] Since Wells-Barnett was a significant figure prior to her marriage to Ferdinand Barnett in June 1895, many biographers only use her maiden name when discussing her prior to her marriage. In this chapter, my main focus is her work for the Pekin Theatre (when she was married) but in order to give background information, I also reference her achievements prior to her marriage. In order to avoid confusion, I use her married name throughout my text. [6] This incident shows the changing nature of Jim Crow laws. Wells-Barnett had ridden this same route on the ladies car in the past without problems or altercations. [7]. Bay delineates the lawyer controversy in her biography of Wells-Barnett. The initial lawyer on the case, Thomas Cassells, was an important African American lawyer and politician. Because of his disinterest, she fired him and hired James M. Greer, a European American. Cassells became one of Wells-Barnett’s lifelong enemies. Bay, To Tell, 45-58. [8] Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 11-14. [9] Bay notes the importance of Reconstruction to Wells-Barnett and how it and her parents shaped her ideas concerning equality and rights. Bay, To Tell, 15-17. [10] Alfreda M. Duster (ed), The Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 298, Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 439 and Bay, To Tell, 281. [11] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 472 and Bay, To Tell, 282. [12] Wells-Barnett’s best known pamphlets are Southern Horrors (1892), A Red Record (1895) and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 1-3. [13] Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 281-2, Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 12. [14] Robert Allen unpacks several transgressive moments on theatrical stages such as burlesque that include women impersonating men and creating a spectacle that unnerved middle class audiences and critics. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). [15] Duster, The Crusade, 289. Bob Cole was another notable African American vaudeville entertainer. In addition to being a talented performer and part of the Cole and Johnson team, he was also a stage manager and playwright for his own stock company. For more information on Cole and Johnson see Seniors’, Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture and Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009), 178. [16] Duster, The Crusade, 289-290. [17] Ibid, 290. [18] Ibid. [19] Ibid. [20] Giddings reports that once members of various African American groups realized the benefit for the Douglass Center would be held at the New Pekin controversy surrounded the event. Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 458. [21] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 447. [22] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 453-461. [23] Duster, The Crusade, 290. [24] Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 112. [25] Duster, The Crusade, 290. [26] Ida Wells-Barnett describing the Pekin Theatre and owner Robert Motts. Duster, The Crusade 290. [27] Ibid. [28] Ibid. [29] Aida Overton Walker, a choreographer, actress, and singer, discussed the limitations forced on African American performers: You haven’t the faintest conception of the difficulties which must be overcome, of the prejudices which must be left slumbering, of the things we must avoid whenever we write or sing a piece of music, put on a play or sketch, walk out in the street or land in a new town. No white can understand these things. Every little thing we do must be thought out and arranged by Negroes, because they alone can know how easy it is for a colored show to offend a white audience. Let me give you an example. In all the ten years that I have appeared in and helped produce a great many plays of a musical nature, there has never been even the remotest suspicion of a love story in any of them. During those ten years I do not think there have ever been a single white company which has produced any kind of musical play in which a love story was not the central motive. Now, why is this? It’s not accident or because we don’t want to put on plays as beautiful and artistic in every way as do white actors, but because there is a popular prejudice against love scenes enacted by Negroes. This is just one of the ten thousand things we must think of every time we make a step. The public does not appreciate our limitations, or, rather, the limitations which other persons have made for us. Chicago Herald, dated 10 January (year missing) clipping, Robinson Locke Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. [30] Duster, The Crusade, 291. [31] Ibid. [32] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 439. [33] Duster, The Crusade, 291. [34] In 1878, Ferdinand Barnett founded the Chicago Conservator, one of the first African American newspapers in the Chicago area (see Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 48). Later, Wells-Barnett would join the staff of the paper and become an editor. This incident occurred after both had sold their interest in the paper. [35] Duster, The Crusade, 291. [36] Ibid, 291-292. [37] Wells-Barnett was upset Carter Woodson had not mentioned her anti-lynching work in his history of significant African Americans. See Linda O. McMurry's To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 336. And Patricia A. Schechter in her essay, The Anti-Lynching Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1920, http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/idabwells/pamphlets.html (accessed 8 Oct. 2014), observes that "(a)t her death in 1931, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) journal, The Crisis, that her work had been "easily forgotten" and "taken to greater success "by others." [38] Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 94. [39] Duster, The Crusade, 292. [40] Ibid. [41] Though Wooley desired interracial interactions between African Americans and European Americans, she had a definite bias against poorer Blacks. She felt that “the ‘hordes’ of southern blacks, most of them ‘ignorant and dissolute,’ who ‘lowered the standard of the colored population in our midst’” Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 456. Wells-Barnett’s knowledge of how lynching victims were criminalized enabled her to have a view that people can “change for the better.” Ibid, 457. [42] Duster, The Crusade, 292. [43] Ibid, 293. [44] Ibid. [45] Ibid. [46] Ibid. [47] Ibid. [48] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 458. Information regarding 1906 from website http://local.aaca.org/junior/mileposts/1906.htm. Accessed 8 Oct. 2014. [49] Hill and Hatch, History, 192. [50] Hill and Hatch, History, 192-193. [51] Ibid, 193. [52] While the other positions were listed by Hill and Hatch, the composers were listed by Bernard L. Peterson, Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 (Westport, Greenwood, 2000), xi. [53] Ibid. [54] Duster, The Crusade, 293. [55] Hill and Hatch, History, 194. Captain Rufus was written by J. Ed. Green and Alfred Anderson and the music came from H. Lawrence Freeman and Joseph Jordan; the play was set in the military and a musical comedy. The Husband was written by Miller and Lyles. [56] Peterson, Profiles, 220. Sylvester Russell wrote for The Chicago Defender’s “Musical and Dramatic” Column along with other writers. See Anna Everett’s Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 18-35, for examples of Russell’s film criticism as well as Russell’s, 36-41. [57] Henry T. Sampson, The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865-1910, (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1988) 282 [58] Ibid, 293 [59]Peterson, Profiles, 252-253. Lester Walton was The New York Age’s theatre critic and editor of the column “Music and the Stage.” [60] Duster, The Crusade, 294 [61] Hill and Hatch, History, 199 [62]Ibid, 205-206. Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre by Karen Bowdre ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 3 (Fall 2014) ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents: Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre by Karen Bowdre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition by Ariel Nereson Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives by Vanessa Campagna “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" by Tamara L. Smith 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 ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2023 DANCE So Brutal It Feels Like Home Alison Clancy Dance, Music English 30 min 8:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Is it possible for a room to be empty when your memories keep breaking through the walls? Alison Clancy’s drone-pop-psych-Americana piece So Brutal It Feels Like Home puts you in a liminal space where ghosts ricochet off every surface. This is about the same thing that makes wild dogs howl. Three dancers, Clancy’s live ethereal vocals and electric guitar, and multi-spectrum lighting and shadows transport us from ecstatic vistas to the bottom of the well. Landing somewhere between a rock show / dance concert / performance installation the work is haunting in its simple brutality, emotional intimacy and physical virtuosity. This piece was created with support from Susannah Lee Griffee and the NY State Dance Force Choreogrpaher's Initiative Award Content / Trigger Description: Dreaming of beauty and collective catharsis, Alison Clancy designs projects bridging between worlds... Haunting solo music performances weave tapestries of electric guitar into expansive, brooding drone-psyche Americana. Incantatory vocals reveal delicate vulnerability and gritty volatility. Alison summons ghosts from machines. Performances often incorporate expressionistic choreography in collaboration with virtuosic dancers. Alison's choreographic work is informed by a deep relationship with classical ballet, but subverts technique in exploration of primordial sensuality. Illuminating the authority of each body's authentic story, the essence of performers are invited to burn and melt the form. Alison's approach is equal parts visceral and visual, often incorporating cinematic custom lighting and video installations. 2022 recipient of the New York State Dance Force Choreographer's Initiative Award. www.alisonclancy.com https://www.instagram.com/_alison_clancy_/ https://www.facebook.com/ClancyMedia Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters George Pate and Libby Ricardo By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF by George Pate and Libby Ricardo The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center In the Summer of 2010, the worlds of theater and medicine collided in Athens, Georgia. What was then known as the Georgia Health Sciences University and is now the Georgia Regents University (GRU), based two hours down the road in Augusta, was in the process of opening a new branch campus that fall in Athens attached to the University of Georgia (UGA). Dr. Stephen Goggans, the head of first-year clinical skills training, contacted Dr. David Z. Saltz, head of UGA’s Department of Theater and Film Studies, about creating a new training program for volunteers performing in simulated doctor-patient encounters as part of the first-year curriculum. These early meetings led to a collaboration which continues to this day and looks to continue to be profitable for both sides into the future. This essay will explain the nature of the collaboration and training and its implications for performance and actor training from the theater department’s perspective, particularly based on the experience of the authors. In narrating the brief history to date of this collaborative project, we hope not only to expose some of the potential issues in bringing together professionals from such disparate fields and suggest some possible solutions, but also to explore the practical applications of actor training and what these applications teach us about our methods. Before getting further into the specifics of the training program at UGA and GRU, we need to take a moment to look at the history and variety of simulated and standardized patients and understand the differences between those two terms. The use of standardized patients began in 1963 at the University of Southern California, under the direction of Dr. Howard Barrows. In some of the earlier tests, doctors unknown to the students being tested played the patients. The doctors were used both for the sake of accuracy in portraying symptoms of the simulated ailment and to provide immediate and interactive assessment on the students' perceptiveness and diagnostic abilities. This type of encounter persists in the form of simulated patients who serve as “secret shoppers” in real practices to research such issues as access to care.[1] The standardized patient eventually became a fixture in many medical schools, primarily as an assessment tool. The most prevalent of these tools, the OSCE, or Objective Structured Clinical Examination, was first designed to assess medical students’ clinical skills, and continues to be used today. Medical students-in-training go to a test site and engage in encounters with actors trained as standardized patients and are evaluated on their clinical skills such as communication, relationship building, and ability to extract information. In fact, many of the encounters for which we trained actors served as preparation for the OSCEs for the medical students in Athens. The primary concern of the OSCEs is the mechanics of a hypothetical and neutral encounter, testing skills such as the medical student’s ability to read a chart or take a history. Additional obstacles, such as a patient’s anxiety or frustration, are taken into account only rarely and even then in a rehearsed, predictable way. The fact is, however, that the difficulties faced by doctors come not only in the form of complicated diagnoses and faltering treatments but also in the interaction with the patient in crisis. While little might prepare a student for the reality of a genuinely sick individual, medical schools now promote clinical skills to help the transition from theoretical to concrete. Traditionally, actors or volunteers who participate in the OSCEs or similar encounters have been known as standardized patients. Standardized patients follow a very specific script, often containing lines of dialogue and specific instructions on when to divulge certain information about the case. For example, a standardized patient may be instructed to mention their father’s heart condition the first time they are asked about family history, but only reveal their grandfather’s cancer if asked about family history a second time. Standardized patients are still used for evaluation at the OSCEs and for training at many medical schools all over the country, including GRU’s main campus in Augusta. Recently, however, some schools, such as GRU’s Athens branch, have been experimenting in a new and innovative kind of encounter by making the transition from standardized to simulated patients for the purposes of training. Unlike traditional standardized patients, simulated patients are not given a specific script. Instead, they receive all the details of a case including symptoms, medical history, patient’s education and socioeconomic status, and any other significant factors. Based on this information, they improvise their encounters with the medical students. Unless the case calls for a specific emotional challenge for the students, the simulated patients are encouraged to go with their own emotional response to the situation. Also, the simulated patients are encouraged to respond and react to the students as they would in a real doctor-patient encounter and to divulge information only as the medical students elicit it from them. In this way, simulated patients offer a higher level of fidelity to doctor-patient interaction than standardized patients offer. [2] While the use of standardized patients in the United States goes back to at least the 1960s, simulated patients represent a relatively recent development in medical training. Their rise can at least in part be attributed to recent research suggesting that clinical skills are not ancillary to medical care but in fact affect healing and recovery in measureable ways.[3] High fidelity simulated patient encounters provide practice in performing empathy. In a standardized encounter, empathy is a moot point.[4] The medical student more or less knows the game and knows that the ability being tested is whether or not they know the right questions to ask, how to take a history, or when to press a patient for a particular piece of crucial information. Not unlike the SATs, success in the OSCEs depends at least as much on an understanding of how the test works as it does on knowledge of the material. A simulated patient encounter, on the other hand, innovates on this process by demanding of a medical student that they pay close attention to the emotional responses of their patients, which may develop in ways they cannot anticipate. In other words, the simulated encounter demands more empathy from doctors in training. Empathy is not a new concern for the medical profession. In his lecture to Harvard Medical students in 1925, Dr. Francis Peabody states: The treatment of a disease may be entirely impersonal; the care of a patient must be completely personal. The significance of the intimate personal relationship between physician and patient cannot be too strongly emphasized, for in an extraordinarily large number of cases both diagnosis and treatment are directly dependent on it, and the failure of the young physician to establish this relationship accounts for much of his ineffectiveness in the care of patients.[5] Empathy is desirable not only in a holistic sense but also on a very practical level. A patient who trusts and respects their doctor as a human and confidant may be more likely to share crucial information and engage earnestly in discussions of treatment options, for example. Though the medical profession has long recognized the importance of instilling empathy in new doctors, the question of how to teach this skill persists. In "Medical Professionalism Crossing the Generational Divide," Colin Walsh and Herbert T. Abelson address the overwhelming concern for the future of the profession: But recent medical graduates also cannot assume that earning a degree means they know what they need to know about earning a patient's trust and providing the best care, even when therapeutic options beyond palliative care have run out. In the next 50 years, this professional schism must be negotiated. If it is not, doctors in 2050 may actually be no more than technicians, as patients become increasingly more interested in "what the test shows" instead of what the doctor has to say.[6] The doctor-patient relationship is inherently intimate, as the physician is charged with managing the physical well-being of his or her patient. This, however, must be coupled with the capacity for empathy. While it might seem like a small amendment, the use of the simulated patient from the onset of training forces the theoretical to become real. Physicians are never just dealing with hypothetical symptoms conveniently listed on a provided paper, but are rather constantly interacting with their patients. The simulated patient is a reminder, a harbinger, of what is to come post-graduation. And the medical students of GRU will be better prepared to face a patient and negotiate between their sometimes contradictory roles as scientist and caretaker. Both standardized and simulated patient encounters offer several unique pedagogical advantages for students preparing for the medical profession. These advantages arise from the opportunities created by applying performance and acting training to the sciences. The acted scenario lives somewhere between the textbook and the clinic. Unlike other simulation modalities such as high-tech simulation mannequins, acting scenarios are flexible, adaptive, and provide a much broader range of feedback than simply correct or incorrect.[7] They also give instructors the opportunity to see what doctors might be like in action. In our experience, many students who excelled in the classroom struggled when confronted with real (or simulated) patients. Without the encounters, their professors may not have recognized that they needed extra help in that area. To help identify the areas where students need to improve, many encounters, including ours at GRU, ask the standardized or simulated patients to fill out a form on a computer in the encounter room to provide feedback about how the students made them feel.[8] One of the major innovations that GRU is exploring in the longstanding practice of using simulated encounters is the stage at which these encounters are introduced into the curriculum. While many schools wait to introduce simulated encounters until the second year, GRU thought it necessary to integrate clinical skills acquisition as early as possible. Thus, simulated patients are used from the first semester on, not just as a means of assessment but also as a pedagogical tool. The use of the simulated patient early in the medical school curriculum emphasizes the importance of developing communicative skills necessary for the demands of the profession. Medical school is already notoriously demanding, yet academic prowess is not enough to fulfill the demands of a physician's practice. The encounter offers real challenges in dealing with difficult social situations. The students were faced with an average of five encounters per semester in which they were expected to complete a range of tasks from something as routine as taking a patient’s history to something as challenging as delivering news of and taking responsibility for a botched procedure. Similarly, these encounters teach skills ranging from how to take a history to how to ethically approach difficult matters such as medical error, final directives, and confidential information.[9] The simulated patients were encouraged to behave as they would if they were in these situations in their own lives, bringing elements of emotional distress or physical discomfort to the room. Community volunteers who were recruited the summer before school began were required to attend a training session. These individuals were not professional performers but rather retired members of the University of Georgia community ranging in age from around 60 to over 80.[10] They largely came to us through their connection with the University of Georgia’s chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. While many served as ushers at the Performing Arts Center, they were admittedly more inclined to participate as audience than performers. Thus, we were confronted with a dilemma: how might we train simulated patients who lack knowledge of performance technique? After all, high fidelity encounters require the ability to respond to the given circumstances and allow emotion to evolve naturally. An impassive simulated patient would not challenge the students to empathize. Ricardo, who handled most of the actual actor training, found terminology to be vital in that process. Rather than try to translate theater terms into lay language, she implored the community volunteers to become comfortable using vocabulary familiar to anyone trained in Stanislavski-based acting techniques, words such as objective, obstacle, and tactic. Much of the training, then, resembled a freshman-level acting class in most American universities. We also developed some specific uses for words particular to the activity of the encounter such as scenario and background. This shared vocabulary promoted a more successful encounter in a number of ways. For one, it made the volunteers feel like actors. By encouraging the use of particular words specifically applicable to their work as simulated patients, the volunteers were more likely to take the experience of the encounter seriously. In the beginning, many of the older members of our volunteer pool wished to connect with the young doctors to the point of breaking character and trying to comfort their students. Acting terminology was the key to solving this issue. When we asked them what their objective was in the first encounter, many of them eagerly responded that their objective was to help the medical students learn. After talking about the idea of the objective as what the characters wanted to get out of their scene partners rather than what the volunteers were trying to accomplish as actors, they were able to identify objectives that increased the level of fidelity in the encounters. Instead of needing to help the students learn, they needed to understand their test results or to seek redress for a costly error. It wasn’t the retiree in a room with a nervous first year medical student, but rather an anxious 65-year old office worker with heart palpitations interacting with a doctor. By instituting our shared terminology, we were able to support encounters that would truly test the medical students. By keeping our conversations rooted in acting rather than medical or pedagogical vocabulary, we were able to move past the initial problems caused when our volunteers began training by asking what the medical students were supposed to learn in any given encounter. We expanded beyond objectives and added other concepts such as obstacles. What happens when the doctor does something that decreases the possibility of getting what you need or want? These terms placed emphasis on the needs of the patient character rather than the aid of the student. Obviously no simulated patient wanted to see a student fail; however, by attempting to help, they were in fact hindering their potential progress. Finally, using acting vocabulary helped to advocate more convincing emotional response, as opposed to forced or contrived reactions. As with any other actor we might coach, we never spoke of playing sad or playing frustrated. Rather, we encouraged the community volunteers to be diligent in creating a complete character. We implored each to create a backstory based on the medical history given in the encounter but also enriched with invented details distinct from their own experience and fueled by their imaginations. This fullness of character development helped to instigate or trigger particular emotional responses while also giving the volunteers a sense of ownership over the characters they created, thus heightening their stakes in the encounter. One of the cases detailed a medical error involving a missing blood test. The circumstances were that the test would indicate whether or not the patient had a cholesterol problem. Many volunteers asked for tips on how to “play mad.” We encouraged them instead to rely on the concepts of objective, obstacle, and backstory. We asked them to imagine that their character’s family history showed many heart problems. We also asked them to think of the hassle of going to the doctor, and even encouraged them to create a scenario that they were either unable to get to an appointment on their own and thus had to burden a loved one for a ride or that they had to travel a great deal of time to get to the office. By placing these seeds of thought in the mind of the volunteer, we never had to prompt visible frustration and annoyance; it sprouted organically within the encounter. Thus, the medical student was faced with a more realistic and devastating scenario, an unhappy customer. We found that different situations called for exercises drawn from various acting theories. Exercises based on Sanford Meisner’s work were used earlier in the training to instill a sense of dependence on the partner, or in this case, the medical student.[11] It is important that the simulated patient be able to read and respond to the student, and that these reactions are organic. Ricardo also speaks frequently about Konstantin Stanislavski’s magic if, entreating the community volunteers to consider what they might do if they were in the same situation specified by a case. Being that we work with predominantly older simulated patients, we sometimes adopt affective memory for our work.[12] In the case involving medical error, many of the patients were able to relate the irritating scenario to one that they had actually suffered themselves. This helped to bolster the reality of the encounter and imbued the case with a greater sense of import. In the Spring of 2011, Ricardo began to work not only with the community volunteers, but also a group of upper level undergraduates from the Department of Theater and Film Studies. The thirteen students admitted to the course had taken pre-requisite acting courses, and thus entered the training with a greater knowledge of acting methodology. The primary obstacle with the theater students was encouraging them to allow more introverted characters to evolve. Working in simulations is significantly different then stage work, as the audience is hardly visible. It is an improvisation with a partner whose stakes are very different than the actor’s. Working with a younger demographic posed a variety of new obstacles for the medical students. Before the semester began, we met with Dr. Stephen Goggans, the head of first year clinical skills, to discuss what might be accomplished with the new simulated patients. While we toyed with various possibilities, it became clear that a group of theater students in their early twenties would create an entirely different encounter than the retirees did. While some cases were difficult to alter, there was a strong attempt to fit the case to the age group. Both sides of the collaboration wanted the event to benefit everyone involved, meaning that the medical students should gain an understanding of working with a younger demographic, while the acting students should be challenged and learn from the encounters. The process of preparing our students for the role of simulated patient was slightly more comprehensive than the work with the community volunteers. For one thing, the cases assigned to the acting students were more complex, generally speaking, some anticipating extreme emotional response. For example, the first case of the semester dealt with alcohol abuse. The medical students not only had to identify the problem but also confront the simulated patient about his or her self-abusive behavior. While many of my students created characters that tended to be contentious, a number chose rather to play an individual humbled and shamed by the confrontation. In fact, one of my students was brought to tears, and in this moment, the medical student seemed uneasy and unsure of how to proceed. This creation of character served as an important example to the medical students. Patients can be combative at times, but they can also tend toward introversion and somberness. A doctor must relate to all patients, despite disease or demeanor. Finally, we turn to the question of the benefits of this kind of training program and of simulated patients in general. Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages to both the simulated and standardized patient approaches. Standardized patient encounters are more consistent and predictable. This makes them a good choice for assessment tools such as the OSCEs as their consistency makes creating standards for evaluation easier. However, the lack of flexibility also potentially allows medical students to behave in a rote manner without actually engaging with the patient. Simulated patients lead to a much less predictable but, ideally, higher fidelity experience. As a pedagogical tool, simulated patients force students to learn to adjust to changing situations. Though the unpredictability of these encounters creates certain risks, the benefits of being able to simulate high-stakes emotional situations with no chance of harming a patient seeking care more than compensates. On the other hand, one drawback of the simulated patient encounter is that, because of its flexibility, assessing it is much harder than in the case of standardized patient encounters where medical students’ responses are either correct or not according to a script and a rubric. This conflict between testing and training has been one of the biggest obstacles and also the most exciting grounds for discussion in collaboratively developing the training program. This conflict has centered around trying to negotiate the meaning of “failure” and its potential uses within the clinical skills curriculum. In an assessment situation such as the OSCEs, standardized patients are useful because any deviation from their scripts becomes a sign of failure, or at least shortcoming, on the part of the doctor. Going in to the project, we on the theatrical side were excited about the potential for encounters to “go wrong,” to veer off the planned and predictable course. Our excitement was born out of no ill will towards the doctors-in-training. In fact, we believed that building in the potential for the situation to fall completely out of their control was one of the key ways in which we could help train them more effectively with simulated rather than standardized patients. After all, if you build a flight simulator programmed never to crash, you are not doing future pilots any favors or really teaching them anything at all. This is also not to say that all failures are created equally. Early on in the training program, we had a number of situations in which the medical students were uncomfortable with a patient’s emotional reactions or not perceptive of physical and verbal cues to the point that they could not elicit the information they needed. This is the kind of “failure” we like to see. In training simulated patients to react to their medical students fluidly rather than simply following a script, we put more pressure on the students to really engage with their patients, to be aware of their mental and emotional states, and to develop multiple strategies for building trust with and gaining access to patients. Initially, some doctors from the medical school had difficulty with the fluidity of these encounters. They wanted our patients to stay on script so that they could tell whether or not their students were behaving “appropriately” or according to their own scripts. A specific example from early in the development process illustrates the complexity of the failure issue. In an early round of encounters, one community volunteer was given a situation in which the doctor was telling him to limit his physical activity, advice that would have kept his character from work, a situation he could not afford. His response was, based on the training he had received, fluid, justifiable, and realistic. He became quite agitated and demanded answers from the flustered young medical student, who, in turn, could not come up with a good response. After the encounter, the student was very upset, even to the point of tears. We on the theatre side at first considered it a great success. It was honest, unpredictable, and effectively simulated the kind of situations these medical students might face with upset patients. The doctors were initially less enthusiastic because, where we saw exciting flexibility, they saw our setting up their students to fail. And, to an extent, they had a point. While that situation may have been realistic and educational, it was perhaps too much for a first-year medical student’s second encounter. Moving forward, we have become aware of the importance of balancing our desire for realism in the encounters with the more local pedagogical needs of each particular scenario. Recently, the relationship between our departments has shown promise of developing in areas other than simulated patient training as well. The issues of empathy and communication in the medical profession are not limited to doctor-patient relationships. On July 11, 2011, The New York Times published an article entitled “New for Aspiring Doctors, the People Skills Test,” which chronicled the efforts of Virginia Tech Carillion to incorporate an assessment of the medical school candidate’s social skills. The school, however, seems less invested in improved bedside manner and more concerned with a student’s ability to interact with other medical professionals. While the ability to communicate successfully with colleagues is imperative, a doctor must also have the aptitude to relate to his or her patient one on one. Some may inherently have this skill set, but we believe that it might also be acquired through training and practice. While the article at least suggests that Virginia Tech Carillion is aware of the lack of social skills and empathy some of its students show in their medical practice, it offers no signs that they are being trained in these skills. Again, while simulation has long been used in medical and forensic as well as other fields as a means of testing or preparation for real-world scenarios, we believe that the kind of acting training we employed at GRU participates in an innovative push to actually train professionals in empathy as a skill. With this in mind, we decided to take our acting skills directly to the medical students, and engaged them in a day of workshops and improvisations designed to lay bare and begin to correct issues in their communication skills that might prevent them from fully engaging with their patients. One exercise we had them do, for example, dealt with the concept of high context versus low context. In this exercise, we had them tell the group about something they knew very well other than medicine as though they were addressing other insiders to that knowledge, and then tell the same information as though they were telling a sibling or friend who had little to no knowledge about the subject. One medical student described a round of Dungeons and Dragons. In the second telling, he occasionally found it very difficult to proceed without the use of some jargon. We discussed how these difficulties were similar to the challenge of respectfully and exhaustively informing patients without being condescending. Of course, we are not the first to suggest using skills traditionally found in humanities classrooms to help improve medical students’ clinical skills. Delese Wear and Lois LaCivita Nixon, co-authors of “Literary Inquiry and Professional Development in Medicine Against Abstractions” argue that literature, rather than simple abstracts of illnesses, would foster a greater understanding of professional development within medical trainees because students would be forced to acknowledge emotions and responses the detailed descriptions might invoke: Our approach is grounded in medical narratives written by physicians — memoirs, essays, and poetry — as they grapple with the daily challenges of medicine that involve altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect for others. Arising from the literary domains, these narratives suggest responses without dictating them, urge behaviors without ordering them, illuminate values without oversimplifying them, and in general complicate the matters rather than clarifying or confirming them.[13] While Wear and Nixon recognize the necessity for medical students to relate to the plights of both patients and fellow practitioners, it disregards the need for the fictional to become reality. A medical student must acknowledge a patient not just as a case, but something living, then navigate the difficulties of interacting with this real person. Wear and Nixon suggest that medical students read poems such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Line Drive” and Marc Straus’s “The Pause” to relate the importance of altruism within the profession. Unfortunately, these poems romanticize the duty of the doctor, and, while they may acknowledge the difficulty of the situation, a reader remains removed, the experience second hand, unlike the immediacy of an actual encounter. This is not, of course, to dismiss Wear and Nixon’s approach, but to suggest that improvisatory acting situations may offer a greater immediacy and a wider range of possible responses than a poem or story can. When a hasty move to immediate contact with a real patient would be detrimental to both parties, the use of simulation has emerged as a means of teaching clinical skills to medical students. The simulated or standardized patient is an individual who performs “the patient” in order to give medical students an opportunity to interact with a real human being. Whereas literature and art might help medical students better understand empathy as a concept, simulated patient encounters give medical students actual practice in performing empathy, in doing the act of empathizing. Our work with simulation has expanded beyond the medical community as well. While we were both still graduate students at the University of Georgia, some faculty in Social Work heard about our simulations and approached us to work on scenarios with their students as well. In the field of social work, the actors are known as simulated or surrogate clients (SCs).[14] Recently SCs have been used in social work to assess and improve the preparedness of future social workers for a variety of situations. One study used SCs to simulate encounters with families of veterans struggling with mental illness leading to domestic violence, finding that the encounters helped social workers learn the signs that might identify when real world clients might pose a “risk of harm to others … or to self.”[15] And another recent study found that “the best measure of students’ competence… is in their ability to effectively perform the core functions of the profession in practice situations.”[16] As in the medical field, social work educators use simulations both for training and assessment. In our case, we trained some of our actors to portray a family working through the kinds of domestic issues social workers regularly encounter. We both now teach at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort, where we are working with our nursing program to develop simulated encounters for their students—encounters ranging from simple clinical intake to mental health and alcohol withdrawal.[17] Because nurses are often the frontlines of patient interaction, simulations may have even greater potential application in nursing education than in training doctors, helping teach skills that improve the focus on “patient-centerdness in… nurse-patient interactions.” [18] In all of these encounters, we are guided by the large body of research on simulated patients and simulated clients from the fields of medicine and social work, our experiences and failures, and our deep belief that acting provides unparalleled opportunities for imparting interpersonal skills to professionals in service fields with a clinical component. The medical students’ response to these encounters evolved over the course of that first year. Initially, many students were skeptical of the encounters, fearing that they might lose precious time to study important medical, biological, or anatomical topics. However, as the encounters increased in complexity, the students became increasingly grateful and enthusiastic as they realized the range of clinical situations for which they were not prepared. The angry patient mentioned earlier, for example, initially shook that medical student’s confidence. Later, however, she expressed her gratitude, saying that she now felt more prepared to deal with an actual patient who was hostile in a real world setting. At a reception at the end of the year, this same student was one of several who spoke to express their enthusiasm for the program and the value of the simulations, saying they felt more prepared in general to deal with a wide range of patients. Of course, these informal responses do not prove the efficacy of the simulated patient program, but they suggest promise in terms of improving medical students’ interpersonal skills. George Pate is a playwright, actor, standup comedian, director, and teacher who currently serves as Assistant Professor in Drama and Theatre at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. His plays have been produced and read in New York, NY, New Orleans, LA, Columbia, SC, Greenville, SC, Charelston, SC, and Athens, GA. He won the 2008 Tennessee Williams National One-Act Playwriting contest for his play Indifferent Blue, now available from Next Stage Press. He was also a regional finalist for Comedy Central's Open Mic Fight. In addition to his creative work, he has published works of scholarship in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Symposium, and Theatre Journal. Libby Ricardo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Theater, and Liberal Studies at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. Libby has worked professionally as an actor and director in Rhode Island, New York, Georgia and South Carolina. She has won multiple South Carolina Broadway World awards, including Best Director and Best Production, for her productions of Grease and Little Shop of Horrors with the Beaufort Theater Company. In addition to maintaining an active professional life as an actor and director, Libby’s research interests include practical applications of theater skills and ensemble-based pedagogy. [1] See Karin V. Rhodes and Franklin G. Miller, “Simulated Patient Studies: An Ethical Analysis,” The Milbank Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2012): 706-724. [2] The medical literature uses “fidelity” to refer to the extent to which a simulation reproduces the conditions of a clinical encounter with an actual patient in an active practice setting. There are examples of this usage in almost every article from nursing and medical journals cited here. All simulation-based training starts from the precept that skills are transferrable. Much of the medical literature articulates this precept in terms of simulation-based training in other fields such as aviation or the service industry. For us, however, coming from a theater and performance studies background, this precept has resonated with concepts such as performativity and the possibility of enacting felicitous speech acts in constructed contexts. In fact the latter concept proved especially useful in recognizing that even the “real world” clinical encounter is nothing more than a constructed context with its own rules for speech acts and their felicity. Learning to perform those speech acts in the simulation, then, was not a case of trying to faithfully recreate a fictional version of a scenario, but of practicing the rules of a particular “game” of speech acts. We use “fidelity,” then, not only in the sense that the medical literature uses it to mean degree of adherence to “real” situations but also to suggest that the “real” encounters and the simulations actually operate under the same rules. A high degree of fidelity, then, simply means that the felicity conditions in the simulation and in the “real” situation are largely the same. Pate has explored the nature of speech acts under different “game” conventions in “‘This is a Real Gun’: 500 Clown and Speech Act Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 27, no. 2 (2013): 31-41. [3] One recent study offered patients suffering irritable bowel syndrome acupuncture treatments. The treatments themselves, unbeknownst to the patients, were not based on actual acupuncture practices but were harmless. The patients who received the treatments from warm and empathetic practitioners showed much higher rates of improvement than those who received treatments from practitioners they believed to be competent but cold and distant. The practitioner’s clinical skills had a measurable outcome on the patients’ recovery. John M. Kelley et al. “Patient and Practitioner Influences on the Placebo Effect in Irritable Bowel Syndrome.” Psychosomatic Medicine 71, no. 7 (2009): 789. [4] Recent research even suggests that the iterability and consistency that encounters such as the OSCE strive for may be impossible because of the subjectivity of both the student and the standardized patient. Johnston et. al. found strong evidence for the “unfeasibility of the absolute objectivity or standardization” of the OSCEs. Jennifer L. Johnston, Gerard Lundy, Melissa McCullough, and Gerard J. Gormley, “The View from Over There: Reframing the OSCE through the Experience of Standardized Patient Raters,” Medical Education 47 (2013): 899-909. [5] F.W. Peabody, “The Care of the Patient,” JAMA 88. (Original address delivered in 1925). [6] Herbert T Abelson and Colin Walsh, “Medical Professionalism Crossing a Generational Divide,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 51, no. 4 (2008): 560. [7] See Stephanie Sideras, Glensie McKenzie, Joanne Noone, Donna Markle, Michelle Frazier, and Maggie Sullivan, “Making Simulation Come Alive: Standardized Patients in Undergraduate Nursing Education,” Nursing Education Perspectives 34, no. 6 (2013): 421-25; and Rebecca D. Wilson, James D. Klein, and Debra Hagler, “Computer-Based or Human Patient Simulation-Based Case Analysis: Which Works Better for Teaching Diagnostic Reasoning Skills?” Nursing Education Perspectives 35, no. 1 (2014): 14-18. [8] See Tonya Rutherford-Hemming and Judith A. Jennrich, “Using Standardized Patients to Strengthen Nurse Practitioner Competency in the Clinical Setting,” Nursing Education Perspectives 34, no. 2 (2013): 118-121. [9] For a deeper discussion of the concept of using simulated patientsto teach medical ethics, see Carine Layat Burn, Samia A. Hurst, Marinette Ummel, Bernard Cerutti, and Anne Baroffio, “Telling the Truth: Medical Student’s Progress with an Ethical Skill,” Medical Teacher 36 (2014): 251-259. [10] We initially made much of the volunteers’ age, thinking that working with an older segment of the population would significantly impact the way the medical students interacted in the simulations. Recent studies suggest that we may have underestimated students’ abilities to treat all patients equally. One study recently showed that medical students showed no significant differences between their interactions with female simulated patients with “normal” or “obese” Body Mass Indexes. The study found that “the body habitus of the [patient] did not significantly affect students’ performance” and that the students gave “advice about healthy diets” equally to both groups. Vanda Yazbeck-Karam, Sola Aoun Bahous, Wissam Faour, Maya Khairallah, and Nadia Asmar, “Influence of Standardized Patient Body Habitus on Undergraduate Student Performance in an Objective Structured Clinical Examination,” Medical Teacher 36 (2014): 240-244. [11] Sanford Meisner and Dennis Longwell, Sanford Meisner on Acting (New York: Vintage Books, 1987). [12] Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares (New York: Routledge, 2013). [13] Lois LaCivita Nixon and Delese Wear, “Literary Inquiry and Professional Development in Medicine Against Abstractions,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 no. 1 (2002): 106. [14] See Mary Ann Forgey, Lee Badger, Tracey Gilbert, and Johna Hansen, “Using Standardized Clients to Train Social Workers in Intimate Partner Violence Assessment,” Journal of Social Work Education 49 (2013): 292-306. [15] Ibid., 304. [16] Carmen Logie, Marion Bogo, Cheryl Regehr, and Glenn Regehr, “A Critical Appraisal of the Use of Standardized Client Simulations in Social Work Education,” Journal of Social Work Education 49 (2013): 66. [17] Using simulated patients to train nursing students to deal with patients with mental health issues is a new approach, the outcomes of which remain questionable. One recent study showed little statistical significance in performance between students who did and those who did not undergo simulations. The exception, however, was students who had been previously identified as “at-risk” or needing additional help and experience. The results of these students show promise for using mental health simulations as a kind of remediation in certain cases. Kirstyn M. Kameg, Nadine Cozzo Englert, Valerie M. Howard, and Katherine J. Perozzi, “Fusion of Psychiatric and Medical High Fidelity Patient Simulation Scenarios: Effect on Nursing Student Knowledge, Retention of Knowledge, and Perception,” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 34 (2013): 892-900. See also Theresa M. Fay-Hillier, Roseann V. Regan, Mary Gallagher Gordon, “Communication and Patient Safety in Simulation for Mental Health Nursing Education,” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 33 (2012): 718-26; and Louise Alexander and Amy Dearsley, “Using Standardized Patients in an Undergraduate Mental Health Simulation: A Pilot Study,” International Journal of Mental Health 42 (2013): 149-64. [18] Sally O’Hagan, Elizabeth Manias, Catherine Elder, John Pill, Robyn Woodward-Kron, Tim McNamara, Gillain Webb, and Geoff McColl, “What Counts as Effective Communication in Nursing? Evidence from Nurse Educators’ and Clinicians’ Feedback on Nurse Interactions with Simulated Patients,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 70 (2014): 1344-56. “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters” by George Pate and Libby Ricardo ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: James Armstrong Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls” by Bradley Stephenson “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon” by Vivian Appler “iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters” by George Pate and Libby Ricardo www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Weather Anh Vo Dance Sunday, June 9, 2024 @ 3pm Brower Park, Prospect Place, Brooklyn Meet at the Shirley Chisholm Circle Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event As an ongoing offering to the unknowability of the weather, the work attempts to sit with what it means to be a small living being—a smallness so intolerable that it must be projected outwards, bottling the weather into the stuff of small talk. Anh Vo Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They create dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. They receive their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Described by the New York Times as "risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous," their choreographic works have been presented nationally and internationally by Target Margin Theater, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, Brown University, Production Workshop, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), greenroom (Seoul), Montréal arts interculturels (Montréal), among others. Their artistic process has received support from Jerome Hill Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Women and Performance, New York Live Arts, Leslie-Lohman Museum, GALLIM Dance, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, and the Performance Project Fellowship at University Settlement. As a writer, they focus on experimental practices in contemporary dance and pornography. Their BA honors thesis, which examines the intersection of pornography and choreography in policing sexual subjectivities, is nominated for the Distinguished Thesis Award. Their texts have been featured on Recess Art (USA), Walker Reader (USA), Women and Performance (USA), Real Life Magazine (USA), Critical Correspondence (USA), Protocols (USA), The Indy (USA), Etcetera (Belgium), Blackness and the Post-modern (Finland), The Theatre Times (Canada), and South East Asian Choreographers' Network e-book (Vietnam). Visit Artist Website Location Meet at the Shirley Chisholm Circle Visit Partner Website