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Jessica Brater Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Jessica Brater By Published on November 7, 2019 Download Article as PDF by Jessica Brater The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 32, Number 1 (Fall 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The American avant-garde company Mabou Mines inaugurated its refurbished theater in the East Village’s 122 Community Center by conjuring performers who are trapped on stage. Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play , which opened in November 2017, was created from works by Tennessee Williams and Mary Shelley and conceived by founding co-artistic director Lee Breuer and artistic associate Maude Mitchell. Mitchell and longtime Mabou Mines collaborator Greg Mehrten play (among other roles) Clare and Felice, the brother-sister acting duo from Williams’s The Two-Character Play (1967). In the original and in Mabou Mines’s riff, the sibling actors have been abandoned by the rest of the company and are caught in a meta-theatrical loop of improvisatory performance, possibly because they rely on their touring income to survive. In Glass Guignol , this improvisation-under-duress includes short and long form citations of Williams’s works. Breuer and Mitchell imagine literary references as ready-mades, repurposing flashes of Williams and Shelley to pose questions about the relation of artist to creation, just as, for example, Dada’s controversial commode did in a concept long credited to Marcel Duchamp but more recently attributed to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.[1] Glass Guignol ’s theatrical reframing of fragments from well-known artworks is especially poignant on location in the company’s first purpose-built theater in its half-century long history. As actors in exile, Clare and Felice underline Mabou Mines artists’ epoch as nomads during the extended period of 122 Community Center’s remodeling. In 2013, the City of New York began a $35 million renovation of 122 Community Center on 1st Avenue and East 9th Street, a nineteenth-century former schoolhouse where Mabou Mines has resided since 1978. The space was slated to reopen in 2016. The company had planned to present two premieres in their refurbished space in winter and spring 2017: Faust 2.0 , directed by co-artistic director Sharon Fogarty, and Glass Guignol . By summer 2017, the building had not yet passed code for occupancy. In a climate increasingly hostile to arts funding, the delay caused additional financial duress for a company already familiar with the relationship between risky artistic choices and economic instability. Co-artistic directors confronted an absence of ticket income, the loss of grant funding contingent upon production, and deferred opportunities to tour completed productions. The itinerant state all but suspended the radical spectacle for which Mabou Mines is renowned as they found themselves in a sort of performance purgatory. What was supposed to be a watershed moment became a dream indefinitely deferred. Mabou Mines artists are likely to feel that the space was worth waiting for. Gay McAuley asks what “the physical reality of the theatre building” tells artists “about the activity they are engaged in and about the way this activity is valued in society.”[2] New York City’s substantial investment in the company is a resounding response. The refurbished 122 Community Center provides a distinctly different scenographic environment for the company’s activities. Sleek and modern, the interior now resembles the many gut-renovated pre-war buildings in New York City. A steel and glass overhang above the new lobby entrance is reminiscent of the Pershing Square Signature Theater’s design by Frank Gehry Architects, though the city contracted with Deborah Berke Partners for this renovation. Although Mabou Mines has performed in state-of-the-art theaters in New York and beyond, its recent productions began and ended in their small office and adjoining slightly dilapidated ToRoNaDa studio in 122 Community Center. These spaces, shabby but spirited, served as a tangible connection to Mabou Mines’s origins in a pre-gentrified East Village. On a preview tour of the new space with co-artistic director Fogarty (we wore hardhats), I could not help but feel nostalgic for the demolished interior architecture and slightly nervous about what a polished backdrop will mean for Mabou Mines’s revolutionary artistic aims. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” says the narrator from Beckett’s novella Worstward Ho , staged by the late Mabou Mines co-artistic director Fred Neumann in 1986.[3] Here, as elsewhere in his writing, Beckett forthrightly acknowledges a process of perpetual trial and error—a creative purgatory—as organic to artistic exploration and the human experience. Mabou Mines artists gravitated early to Beckett’s work, staging eight of his texts between 1971 and 1996.[4] The company’s attraction to his writing is rooted in a corresponding philosophy that embraces uncertainty as an element of artistic creation. Co-founders JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow as well as current co-artistic directors Breuer, Fogarty, Karen Kandel, and Terry O’Reilly have long been engaged in the business of taking calculated theatrical risks. These ventures, always both aesthetically ambitious and financially hazardous, have frequently resulted in critical disparagement and/or financial insolvency. Mabou Mines artists have regularly viewed risk as necessary to the creation of avant-garde work. The company has almost always been willing to stake economic stability and critical praise for a claim of unfettered artistic discovery. This claim is most readily apparent in the company’s investment in a creative process that absorbs, reiterates, and modifies previous approaches, while simultaneously adopting new techniques and adapting them to new spaces. When Mabou Mines stages a production in front of the audience, this encounter becomes an opportunity for artists to understand and evaluate which aspects of the process have achieved their objectives in performance. This appraisal continues retroactively, as when Breuer expressed dissatisfaction in 2014 about acting choices Maleczech made in her 1990 OBIE-award winning performance as Lear under his direction in Mabou Mines’s gender-reversed production of Shakespeare’s play.[5] Breuer’s assessment of this critically lauded performance demonstrates the scant regard company members have for external evaluation. But perhaps more importantly, Breuer’s scrutiny of previous artistic decisions suggests that the company’s desire to conquer uncharted artistic territory requires a constant practice of self-assessment and refinement, akin to the “Rep & Rev” process Suzan-Lori Parks has described in her own work. In Mabou Mines’s (and Beckett’s) world of creation, future artistic possibilities depend upon an artist’s willingness to confront the implications of past choices. The result is a process and product that are one and the same and a project that is ongoing, never “finished.” As a consequence, the company sees process and product as fluid, rather than as binary. Each Mabou Mines production is only fully visible in the moment of performance, after which elements of projects continue on their orbits. The ToRoNaDa—more equipped for rehearsal than for performance and yet not originally designed for either—underscored the company’s synergy of process and product. If, as Laura Levin suggests “identity is, both consciously and unconsciously, constituted through space,” Mabou Mines’s new theater invites the possibility of a reimagined personality for the company.[6] What will happen to Mabou Mines’s reiteration and modification of past impulses, times and spaces in a new, exclusive, purpose-built theater? As McAuley points out, theatre “space is, of course, not an empty container but an active agent; it shapes what goes on within it, emits signals about it to the community at large, and is itself affected. … The theatre building…provides a context of interpretation for spectators and performers alike.”[7] In order to imagine how the new space may re-energize the company’s aesthetic, it is crucial to consider the effect of performance spaces on the company as they move away from an old space and return to a new one. Ghosts of Performance Spaces Past It is probably impossible to create a complete rupture between the Mabou Mines of the present and its East Village past. Mabou Mines artists simply cannot escape their own geography; their performance history dots the East Village—ghosting it, in Marvin Carlson’s terms. The company’s temporary inability to move forward made Mabou Mines’s link to its history all the more palpable. The delay in presenting planned new work thrust the company into a liminal state of expectation; the set for Glass Guignol stood idly on the company’s new stage as spirits of future performances hovered hopefully around the construction site, mingling with the specters of past performances. Such past productions established a record of revolution, paving the way for the company’s recognition as a fixture of counter cultural “downtown” performance. Because the East Village functions as a palimpsest for Mabou Mines’s history, the company’s relationship to its history is in this respect inherently site-specific. Their presence in the East Village has likewise shaped the story of the neighborhood. As Kim Solga, Shelley Orr, and D.J. Hopkins argue, “performance can help to renegotiate the urban archive, to build the city, and to change it.”[8] Though the company debuted uptown at the Guggenheim Museum with The Red Horse Animation in 1970, the production was sponsored by the mother of downtown performance, La Mama’s Ellen Stewart. In 1971, Breuer directed Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go under the Brooklyn Bridge in a performance that anticipated Maleczech’s 2007 piece Song for New York —here the audience viewed the reflections of the performers in the East River. After years as East Village nomads, Joseph Papp invited co-artistic directors Akalaitis, Breuer, Glass, Maleczech, Fred Neumann and Warrilow to take up residency at the Public Theater in the mid 1970s. Thus, unabashedly avant-garde performance was institutionalized within the structure of New York theater, albeit in a marginalized position—Papp described Mabou Mines artists as his “black sheep.”[9] Those black sheep used the stability of the Public’s performance space to produce work on a larger scale than previously possible, although they continued to pursue more intimate works as well. Red Horse and the company’s early forays into Beckett were minimalist spectacles. In the Public’s Old Prop Shop, Akalaitis and company’s sprawling Dead End Kids (1980) was devised by more than thirty multidisciplinary collaborators and featured a cast of fifteen. The company’s residency at the Public lasted into the mid 1980s. Mabou Mines’s bold and diverse aesthetic aims, spurred by its collective structure, meant that the company continued to exploit the rawness of failure and success in emergent downtown performance spaces. Another Beckett text, Maleczech’s performance installation based on the short story Imagination Dead Imagine , was presented at the Wooster Group’s space, the Performing Garage, in 1984. Mabou Mines was part of a movement of New York avant-garde companies activating new spaces, often ones that were unequipped for the mechanics of performance. “Theatre artists,” McAuley points out, “are frequently obliged to work in buildings designed for earlier periods, and this can cause problems if there is too great a distance between the practice of theatre as predicated by the building and practices deemed appropriate to the present by the artists (and spectators) involved.”[10] The Mabou Mines artistic directors are among those theatre artists McAuley describes. In order to imagine how a new, technologically sophisticated space might alter Mabou Mines’s aesthetic, it is crucial to consider the ways in which the company’s former spartan site in 122 Community Center contributed to past works. For thirty-five years, the company’s administrative operations were run out of a tiny office and productions were rehearsed, workshopped, and often presented in the adjoining, bare bones ToRoNaDa studio. The ToRoNaDa was a large rectangular classroom with giant windows, midnight blue walls and a basic lighting grid named in honor of four deceased collaborators: Tony Vasconcellos, Ron Vawter, Nancy Graves, and David Warrilow. Appropriately enough, it is also a nickname for “no bull.”[11] It accommodated approximately 50 seats. The walls opposite the windows were lined with built-in cabinets fronted by chalk boards—relics of the room’s past life as a classroom. A loft space over an improvised office in the northeast corner of the room doubled not only as storage for lighting equipment but also as a staging area, featuring prominently in works such as Belén: A Book of Hours (1999), when Monica Dionne was stationed there as she provided contemporary commentary on the history of the notorious Mexican women’s prison. In this case, as in many others, the ToRoNaDa’s poor theater aesthetic provided a springboard for creative choices that were critically lauded; performers Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodriguez were honored with OBIE special citations and Julie Archer was nominated for the American Theatre Wing’s Hewes Design award. This charmingly dilapidated home, though constant, was insufficient for supporting the company’s integration of technology with live performance. Though Archer used projections artfully in Belén , her projection design for Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2011; premiere 2007 at Colby College), based on the life of Lucia Joyce and directed by Fogarty, found a more sophisticated backdrop down the hall from the ToRoNaDa at Performance Space 122’s larger theater. A consideration of the history of this institution and other peers in the East Village contextualizes the growing pains Mabou Mines is experiencing as it faces its future in a refurbished space. The company has long shared the building with Performance Space 122, Painting Space 122, and the AIDS Service Center. Performance Space 122, better known as PS122, and now known as Performance Space New York, was founded in 1980 and quickly became integral to East Village theater and hosted artists including Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Spalding Gray, Penny Arcade, and Carmelita Tropicana. Its past, like Mabou Mines’s, is intricately connected to its geography. The organization proudly acknowledges its role in East Village history on its website: “As decades passed the city became cleaner, safer, greener and more expensive, and the neighborhood gentrified. Although PS122 became an ‘institution’ during this time, it also managed to retain its gritty non-conformist character.”[12] PS122 audiences grew intimately familiar not only with its bold programming of audacious artists, but also with its awkward horizontal layout and the Ionic columns that intruded into the stage pictures. The institution bills its new, custom spaces as “column-free.” These larger theaters “raise the roof to feature a two-story ceiling allowing for more agency for artists and more expansive experiences” for viewers.[13] In a sign of how significant the renovation is for Mabou Mines’s fellow tenants, PS122 has changed its name to Performance Space New York: a new name for a new architectural and artistic life. The changes to the interiors and inhabitants of downtown performance sites are not limited to 122 Community Center. The Old Prop Shop is no more. Richard Foreman bequeathed his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church, itself the former site of Theatre Genesis, to Incubator Arts, a new generation of artists who were unable to sustain the space. The Living Theatre has gained and lost three East Village spaces, closing their 14th street space in 1963, its Third Avenue space in 1993, and residing at its Clinton Street theater from 2008 to 2013. The Living has now returned to the nomadic state embedded in its history. La Mama has been more successful at putting down permanent spatial roots, expanding into two large buildings of prime property. This, too reflects institutional emphasis; as a producer, Ellen Stewart prioritized real estate from La Mama’s founding. New York Theatre Workshop, founded in 1979, opened its own scenery, costume, and production shop in 2011. Recent advances by La Mama and NYTW have been supported by the Fourth Arts Block (FAB) Cultural District, founded in 2001 by neighborhood cultural and community groups. The organization’s mission included the purchase of eight properties from the City of New York to “secure them as permanently affordable spaces for non-profit arts and cultural organizations.”[14] The refurbished space Mabou Mines inhabits includes a high-tech, 50-seat performance venue, a modern office, dressing rooms, storage space, and two rehearsal studios. Audiences no longer ascend well-worn stairs with intricate, wrought iron detailing in a dank stairwell, but enter instead through an airy and modern lobby and glide up to the theater in an elevator. The move into a deluxe suite marks the dawn of a new era for Mabou Mines in more ways than one. Maleczech died in 2013, leaving Breuer as the last remaining co-founding artistic director at the company’s helm. But both Glass Guignol and Faust 2.0 continue the company’s tradition of radicalizing classic works. And both take up recent and present company concerns, confronting the pleasure and pain of waiting as Clare and Felice tread water onstage and Faust postpones the consequences of mortality. It remains to be seen how the spectacle of a swanky, gut-renovated East Village building will continue to foreground risk for a company founded by a group of artists who once shared an apartment and worked as short order cooks in the same restaurant. After all, as McAuley suggests, “the point of access to the building, the foyers, stairways, corridors, bars and restaurants, the box office, and of course the auditorium are all parts” of the audience experience, “and the way we experience them has an unavoidable impact on the meanings we take away with us.”[15] Mabou Mines artists are unlikely to be terribly concerned about this. A space that will support the needs of their adventurous exploitation of technology and distinctive integration of design elements in early phases of development is surely overdue for the half-century-old company. Levin offers a useful claim in support of Mabou Mines’s colonization of renovated real estate: “While performance critics often view the absorption of self into setting as a troubling act of submission – reading ‘blending in’ as evidence of assimilation or erasure…it can also facilitate socially productive ways of inhabiting our physical and cultural environments.”[16] In this sense, the company’s absorption into a refurbished habitat signals a “socially productive” and crucial cultural acknowledgment of their contribution to the East Village in particular and to New York City at large. Attainment in Other Spaces Although the ToRoNaDa was undoubtedly a hub of creativity for Mabou Mines and served as an occasional performance space for full productions, its schoolroom aesthetic and limited technical capabilities meant that the company presented most performances off-site. The co-artistic directors’ early and sustained affinity for Beckett’s works reflects, in part, the resonance they found in the playwright’s ability to dramatize a perpetual state of limbo. This is certainly echoed in the company’s commitment to taking artistic risks regardless of the critical consequences, but also in Mabou Mines’s transitory relationship to the many performance sites away from 122 Community Center where its work has been presented. While the Living Theater’s work has always been suited to their nomadic existence, this is not necessarily the case for Mabou Mines (even the company’s name refers to a specific place in Nova Scotia). Although it is atypical for artists to rehearse regularly in performance spaces prior to technical rehearsals (the cost would be prohibitive), the resulting geographical split between process and product presents a particular challenge for Mabou Mines’s synthesis of the two, in part because the company emphasizes the early integration of design elements. This artificial divide is likely to have affected Mabou Mines artists’ goals as well as critical reception of works performed away from the ToRoNaDa. Confronting the unknown quantity of off-site space thus presents yet another risk the company has been willing to take. While its many awards and critical successes are likely responsible for the upgrades to Mabou Mines’s home, it may be its so-called failures that truly reveal Mabou Mines’s avant-garde mettle. As Beckett writes in Three Dialogues , “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world… .”[17] But to what extent do Mabou Mines co-artistic directors take critical reception into consideration? Maleczech claimed she mailed negative reviews to a post office box unread. One way to understand how Mabou Mines artists evaluate their process and product given their healthy disregard for critical accolades is to examine works that others perceive to have failed but which make a significant contribution to the company’s sustained artistic priorities, despite a tension between their goals and the performance space in which they have found themselves. In the productions examined here, negative reviews are attributable, in part, to fundamental misunderstandings about the relationship between the company’s marriage of process and product and a lack of sensitivity to variables presented by the performance space. I will rely primarily on reviews from the New York Times , in part because the company’s critical ups and downs are most readily apparent in the context of a single source and because, for better or worse, the Times wields an outsized influence as an arbiter of theatrical taste. It is also useful to consider how Mabou Mines artists conceptualize their relationship to the audience in considering their creative values and prerogatives. Maleczech presented an ambitious project in 2007 that represents a logical progression of many of the company’s collective origins and impulses. Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting was organized around original poems about New York City, and produced site-specifically on a barge docked in the East River in Long Island City, Queens. Admission was free; Maleczech described the performance as her gift to the home that had given so generously to her as an artist. The landscape of reviews is mixed, but Claudia La Rocco, writing for the New York Times , panned the production in no uncertain terms: “This self-proclaimed ‘celebration of New York City’ by the collaborative theater ensemble Mabou Mines does not inspire. It does not satisfy. It does little more than prompt head shaking at all the very hard work and passion that must have been squandered in getting it off the ground.”[18] This is resounding critical disapproval. But what does Song for New York mean in the context of the company’s taste for adventurous collisions between process and product? As audience members arrived at Gantry State Park for performances of Song for New York , they could enter a photo booth and have their pictures taken with a pinhole camera as part of an interactive design (by former co-artistic director Julie Archer) that emphasized New York as a hometown. Spectators then gathered on the dock for the show. Maleczech had commissioned five artists to write poems, one for each borough. Some of the writers, such as Migdalia Cruz and Patricia Spears Jones, were seasoned playwrights. Another, Kandel—now a Mabou Mines co-artistic director—is primarily a performer. All of the writers and featured performers were women who represented a range of cultural backgrounds. Poems were set to live music. A chorus of men delivered interludes, or “yarns,” inspired by the city’s bodies of water as the barge—and the performance itself—rocked gently on the East River. Maleczech’s thank you note to New York was nothing if not writ large. While La Rocco’s review of Song for New York gestures towards an acknowledgment of Mabou Mines’s collective structure, it does not engage the relationship between product and what, even after thirty-seven years, remained a radical way of working in an unusual space. The text was not devised by the Song for New York company; each writer worked independently on her own contribution. This is precisely how Mabou Mines co-artistic directors operate. Productions initiated by artistic directors are produced in a queue. Often, co-artistic directors collaborate on developing new work, as Archer did in designing the barge and shore set for Song for New York ; but there is no requirement that co-artistic directors be artistically involved in every project. In this case, Breuer and O’Reilly did not collaborate. Such artistic independence and choice are hallmarks of the company’s self-defined success.[19] Song for New York is equally revealing of Mabou Mines’s staunch commitment to artistic risk. In inviting Kandel, known for her performance work, to participate as a writer, Maleczech demonstrated a zest for interdisciplinary exploration. The decision to commission women writers and performers of varied cultural backgrounds takes subtle yet unmistakable aim at patriarchal historiographic and artistic convention. Here, widely diverse female voices tell the story of a great American city. This is a more inclusive Walt Whitman for the twenty-first century. Maleczech envisioned performance on an epic scale, integrating a male chorus and live music and refusing to give up on the idea of the barge space even in the face of dire economic consequences and logistical nightmares.[20] In her invocation of New York City’s waterways alongside its diverse population, she evokes Levin’s idea of a “performance’s ‘environmental unconscious,’” a “notion of ‘site-specificity,’ central to space-sensitive performance practices” that “call attention to marginalized entities (human and non-human) and thus directly engage with the political dimensions of art making.”[21] While this production may not have satisfied the New York Times , Song for New York insists upon the political nature of public space and demonstrates avant-garde ideals in its embrace of an interdisciplinary way of working, its rejection of inherited societal standards, and its rebuff of bourgeois economic and logistical concerns as well as conventional spatial expectations. The complexity of the site for this production also tested the company’s organizational agility, perhaps preparing them for their unforeseen extended exile from 122 Community Center. Finn (2010), directed by Fogarty, also disappointed an establishment New York Times critic. Following in the company’s tradition of adaptation, Finn is a technologically ambitious live-action video game riff on the Celtic legend of Finn McCool described by Jason Zinoman as “soul-less.” It was presented at New York University’s enormous, state-of-the-art Skirball Center for the Arts. In his review Zinoman contrasts Mabou Mines’s use of technology unfavorably with the Wooster Group’s, arguing that “most theater companies fail to integrate video as well as the Wooster Group does.”[22] The Wooster Group, probably Mabou Mines’s closest peer in sustained theatrical invention, has had its own permanent space in which to rehearse and perform since its founding. When Wooster Group audiences arrive at the Performing Garage, they already have a context for the work they will see there and the company is in the enviable position of rehearsing where they frequently perform. Meanwhile, the cavernous Skirball Center, which seats 867, is strikingly dissimilar to the modest ToRoNaDa. Although Finn was not Mabou Mines’s debut at the Skirball Center—the company had presented Red Beads there in 2005—the space is not one that audiences and critics automatically associate with the company. The effects of this estrangement between performance and performance space for artists, audiences, and critics, are perhaps unquantifiable, but nonetheless significant for a company that is at once process-driven and technologically ambitious. Zinoman also fails to acknowledge that Mabou Mines was on the vanguard of technological innovation in the American avant-garde with the Red Horse Animation before the Wooster Group was founded. For this production, Philip Glass’s specially designed flooring amplified the sound performers’ bodies made as they came in contact with it. Hajj (1983), written and directed by Breuer and featuring Maleczech, was one of the first American productions to combine video with live theatrical performance. The OBIE-award winning Hajj was a result of a collaboration with SONY that allowed the company to work with state-of-the art equipment. In fact, it was partially developed at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage, where Imagination Dead Imagine , groundbreaking in its holographic vision, would also be presented. Writing for the New York Times in 1983, Mel Gussow lauds Mabou Mines for its integration of video in Hajj : “the pictures in this mysterious piece - contrasting, overlapping, coalescing -demonstrate the virtuosity of video as an instrument in live performance art.”[23] Zinoman’s review omits Finn ’s context within the company’s pioneering history of utilizing cutting-edge stage technology. For the company, however, Fogarty’s encounter with video gaming is a part of a logical progression in an ongoing engagement with technology—one that its longtime space was incapable of adequately supporting. Audiences, too, have sometimes found Mabou Mines’s work perplexing. This befuddlement is often tied to the inventive nature of the work. In one such case, audience confusion derived from the technological accomplishments Zinoman overlooks. A representative of Actor’s Equity Association attending Imagination Dead Imagine sought to confirm that the performer who played the hologram was being treated properly. This hologram was a pre-recorded image of Maleczech’s daughter, Clove Galilee, dissected into three parts—to produce a single holographic image of that size was not technologically possible at the time. The result was the largest hologram ever to be featured on stage at the time of Imagination Dead Imagine’s premiere. Maleczech recalled showing the holographic equipment to the Actor’s Equity Association envoy to demonstrate that there was no one inside. Here Mabou Mines’s innovations outpaced at least one audience member’s technological literacy. In another instance, spectators were uncomfortable with stylistic interventions the company introduced to a classic text. When the company presented a workshop of Lear (1987), initiated by Maleczech and directed by Breuer at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, half of the audience walked out. Although Maleczech ultimately won an OBIE for her performance, the production confronted spectators with a number of disruptions: a gender reversed cast featuring a female Lear (long before Glenda Jackson), a drag queen Fool (played by Greg Mehrten), dogs as Lear’s retinue, and golf carts tricked out as sports cars to transport performers around an American Southern setting. Here too the juxtaposition between site and content may have augmented the gap between expectation and reality for audiences. But as Richard Caves writes, “The smaller the pecuniary rewards of normal creativity, the more attractive are the highly uncertain and largely subjective rewards of assaulting the aesthetic frontier.”[24] Maleczech once lamented that many contemporary artists assume they “know what the audience wants to eat for dinner.”[25] Mabou Mines simply serves what is on their menu. This may suggest that the company does not consider the audience. Rather, Mabou Mines artists set high expectations for both spectators and themselves, challenging us to meet them in the middle in performance. Breuer identifies a dialectical relationship between audience reception and his work. Maleczech, meanwhile, described a process of attracting the audience’s attention without pandering to them: “you startle them or you push what you are doing so far that you get them to laugh, or you do the opposite of what you’re doing, and you have them for a second, and then you lose them again.”[26] Both approaches suggest an experience of performance that is reciprocal without being coerced. In Mabou Mines’s new space, the potential risks (or lack thereof) for artists and audiences are also evenly balanced. Artists will have tools that more easily and comfortably accessible, and audiences will know what to expect technically and architecturally at 122 Community Center, marking a departure from Mabou Mines’s history of producing in a variety of New York City venues. Will this lull spectators (and critics) into a state of comfort that is at odds with the alertness Breuer and Maleczech seek? Despite the potential excitement of what Sarah Bess Rowen described as a “masturbatory bubble cycle”[27]—a bubble machine resembling a bicycle positioned between Mitchell’s legs during a ready-made of Williams’s A Cavalier for Milady —Alexis Soloski complains in her review of Glass Guignol for the New York Times that the production fails to surprise the audience. Soloski’s critique suggests that the company may confront a new audience mentality attuned to its new space, one that requires a recalibration of the relationship to critical reception. But as is usual for Mabou Mines artists, Breuer and Mitchell seem to have accounted for this possibility; the company takes up the question of critical failure in its project description: “Glass Guignol explores the nature of the creative process, its triumphs…and its terrors.”[29] Despite Soloski’s concerns, Glass Guignol is best contextualized as part of a meta-conversation within the company’s work, and Breuer and Mitchell’s in particular. Coming on the heels of their celebrated 2011 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Comédie Française, which marked the first time in the theater’s 330 years that a play by an American writer was presented there, Glass Guignol continues Breuer and Mitchell’s interrogation of Williams’s work. Glass Guignol also takes up an artistic engagement with the history of Parisian theater, referencing the Grand Guignol—Paris’s late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century “bucket of blood” horror theatre—in its title and utilization of the grotesque. This stylistic affiliation is evident throughout the performance. Aside from Mitchell’s encounter with the bubble-cycle, at one point in the performance an actor dressed as a chained gorilla in a tutu makes an appearance; an S & M Nijinsky also materializes only to become the Gentleman Caller. These fleeting, cacophonous, and often opaque references are themselves homages to ghosts of Duchamp (but perhaps von Freytag-Loringhoven) and Alfred Jarry—two French artists renowned for playful, well-choreographed chaos, whose philosophies were foundational to Breuer in developing Glass Guignol . Glass Guignol also articulates an explicit but obscure link between the Grand Guignol and Tennessee Williams. As Annette Saddick notes, “In a page typed by Williams and dated August 1982, located in the archives of the Harvard Theatre Collection, he announces his plan for what he calls ‘Williams’ Guignol ,’ three evenings in repertoire of late plays in this tradition.”[30] In addition to “The Two Character Play,” the company also cites the relationship between Williams and his sister Rose as a guiding narrative in Glass Guignol ’s patchwork of references to plays, short stories, and poems by the writer. This microscopic engagement with intricacies of theatre history is typical of Breuer’s method of radically resurrecting classic works, as when he was inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s connection between African-American church traditions and Greek tragedy in creating The Gospel of Colonus (1983), an adaptation of Oedipus at Colonus set in a gospel church. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition inherent in Soloski’s critique between a half-century old company and the experience for audiences in a slickly renovated space remains. Once again, Beckett has expressed the challenge Mabou Mines artists face. “We are disappointed at the nullity of what we are pleased to call attainment,” he writes in his essay Proust , “But what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has died—and perhaps many times—along the way.”[31] What will rise from the ashes on Mabou Mines’s next try in their new space? A New Generation Mabou Mines is not only at a longitudinal crossroads, but also at a philosophical one. Breuer is the only founding co-artistic director remaining at the company’s helm. Julie Archer, who began working with the company in the late 1970s and became a co-artistic director in 2005, resigned her post in 2013, following Maleczech’s death. O’Reilly and Fogarty have been artistic directors since 1973 and 1999, respectively, and remain with the company. Kandel, who first worked with the company on Lear , is the newest co-artistic director. This transition from artistic associate to guiding voice will surely invite permutations of past investigations as well as fresh endeavors, but she is hardly a newcomer to the company. One radical way to consider the company’s ever-changing aesthetic is to consider the work of a new generation of artistic associates in Clove Galilee and David Neumann. Significantly, both are children of Mabou Mines artists: Galilee is the daughter of Breuer and Maleczech and Neumann is the son of Fred Neumann and the late artistic associate Honora Fergusson. Both founded their own performance companies that have co-produced new work with Mabou Mines since 2015. These co-produced pieces, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid and I Understand Everything Better , present intergenerational, meta-theatrical and meta-historical questions about the future failure or success of Mabou Mines. Wickets , another production by Galilee’s company, takes sustained Mabou Mines priorities in new directions. By briefly examining these artistic contributions by Neumann and Galilee, we can begin to speculate on what we might see on the company’s new stage in its reconfigured space. Of the offspring of Mabou Mines artists, Galilee has been the most frequent collaborator on Mabou Mines productions. Her company, Trick Saddle, co-founded with her wife Jenny Rogers, has produced or co-produced several bold productions. Wickets (2009) re-conceptualizes Maria Irene Fornes’s canonical feminist play Fefu and Her Friends , setting it on a trans-Atlantic flight by installing a recreated 1970s airplane in New York’s 3-Legged Dog (3LD) Art and Technology Center. Fornes’s characters become flight attendants. Seated as passengers, the audience goes along for the ride on this fictitious feminist flight. In a clever alteration of Fornes’s five environments, performers stage scenes in the nooks and crannies on the plane: aisles, galleys and bathrooms become playing areas. Here Galilee and Rogers escalate the tension Fornes exposes between women’s public and private selves. Wickets , developed as part of Mabou Mines/Suite residency program, follows in the footsteps of the company’s interest in adaptation. Feminist representation has also been a sustained priority for the company, and here we see Galilee and Rogers in the process of exploring original ways to stage feminism. This new generation of feminist artists brings a fresh perspective that may be gradually incorporated into Mabou Mines’s shifting process and product. Trick Saddle’s foray into new terrain brings with it the usual critical attempt to parse failure and success. In an otherwise positive review for the Village Voice , Garrett Eisler notes, “There’s much for Fefu fans to dispute in this radical adaptation…and, inevitably, many details just don’t translate,” citing in particular the production’s titular airborne game of croquet.[32] In TimeOut , Helen Shaw also praises Wickets but takes the production to task for evading “Fornes’s free-floating dread,” finding it excessively “sweet.”[33] It is too soon to know precisely where Galilee’s Generation X perspective on feminism will take the company’s aesthetics, but the journey is undoubtedly underway. Imagining the Imaginary Invalid was initiated by Maleczech for Mabou Mines based on Molière’s Imaginary Invalid and Versailles Impromptu as well as the history of medicine. Galilee, who began as a collaborator, became the lead artist and Trick Saddle a co-producer when Maleczech died before the project was completed. Galilee’s keenest contribution was her insistent underscoring of Maleczech’s absence. In a certain sense, the production, which never came to fruition in Maleczech’s lifetime, stages the failure of the human body and the limits of medical intervention. In a doctor’s office scene during which Maleczech declines further treatment for cancer, Marylouise Burke plays Maleczech, Christianna Nelson plays Galilee, and Galilee plays the doctor. This dislocated round-robin casting is a visceral reminder that the real Maleczech is not there, as is a chair that sits empty on stage for much of the performance. Galilee’s intervention in Imagining the Imaginary Invalid follows in the footsteps of another Mabou Mines production in its meta-theatrical representation of personal family drama: Hajj was based in part on Maleczech’s regret about an unpaid debt. Her father died before she had the opportunity to repay the money he lent her to her to fund her first directing work, Vanishing Pictures . Fittingly, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid was staged at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La Mama: another old company’s new space. David Neumann’s co-production with Mabou Mines also exteriorizes his private process of mourning parents who were public figures of the theatre. Neumann, a Bessie-award winning director, choreographer, and performer, founded the Advanced Beginner Group, which “utilizes experimental dance-making approaches with a humorous outlook and an inclusive layering of disciplines to create complex, thought-provoking dance works.”[34] I Understand Everything Better , which premiered at the Abrons Arts Center in 2015, was inspired by Hurricane Sandy and the death of Neumann's parents in 2012. Honora Fergusson passed away quickly in July of that year, while Fred Neumann was in the throes of a long decline into dementia. “‘He would have terrible dreams,’” David Neumann told the New Yorker ’s Joan Acocella, “‘He’d wake up and tell me. He was driving in the mountains and there was all this furniture in the road. He didn’t know how to get past it.’” Acocella documents the younger Neumann’s correlation to Hurricane Sandy: “Meanwhile, on the TV, weathermen would stand on beaches and report that the hurricane was moving north.”[35] She also makes note of another parallel: Fred Neumann’s ignominious aging process and his history of performing Beckett’s unflinching exposure of mortal fragility with Mabou Mines. While David Neumann does not reference Beckett explicitly in his piece, he embodies the link between the storm and his father’s decline by playing both a meteorologist and “a man of distinction.” As Gia Kourlas writes for the New York Times , the production “dances around dementia and double meanings – the cleanup of a storm, the cleanup of a body….”[36] Those familiar with Fred Neumann’s fluency in Beckett’s works can connect the dots easily enough. I Understand Everything Better is also linked to Mabou Mines’s aesthetic in its pastiche style, evident in its juxtaposition of comedy and pathos and blend of Japanese dance-theatre techniques, weather reports, and family history. Imagining the Imaginary Invalid and I Understand Everything Better dramatize Galilee and Neumann’s process of grappling in artistic terms with the personal and aesthetic legacies of their parents. These productions are thus apt metaphors for Mabou Mines’s current liminal state in its newly minted space under the guidance of an updated composition of co-artistic directors and artistic associates. Galilee and Neumann’s works show us both where the company is now and suggests where it might be going. How will the next generation of Mabou Mines artists “try again” in the refurbished 122 Community Center? Both came of age as artists in upgraded performance spaces in the East Village and in newer, sophisticated spaces for alternative work that appeared in surrounding neighborhoods; Neumann has worked regularly in a number of capacities at NYTW and Wickets premiered at 3LD in lower Manhattan. Although Guignol baptized the new theater, it was work by a former Mabou Mines resident artist that spoke particularly poignantly about the ebb and flow of the company’s past and future. Mallory Catlett’s This Was the End , a cerebral rumination on Uncle Vanya , was presented at the refurbished space in June 2018. Catlett developed the piece between 2009 and 2011 as a resident artist in SUITE/Space, a residency program that provides artists with space, mentorship, and funds to create new work. Mabou Mines resident artists worked in the ToRoNaDa studio prior to the renovation, and Catlett came to rely upon the built-in cabinets along the wall in her spatial conception of the piece. “I knew the building was going to be renovated,” Catlett writes in her director’s note, “so I asked Mabou if I could take it and they said yes. This wall carries with it a history of their generosity. Think of all the things that happened in front of it.”[37] This Was the End was commissioned by and presented at the Chocolate Factory in Queens in 2014. Catlett stored the cabinet in her parents’ barn before returning it to the reconfigured 122 Community Center for this revival. Catlett employs several strategies to distort the relationship between past and present. She casts older actors to play the typically youthful Sonya and Yelena; Black-Eyed Susan as the former and Rae C. Wright as the latter. As a result, not just Vanya, but Yelena too seems to be a fly stuck in amber. Any hopes we had that Sonya might have escaped are dashed; the three are trapped where Chekhov left them in 1898 but now aged (as Chekhov’s characters are in Brian Friel’s Afterplay [2002]). The production also features prominent performers from the history of downtown New York performance: in addition to Black-Eyed Susan, a founding member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Paul Zimet, a member of the Open Theater, plays Vanya. There is a jarring juxtaposition between the rugged East Village history that Black-Eyed Susan and Zimet personify and the sleek interior of the updated building. And then there is the cabinet. Extracted from its schoolhouse surroundings, the cabinet appears to float in the cavernous, ageless black box, the last ice cap in the melting Antarctic of a twenty-first century East Village. But the cabinet does not appear exactly as it did in the ToRoNaDa—the interior has been embellished in size to accommodate the presence of more than one performer. For those familiar with the original built-in, the revelation that even the cabinet has been renovated augments the strange sensation that actors and audience are caught outside of temporal boundaries. One performer, G Lucas Crane, remains inside the cabinet for the entire performance, playing cassette tape recordings of Sonya, Vanya, Astrov, and Yelena back to them. This archivist is literally, corporeally, stuck in the past. The use of the old cabinet in this new-old space emphasizes what McAuley describes as “the constant dual presence of the performance space and the fictional world or worlds created. The space the spectator is watching during the performance…is always both stage and somewhere else. … [H]owever convincing the fictional world may be, the stage itself is always also present at some level of our consciousness.”[38] Here, Catlett simultaneously evokes 122 Community Center pre- and post-renovation, engaging in what Levin might describe as “a mischievous tactic of” spatial “infiltration.”[39] Video work by Crane and Ryan Holsopple further warps our sensibilities. As the performers climb in and out of the cabinet and circle it, looking for someone or something, pre-recorded images of the performers doing the same thing flicker eerily on the cabinet’s façade and on the actors as we watch Chekhov’s characters try to catch up with or outrun other versions of themselves. “We were working with Uncle Vanya ,” Catlett explains In a certain sense, This Was the End fills in the dramatic dots between Chekov and Beckett. Time and habit have worn Catlett’s characters into threadbare versions of the originals who are still waiting. “There is no escape from the hours and the days,” Beckett writes on Proust, In Guignol , Breuer and Mitchell stage the artist as Frankenstein as they transmogrify The Glass Menagerie ’s Laura into a monster, stitching Mitchell into a gruesome, larger-than-life puppet. Catlett’s monster is a theatre purgatory where Chekhov, Beckett, and Mabou Mines co-artistic directors come and gone collide with East Village architecture of the past and present. In Mabou Mines’s new space, This Was the End bids a fond farewell to 122 Community Center as we knew it. In an homage to the ToRoNaDa, Fogarty says that the new theater was initially painted midnight blue, the color Archer selected for the walls of the former studio. But the blue walls were quickly painted over with black for the Guignol set. A flash of blue remains on the ceiling, just visible behind the lighting grid. This is for the best; should the company insist upon a distinction between its past and future, it would betray the boundaries of its own avant-garde perspective which refuses to categorize process and product in oppositional terms. For Mabou Mines artists, as for Beckett, “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.”[42] The purgatory of performance space can be ecstasy as well as agony. Each day in Mabou Mines’s new theater is an opportunity to try again. Jessica Brater is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the BA and MA programs in Theatre Studies at Montclair State University. She is also a Community Engaged Teaching and Learning Fellow at Montclair. Forthcoming publications include chapters in Analysing Gender in Performance (Palgrave), the Great North American Stage Directors and American Theatre Ensembles series (both Bloomsbury) and The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945. [1] Josh Jones, “The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, ‘Fountain,’ Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” OpenCulture.com, http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/the-iconic-urinal-work-of-art-fountain-wasnt-created-by-marcel-duchamp.html . Accessed July 17, 2018. [2] Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 69. [3] Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition , Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 471. [4] Mabou Mines was founded in 1970. For thorough discussion of the company’s founding and its work in the 1970s, see Iris Smith Fisher, Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). [5] Lee Breuer, in discussion, “Ruth Maleczech: Art + Impact,” Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, 7 April 2014. [6] Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 7. [7] McAuley, 41. [8] Kim Solga with Shelly Orr and D.J. Hopkins, “Introduction: City/Text/Performance” in Performance and the City , edited by Kim Solga, Shelly Orr, and D.J. Hopkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6. [9] “History,” Mabou Mines website. For thorough discussion of the company’s founding and its work in the 1970s, see Fisher. [10] McAuley, 38. [11] For more information on the origins of the studio’s name, see “Program History/Artist Alumni,” Mabou Mines website, www.maboumines.org/residency/program-historyartist-alumni . Accessed 29 August 2017. [12] “About,” PS122 website, www.ps122.org/about. Accessed 21 August 2017. [13] Ibid . [14] “Mission,” FABnyc website, fabnyc.org/mission. Accessed 21 August 2017. [15] McAuley, 25-26. [16] Levin, 14. [17] Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues” in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition , Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006) 563. [18] Claudia La Rocco, “An Affectionate Shout-Out to New York,” review of Song for New York by Mabou Mines, The New York Times, 3 September 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/theater/reviews/03song.html . Accessed 9 August 2017. [19] For a more extensive examination of Mabou Mines’s collective structure and aesthetic and a number of productions discussed here, see Jessica Silsby Brater, Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). [20] Maleczech’s original vision was to present the performance on docks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island, as well as in Queens. But the cost, which included a hefty fee for both the barge and the tug needed to move the barge, was prohibitively expensive, even if the company had been willing to charge for tickets. [21] Levin, 27-28. [22] Jason Zinoman, “Celtic Tale Becomes Video Game for the Stage,” review of FINN by Mabou Mines, The New York Times , 5 March 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/theater/reviews/06finn.html. Accessed 9 August 2017. [23] Mel Gussow, “‘Hajj,’ A Journey by Monologue,” review of Hajj by Mabou Mines, The New York Times , 11 May 1983, www.nytimes.com/1983/05/11/theater/theater-hajj-a-journey-by-monologue.html . Accessed 10 August 2017. [24] Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 204. [25] Ruth Maleczech, interviews conducted by the author between July 2011 and March 2012. [26] Ibid. [27] Sarah Bess Rowen, “Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell’s Glass Guignol: The Brother Sister Play,” review of Glass Guignol by Mabou Mines, The Huffington Post , 14 December 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/through-the-looking-glass-darkly-lee-breuer-and-maude_us_5a32d032e4b0e7f1200cf93e . Accessed 21 June 2018. [28] Alexis Soloski, Review of Glass Guignol by Mabou Mines, The New York Times , 17 December 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/theater/review-glass-guignol-tennessee-williams-mabou-mines.html . Accessed 25 June 2018. [29] “Glass Guignol: The Brother Sister Play,” Mabou Mines website, www.maboumines.org/production/glass-guignol-the-brother-and-sister-play. Accessed 2 October 2019. [30] Annette Saddik, “Glass Guignol: the Brother and Sister Play,” Theatre Review, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Number 17, tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/journal/work.php?ID=154 . Accessed 2 October 2019. [31] Samuel Beckett, “Proust” in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition , Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 513. [32] Garrett Eisler, “Wickets is Faux Site-Specific Performance at Its Best,” review of Wickets by Trick Saddle, The Village Voice , 14 January 2009, www.villagevoice.com/2009/01/14/wickets-is-faux-site-specific-performance-at-its-best . Accessed 26 October 2017. [33] Helen Shaw, “Wickets,” review of Wickets by Trick Saddle, Time Out New York , 12 January 2009, www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/wickets. Accessed 26 October 2017. [34] Advanced Beginner Group, “About,” www.advancedbeginnergroup.org/advanced-beginner-group . Accessed 23 October 2017. [35] Joan Acocella, “David Neumann’s I Understand Everything Better,” The New Yorker , 13 April 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/dance-a-perfect-storm-joan-acocella . Accessed 23 October 2017. [36] Gia Kourlas, “In ‘I Understand Everything Better,’ Ruthless Elemental Forces,” review of I Understand Everything Better by David Neumann, The New York Times , 20 April 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/arts/dance/review-in-i-understand-everything-better-ruthless-elemental-forces.html . Accessed 24 October 2017. [37] Mallory Catlett, “Director’s Note.” Program for Mallory Catlett’s This Was the End at Mabou Mines, New York, NY, 2018, 2. [38] McAuley, 27-28. [39] Levin, 15. [40] Catlett. [41] Beckett, “Proust,” 512. [42] Ibid., 515-516. Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space" by Jessica Brater ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 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: Jess Applebaum Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu 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: "Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon " by Verna A. Foster "Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space" by Jessica Brater "Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning" by Seokhun Choi www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 by Jessica Brater The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 32, Number 1 (Fall 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The American avant-garde company Mabou Mines inaugurated its refurbished theater in the East Village’s 122 Community Center by conjuring performers who are trapped on stage. Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play, which opened in November 2017, was created from works by Tennessee Williams and Mary Shelley and conceived by founding co-artistic director Lee Breuer and artistic associate Maude Mitchell. Mitchell and longtime Mabou Mines collaborator Greg Mehrten play (among other roles) Clare and Felice, the brother-sister acting duo from Williams’s The Two-Character Play (1967). In the original and in Mabou Mines’s riff, the sibling actors have been abandoned by the rest of the company and are caught in a meta-theatrical loop of improvisatory performance, possibly because they rely on their touring income to survive. In Glass Guignol, this improvisation-under-duress includes short and long form citations of Williams’s works. Breuer and Mitchell imagine literary references as ready-mades, repurposing flashes of Williams and Shelley to pose questions about the relation of artist to creation, just as, for example, Dada’s controversial commode did in a concept long credited to Marcel Duchamp but more recently attributed to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.[1] Glass Guignol’s theatrical reframing of fragments from well-known artworks is especially poignant on location in the company’s first purpose-built theater in its half-century long history. As actors in exile, Clare and Felice underline Mabou Mines artists’ epoch as nomads during the extended period of 122 Community Center’s remodeling. In 2013, the City of New York began a $35 million renovation of 122 Community Center on 1st Avenue and East 9th Street, a nineteenth-century former schoolhouse where Mabou Mines has resided since 1978. The space was slated to reopen in 2016. The company had planned to present two premieres in their refurbished space in winter and spring 2017: Faust 2.0, directed by co-artistic director Sharon Fogarty, and Glass Guignol. By summer 2017, the building had not yet passed code for occupancy. In a climate increasingly hostile to arts funding, the delay caused additional financial duress for a company already familiar with the relationship between risky artistic choices and economic instability. Co-artistic directors confronted an absence of ticket income, the loss of grant funding contingent upon production, and deferred opportunities to tour completed productions. The itinerant state all but suspended the radical spectacle for which Mabou Mines is renowned as they found themselves in a sort of performance purgatory. What was supposed to be a watershed moment became a dream indefinitely deferred. Mabou Mines artists are likely to feel that the space was worth waiting for. Gay McAuley asks what “the physical reality of the theatre building” tells artists “about the activity they are engaged in and about the way this activity is valued in society.”[2] New York City’s substantial investment in the company is a resounding response. The refurbished 122 Community Center provides a distinctly different scenographic environment for the company’s activities. Sleek and modern, the interior now resembles the many gut-renovated pre-war buildings in New York City. A steel and glass overhang above the new lobby entrance is reminiscent of the Pershing Square Signature Theater’s design by Frank Gehry Architects, though the city contracted with Deborah Berke Partners for this renovation. Although Mabou Mines has performed in state-of-the-art theaters in New York and beyond, its recent productions began and ended in their small office and adjoining slightly dilapidated ToRoNaDa studio in 122 Community Center. These spaces, shabby but spirited, served as a tangible connection to Mabou Mines’s origins in a pre-gentrified East Village. On a preview tour of the new space with co-artistic director Fogarty (we wore hardhats), I could not help but feel nostalgic for the demolished interior architecture and slightly nervous about what a polished backdrop will mean for Mabou Mines’s revolutionary artistic aims. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” says the narrator from Beckett’s novella Worstward Ho, staged by the late Mabou Mines co-artistic director Fred Neumann in 1986.[3] Here, as elsewhere in his writing, Beckett forthrightly acknowledges a process of perpetual trial and error—a creative purgatory—as organic to artistic exploration and the human experience. Mabou Mines artists gravitated early to Beckett’s work, staging eight of his texts between 1971 and 1996.[4] The company’s attraction to his writing is rooted in a corresponding philosophy that embraces uncertainty as an element of artistic creation. Co-founders JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow as well as current co-artistic directors Breuer, Fogarty, Karen Kandel, and Terry O’Reilly have long been engaged in the business of taking calculated theatrical risks. These ventures, always both aesthetically ambitious and financially hazardous, have frequently resulted in critical disparagement and/or financial insolvency. Mabou Mines artists have regularly viewed risk as necessary to the creation of avant-garde work. The company has almost always been willing to stake economic stability and critical praise for a claim of unfettered artistic discovery. This claim is most readily apparent in the company’s investment in a creative process that absorbs, reiterates, and modifies previous approaches, while simultaneously adopting new techniques and adapting them to new spaces. When Mabou Mines stages a production in front of the audience, this encounter becomes an opportunity for artists to understand and evaluate which aspects of the process have achieved their objectives in performance. This appraisal continues retroactively, as when Breuer expressed dissatisfaction in 2014 about acting choices Maleczech made in her 1990 OBIE-award winning performance as Lear under his direction in Mabou Mines’s gender-reversed production of Shakespeare’s play.[5] Breuer’s assessment of this critically lauded performance demonstrates the scant regard company members have for external evaluation. But perhaps more importantly, Breuer’s scrutiny of previous artistic decisions suggests that the company’s desire to conquer uncharted artistic territory requires a constant practice of self-assessment and refinement, akin to the “Rep & Rev” process Suzan-Lori Parks has described in her own work. In Mabou Mines’s (and Beckett’s) world of creation, future artistic possibilities depend upon an artist’s willingness to confront the implications of past choices. The result is a process and product that are one and the same and a project that is ongoing, never “finished.” As a consequence, the company sees process and product as fluid, rather than as binary. Each Mabou Mines production is only fully visible in the moment of performance, after which elements of projects continue on their orbits. The ToRoNaDa—more equipped for rehearsal than for performance and yet not originally designed for either—underscored the company’s synergy of process and product. If, as Laura Levin suggests “identity is, both consciously and unconsciously, constituted through space,” Mabou Mines’s new theater invites the possibility of a reimagined personality for the company.[6] What will happen to Mabou Mines’s reiteration and modification of past impulses, times and spaces in a new, exclusive, purpose-built theater? As McAuley points out, theatre “space is, of course, not an empty container but an active agent; it shapes what goes on within it, emits signals about it to the community at large, and is itself affected. … The theatre building…provides a context of interpretation for spectators and performers alike.”[7] In order to imagine how the new space may re-energize the company’s aesthetic, it is crucial to consider the effect of performance spaces on the company as they move away from an old space and return to a new one. Ghosts of Performance Spaces Past It is probably impossible to create a complete rupture between the Mabou Mines of the present and its East Village past. Mabou Mines artists simply cannot escape their own geography; their performance history dots the East Village—ghosting it, in Marvin Carlson’s terms. The company’s temporary inability to move forward made Mabou Mines’s link to its history all the more palpable. The delay in presenting planned new work thrust the company into a liminal state of expectation; the set for Glass Guignol stood idly on the company’s new stage as spirits of future performances hovered hopefully around the construction site, mingling with the specters of past performances. Such past productions established a record of revolution, paving the way for the company’s recognition as a fixture of counter cultural “downtown” performance. Because the East Village functions as a palimpsest for Mabou Mines’s history, the company’s relationship to its history is in this respect inherently site-specific. Their presence in the East Village has likewise shaped the story of the neighborhood. As Kim Solga, Shelley Orr, and D.J. Hopkins argue, “performance can help to renegotiate the urban archive, to build the city, and to change it.”[8] Though the company debuted uptown at the Guggenheim Museum with The Red Horse Animation in 1970, the production was sponsored by the mother of downtown performance, La Mama’s Ellen Stewart. In 1971, Breuer directed Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go under the Brooklyn Bridge in a performance that anticipated Maleczech’s 2007 piece Song for New York—here the audience viewed the reflections of the performers in the East River. After years as East Village nomads, Joseph Papp invited co-artistic directors Akalaitis, Breuer, Glass, Maleczech, Fred Neumann and Warrilow to take up residency at the Public Theater in the mid 1970s. Thus, unabashedly avant-garde performance was institutionalized within the structure of New York theater, albeit in a marginalized position—Papp described Mabou Mines artists as his “black sheep.”[9] Those black sheep used the stability of the Public’s performance space to produce work on a larger scale than previously possible, although they continued to pursue more intimate works as well. Red Horse and the company’s early forays into Beckett were minimalist spectacles. In the Public’s Old Prop Shop, Akalaitis and company’s sprawling Dead End Kids (1980) was devised by more than thirty multidisciplinary collaborators and featured a cast of fifteen. The company’s residency at the Public lasted into the mid 1980s. Mabou Mines’s bold and diverse aesthetic aims, spurred by its collective structure, meant that the company continued to exploit the rawness of failure and success in emergent downtown performance spaces. Another Beckett text, Maleczech’s performance installation based on the short story Imagination Dead Imagine, was presented at the Wooster Group’s space, the Performing Garage, in 1984. Mabou Mines was part of a movement of New York avant-garde companies activating new spaces, often ones that were unequipped for the mechanics of performance. “Theatre artists,” McAuley points out, “are frequently obliged to work in buildings designed for earlier periods, and this can cause problems if there is too great a distance between the practice of theatre as predicated by the building and practices deemed appropriate to the present by the artists (and spectators) involved.”[10] The Mabou Mines artistic directors are among those theatre artists McAuley describes. In order to imagine how a new, technologically sophisticated space might alter Mabou Mines’s aesthetic, it is crucial to consider the ways in which the company’s former spartan site in 122 Community Center contributed to past works. For thirty-five years, the company’s administrative operations were run out of a tiny office and productions were rehearsed, workshopped, and often presented in the adjoining, bare bones ToRoNaDa studio. The ToRoNaDa was a large rectangular classroom with giant windows, midnight blue walls and a basic lighting grid named in honor of four deceased collaborators: Tony Vasconcellos, Ron Vawter, Nancy Graves, and David Warrilow. Appropriately enough, it is also a nickname for “no bull.”[11] It accommodated approximately 50 seats. The walls opposite the windows were lined with built-in cabinets fronted by chalk boards—relics of the room’s past life as a classroom. A loft space over an improvised office in the northeast corner of the room doubled not only as storage for lighting equipment but also as a staging area, featuring prominently in works such as Belén: A Book of Hours (1999), when Monica Dionne was stationed there as she provided contemporary commentary on the history of the notorious Mexican women’s prison. In this case, as in many others, the ToRoNaDa’s poor theater aesthetic provided a springboard for creative choices that were critically lauded; performers Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodriguez were honored with OBIE special citations and Julie Archer was nominated for the American Theatre Wing’s Hewes Design award. This charmingly dilapidated home, though constant, was insufficient for supporting the company’s integration of technology with live performance. Though Archer used projections artfully in Belén, her projection design for Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2011; premiere 2007 at Colby College), based on the life of Lucia Joyce and directed by Fogarty, found a more sophisticated backdrop down the hall from the ToRoNaDa at Performance Space 122’s larger theater. A consideration of the history of this institution and other peers in the East Village contextualizes the growing pains Mabou Mines is experiencing as it faces its future in a refurbished space. The company has long shared the building with Performance Space 122, Painting Space 122, and the AIDS Service Center. Performance Space 122, better known as PS122, and now known as Performance Space New York, was founded in 1980 and quickly became integral to East Village theater and hosted artists including Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Spalding Gray, Penny Arcade, and Carmelita Tropicana. Its past, like Mabou Mines’s, is intricately connected to its geography. The organization proudly acknowledges its role in East Village history on its website: “As decades passed the city became cleaner, safer, greener and more expensive, and the neighborhood gentrified. Although PS122 became an ‘institution’ during this time, it also managed to retain its gritty non-conformist character.”[12] PS122 audiences grew intimately familiar not only with its bold programming of audacious artists, but also with its awkward horizontal layout and the Ionic columns that intruded into the stage pictures. The institution bills its new, custom spaces as “column-free.” These larger theaters “raise the roof to feature a two-story ceiling allowing for more agency for artists and more expansive experiences” for viewers.[13] In a sign of how significant the renovation is for Mabou Mines’s fellow tenants, PS122 has changed its name to Performance Space New York: a new name for a new architectural and artistic life. The changes to the interiors and inhabitants of downtown performance sites are not limited to 122 Community Center. The Old Prop Shop is no more. Richard Foreman bequeathed his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church, itself the former site of Theatre Genesis, to Incubator Arts, a new generation of artists who were unable to sustain the space. The Living Theatre has gained and lost three East Village spaces, closing their 14th street space in 1963, its Third Avenue space in 1993, and residing at its Clinton Street theater from 2008 to 2013. The Living has now returned to the nomadic state embedded in its history. La Mama has been more successful at putting down permanent spatial roots, expanding into two large buildings of prime property. This, too reflects institutional emphasis; as a producer, Ellen Stewart prioritized real estate from La Mama’s founding. New York Theatre Workshop, founded in 1979, opened its own scenery, costume, and production shop in 2011. Recent advances by La Mama and NYTW have been supported by the Fourth Arts Block (FAB) Cultural District, founded in 2001 by neighborhood cultural and community groups. The organization’s mission included the purchase of eight properties from the City of New York to “secure them as permanently affordable spaces for non-profit arts and cultural organizations.”[14] The refurbished space Mabou Mines inhabits includes a high-tech, 50-seat performance venue, a modern office, dressing rooms, storage space, and two rehearsal studios. Audiences no longer ascend well-worn stairs with intricate, wrought iron detailing in a dank stairwell, but enter instead through an airy and modern lobby and glide up to the theater in an elevator. The move into a deluxe suite marks the dawn of a new era for Mabou Mines in more ways than one. Maleczech died in 2013, leaving Breuer as the last remaining co-founding artistic director at the company’s helm. But both Glass Guignol and Faust 2.0 continue the company’s tradition of radicalizing classic works. And both take up recent and present company concerns, confronting the pleasure and pain of waiting as Clare and Felice tread water onstage and Faust postpones the consequences of mortality. It remains to be seen how the spectacle of a swanky, gut-renovated East Village building will continue to foreground risk for a company founded by a group of artists who once shared an apartment and worked as short order cooks in the same restaurant. After all, as McAuley suggests, “the point of access to the building, the foyers, stairways, corridors, bars and restaurants, the box office, and of course the auditorium are all parts” of the audience experience, “and the way we experience them has an unavoidable impact on the meanings we take away with us.”[15] Mabou Mines artists are unlikely to be terribly concerned about this. A space that will support the needs of their adventurous exploitation of technology and distinctive integration of design elements in early phases of development is surely overdue for the half-century-old company. Levin offers a useful claim in support of Mabou Mines’s colonization of renovated real estate: “While performance critics often view the absorption of self into setting as a troubling act of submission – reading ‘blending in’ as evidence of assimilation or erasure…it can also facilitate socially productive ways of inhabiting our physical and cultural environments.”[16] In this sense, the company’s absorption into a refurbished habitat signals a “socially productive” and crucial cultural acknowledgment of their contribution to the East Village in particular and to New York City at large. Attainment in Other Spaces Although the ToRoNaDa was undoubtedly a hub of creativity for Mabou Mines and served as an occasional performance space for full productions, its schoolroom aesthetic and limited technical capabilities meant that the company presented most performances off-site. The co-artistic directors’ early and sustained affinity for Beckett’s works reflects, in part, the resonance they found in the playwright’s ability to dramatize a perpetual state of limbo. This is certainly echoed in the company’s commitment to taking artistic risks regardless of the critical consequences, but also in Mabou Mines’s transitory relationship to the many performance sites away from 122 Community Center where its work has been presented. While the Living Theater’s work has always been suited to their nomadic existence, this is not necessarily the case for Mabou Mines (even the company’s name refers to a specific place in Nova Scotia). Although it is atypical for artists to rehearse regularly in performance spaces prior to technical rehearsals (the cost would be prohibitive), the resulting geographical split between process and product presents a particular challenge for Mabou Mines’s synthesis of the two, in part because the company emphasizes the early integration of design elements. This artificial divide is likely to have affected Mabou Mines artists’ goals as well as critical reception of works performed away from the ToRoNaDa. Confronting the unknown quantity of off-site space thus presents yet another risk the company has been willing to take. While its many awards and critical successes are likely responsible for the upgrades to Mabou Mines’s home, it may be its so-called failures that truly reveal Mabou Mines’s avant-garde mettle. As Beckett writes in Three Dialogues, “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world… .”[17] But to what extent do Mabou Mines co-artistic directors take critical reception into consideration? Maleczech claimed she mailed negative reviews to a post office box unread. One way to understand how Mabou Mines artists evaluate their process and product given their healthy disregard for critical accolades is to examine works that others perceive to have failed but which make a significant contribution to the company’s sustained artistic priorities, despite a tension between their goals and the performance space in which they have found themselves. In the productions examined here, negative reviews are attributable, in part, to fundamental misunderstandings about the relationship between the company’s marriage of process and product and a lack of sensitivity to variables presented by the performance space. I will rely primarily on reviews from the New York Times, in part because the company’s critical ups and downs are most readily apparent in the context of a single source and because, for better or worse, the Times wields an outsized influence as an arbiter of theatrical taste. It is also useful to consider how Mabou Mines artists conceptualize their relationship to the audience in considering their creative values and prerogatives. Maleczech presented an ambitious project in 2007 that represents a logical progression of many of the company’s collective origins and impulses. Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting was organized around original poems about New York City, and produced site-specifically on a barge docked in the East River in Long Island City, Queens. Admission was free; Maleczech described the performance as her gift to the home that had given so generously to her as an artist. The landscape of reviews is mixed, but Claudia La Rocco, writing for the New York Times, panned the production in no uncertain terms: “This self-proclaimed ‘celebration of New York City’ by the collaborative theater ensemble Mabou Mines does not inspire. It does not satisfy. It does little more than prompt head shaking at all the very hard work and passion that must have been squandered in getting it off the ground.”[18] This is resounding critical disapproval. But what does Song for New York mean in the context of the company’s taste for adventurous collisions between process and product? As audience members arrived at Gantry State Park for performances of Song for New York, they could enter a photo booth and have their pictures taken with a pinhole camera as part of an interactive design (by former co-artistic director Julie Archer) that emphasized New York as a hometown. Spectators then gathered on the dock for the show. Maleczech had commissioned five artists to write poems, one for each borough. Some of the writers, such as Migdalia Cruz and Patricia Spears Jones, were seasoned playwrights. Another, Kandel—now a Mabou Mines co-artistic director—is primarily a performer. All of the writers and featured performers were women who represented a range of cultural backgrounds. Poems were set to live music. A chorus of men delivered interludes, or “yarns,” inspired by the city’s bodies of water as the barge—and the performance itself—rocked gently on the East River. Maleczech’s thank you note to New York was nothing if not writ large. While La Rocco’s review of Song for New York gestures towards an acknowledgment of Mabou Mines’s collective structure, it does not engage the relationship between product and what, even after thirty-seven years, remained a radical way of working in an unusual space. The text was not devised by the Song for New York company; each writer worked independently on her own contribution. This is precisely how Mabou Mines co-artistic directors operate. Productions initiated by artistic directors are produced in a queue. Often, co-artistic directors collaborate on developing new work, as Archer did in designing the barge and shore set for Song for New York; but there is no requirement that co-artistic directors be artistically involved in every project. In this case, Breuer and O’Reilly did not collaborate. Such artistic independence and choice are hallmarks of the company’s self-defined success.[19] Song for New York is equally revealing of Mabou Mines’s staunch commitment to artistic risk. In inviting Kandel, known for her performance work, to participate as a writer, Maleczech demonstrated a zest for interdisciplinary exploration. The decision to commission women writers and performers of varied cultural backgrounds takes subtle yet unmistakable aim at patriarchal historiographic and artistic convention. Here, widely diverse female voices tell the story of a great American city. This is a more inclusive Walt Whitman for the twenty-first century. Maleczech envisioned performance on an epic scale, integrating a male chorus and live music and refusing to give up on the idea of the barge space even in the face of dire economic consequences and logistical nightmares.[20] In her invocation of New York City’s waterways alongside its diverse population, she evokes Levin’s idea of a “performance’s ‘environmental unconscious,’” a “notion of ‘site-specificity,’ central to space-sensitive performance practices” that “call attention to marginalized entities (human and non-human) and thus directly engage with the political dimensions of art making.”[21] While this production may not have satisfied the New York Times, Song for New York insists upon the political nature of public space and demonstrates avant-garde ideals in its embrace of an interdisciplinary way of working, its rejection of inherited societal standards, and its rebuff of bourgeois economic and logistical concerns as well as conventional spatial expectations. The complexity of the site for this production also tested the company’s organizational agility, perhaps preparing them for their unforeseen extended exile from 122 Community Center. Finn (2010), directed by Fogarty, also disappointed an establishment New York Times critic. Following in the company’s tradition of adaptation, Finn is a technologically ambitious live-action video game riff on the Celtic legend of Finn McCool described by Jason Zinoman as “soul-less.” It was presented at New York University’s enormous, state-of-the-art Skirball Center for the Arts. In his review Zinoman contrasts Mabou Mines’s use of technology unfavorably with the Wooster Group’s, arguing that “most theater companies fail to integrate video as well as the Wooster Group does.”[22] The Wooster Group, probably Mabou Mines’s closest peer in sustained theatrical invention, has had its own permanent space in which to rehearse and perform since its founding. When Wooster Group audiences arrive at the Performing Garage, they already have a context for the work they will see there and the company is in the enviable position of rehearsing where they frequently perform. Meanwhile, the cavernous Skirball Center, which seats 867, is strikingly dissimilar to the modest ToRoNaDa. Although Finn was not Mabou Mines’s debut at the Skirball Center—the company had presented Red Beads there in 2005—the space is not one that audiences and critics automatically associate with the company. The effects of this estrangement between performance and performance space for artists, audiences, and critics, are perhaps unquantifiable, but nonetheless significant for a company that is at once process-driven and technologically ambitious. Zinoman also fails to acknowledge that Mabou Mines was on the vanguard of technological innovation in the American avant-garde with the Red Horse Animation before the Wooster Group was founded. For this production, Philip Glass’s specially designed flooring amplified the sound performers’ bodies made as they came in contact with it. Hajj (1983), written and directed by Breuer and featuring Maleczech, was one of the first American productions to combine video with live theatrical performance. The OBIE-award winning Hajj was a result of a collaboration with SONY that allowed the company to work with state-of-the art equipment. In fact, it was partially developed at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage, where Imagination Dead Imagine, groundbreaking in its holographic vision, would also be presented. Writing for the New York Times in 1983, Mel Gussow lauds Mabou Mines for its integration of video in Hajj: “the pictures in this mysterious piece - contrasting, overlapping, coalescing -demonstrate the virtuosity of video as an instrument in live performance art.”[23] Zinoman’s review omits Finn’s context within the company’s pioneering history of utilizing cutting-edge stage technology. For the company, however, Fogarty’s encounter with video gaming is a part of a logical progression in an ongoing engagement with technology—one that its longtime space was incapable of adequately supporting. Audiences, too, have sometimes found Mabou Mines’s work perplexing. This befuddlement is often tied to the inventive nature of the work. In one such case, audience confusion derived from the technological accomplishments Zinoman overlooks. A representative of Actor’s Equity Association attending Imagination Dead Imagine sought to confirm that the performer who played the hologram was being treated properly. This hologram was a pre-recorded image of Maleczech’s daughter, Clove Galilee, dissected into three parts—to produce a single holographic image of that size was not technologically possible at the time. The result was the largest hologram ever to be featured on stage at the time of Imagination Dead Imagine’s premiere. Maleczech recalled showing the holographic equipment to the Actor’s Equity Association envoy to demonstrate that there was no one inside. Here Mabou Mines’s innovations outpaced at least one audience member’s technological literacy. In another instance, spectators were uncomfortable with stylistic interventions the company introduced to a classic text. When the company presented a workshop of Lear (1987), initiated by Maleczech and directed by Breuer at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, half of the audience walked out. Although Maleczech ultimately won an OBIE for her performance, the production confronted spectators with a number of disruptions: a gender reversed cast featuring a female Lear (long before Glenda Jackson), a drag queen Fool (played by Greg Mehrten), dogs as Lear’s retinue, and golf carts tricked out as sports cars to transport performers around an American Southern setting. Here too the juxtaposition between site and content may have augmented the gap between expectation and reality for audiences. But as Richard Caves writes, “The smaller the pecuniary rewards of normal creativity, the more attractive are the highly uncertain and largely subjective rewards of assaulting the aesthetic frontier.”[24] Maleczech once lamented that many contemporary artists assume they “know what the audience wants to eat for dinner.”[25] Mabou Mines simply serves what is on their menu. This may suggest that the company does not consider the audience. Rather, Mabou Mines artists set high expectations for both spectators and themselves, challenging us to meet them in the middle in performance. Breuer identifies a dialectical relationship between audience reception and his work. Maleczech, meanwhile, described a process of attracting the audience’s attention without pandering to them: “you startle them or you push what you are doing so far that you get them to laugh, or you do the opposite of what you’re doing, and you have them for a second, and then you lose them again.”[26] Both approaches suggest an experience of performance that is reciprocal without being coerced. In Mabou Mines’s new space, the potential risks (or lack thereof) for artists and audiences are also evenly balanced. Artists will have tools that more easily and comfortably accessible, and audiences will know what to expect technically and architecturally at 122 Community Center, marking a departure from Mabou Mines’s history of producing in a variety of New York City venues. Will this lull spectators (and critics) into a state of comfort that is at odds with the alertness Breuer and Maleczech seek? Despite the potential excitement of what Sarah Bess Rowen described as a “masturbatory bubble cycle”[27]—a bubble machine resembling a bicycle positioned between Mitchell’s legs during a ready-made of Williams’s A Cavalier for Milady—Alexis Soloski complains in her review of Glass Guignol for the New York Times that the production fails to surprise the audience. In this brand-new theater, many of Mr. Breuer’s gestures, like a mostly nude Christ or Meganne George’s fetishwear costumes, point back to the company’s 1970s and 1980s heyday. This is shock treatment with a low current. Mabou Mines was always an exemplar of the theatrical avant-garde. The company is nearly 50 now. Maybe its members have slowed down. Maybe the rest of us have finally caught up.[28] Soloski’s critique suggests that the company may confront a new audience mentality attuned to its new space, one that requires a recalibration of the relationship to critical reception. But as is usual for Mabou Mines artists, Breuer and Mitchell seem to have accounted for this possibility; the company takes up the question of critical failure in its project description: “Glass Guignol explores the nature of the creative process, its triumphs…and its terrors.”[29] Despite Soloski’s concerns, Glass Guignol is best contextualized as part of a meta-conversation within the company’s work, and Breuer and Mitchell’s in particular. Coming on the heels of their celebrated 2011 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Comédie Française, which marked the first time in the theater’s 330 years that a play by an American writer was presented there, Glass Guignol continues Breuer and Mitchell’s interrogation of Williams’s work. Glass Guignol also takes up an artistic engagement with the history of Parisian theater, referencing the Grand Guignol—Paris’s late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century “bucket of blood” horror theatre—in its title and utilization of the grotesque. This stylistic affiliation is evident throughout the performance. Aside from Mitchell’s encounter with the bubble-cycle, at one point in the performance an actor dressed as a chained gorilla in a tutu makes an appearance; an S & M Nijinsky also materializes only to become the Gentleman Caller. These fleeting, cacophonous, and often opaque references are themselves homages to ghosts of Duchamp (but perhaps von Freytag-Loringhoven) and Alfred Jarry—two French artists renowned for playful, well-choreographed chaos, whose philosophies were foundational to Breuer in developing Glass Guignol. Glass Guignol also articulates an explicit but obscure link between the Grand Guignol and Tennessee Williams. As Annette Saddick notes, “In a page typed by Williams and dated August 1982, located in the archives of the Harvard Theatre Collection, he announces his plan for what he calls ‘Williams’ Guignol,’ three evenings in repertoire of late plays in this tradition.”[30] In addition to “The Two Character Play,” the company also cites the relationship between Williams and his sister Rose as a guiding narrative in Glass Guignol’s patchwork of references to plays, short stories, and poems by the writer. This microscopic engagement with intricacies of theatre history is typical of Breuer’s method of radically resurrecting classic works, as when he was inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s connection between African-American church traditions and Greek tragedy in creating The Gospel of Colonus (1983), an adaptation of Oedipus at Colonus set in a gospel church. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition inherent in Soloski’s critique between a half-century old company and the experience for audiences in a slickly renovated space remains. Once again, Beckett has expressed the challenge Mabou Mines artists face. “We are disappointed at the nullity of what we are pleased to call attainment,” he writes in his essay Proust, “But what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has died—and perhaps many times—along the way.”[31] What will rise from the ashes on Mabou Mines’s next try in their new space? A New Generation Mabou Mines is not only at a longitudinal crossroads, but also at a philosophical one. Breuer is the only founding co-artistic director remaining at the company’s helm. Julie Archer, who began working with the company in the late 1970s and became a co-artistic director in 2005, resigned her post in 2013, following Maleczech’s death. O’Reilly and Fogarty have been artistic directors since 1973 and 1999, respectively, and remain with the company. Kandel, who first worked with the company on Lear, is the newest co-artistic director. This transition from artistic associate to guiding voice will surely invite permutations of past investigations as well as fresh endeavors, but she is hardly a newcomer to the company. One radical way to consider the company’s ever-changing aesthetic is to consider the work of a new generation of artistic associates in Clove Galilee and David Neumann. Significantly, both are children of Mabou Mines artists: Galilee is the daughter of Breuer and Maleczech and Neumann is the son of Fred Neumann and the late artistic associate Honora Fergusson. Both founded their own performance companies that have co-produced new work with Mabou Mines since 2015. These co-produced pieces, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid and I Understand Everything Better, present intergenerational, meta-theatrical and meta-historical questions about the future failure or success of Mabou Mines. Wickets, another production by Galilee’s company, takes sustained Mabou Mines priorities in new directions. By briefly examining these artistic contributions by Neumann and Galilee, we can begin to speculate on what we might see on the company’s new stage in its reconfigured space. Of the offspring of Mabou Mines artists, Galilee has been the most frequent collaborator on Mabou Mines productions. Her company, Trick Saddle, co-founded with her wife Jenny Rogers, has produced or co-produced several bold productions. Wickets (2009) re-conceptualizes Maria Irene Fornes’s canonical feminist play Fefu and Her Friends, setting it on a trans-Atlantic flight by installing a recreated 1970s airplane in New York’s 3-Legged Dog (3LD) Art and Technology Center. Fornes’s characters become flight attendants. Seated as passengers, the audience goes along for the ride on this fictitious feminist flight. In a clever alteration of Fornes’s five environments, performers stage scenes in the nooks and crannies on the plane: aisles, galleys and bathrooms become playing areas. Here Galilee and Rogers escalate the tension Fornes exposes between women’s public and private selves. Wickets, developed as part of Mabou Mines/Suite residency program, follows in the footsteps of the company’s interest in adaptation. Feminist representation has also been a sustained priority for the company, and here we see Galilee and Rogers in the process of exploring original ways to stage feminism. This new generation of feminist artists brings a fresh perspective that may be gradually incorporated into Mabou Mines’s shifting process and product. Trick Saddle’s foray into new terrain brings with it the usual critical attempt to parse failure and success. In an otherwise positive review for the Village Voice, Garrett Eisler notes, “There’s much for Fefu fans to dispute in this radical adaptation…and, inevitably, many details just don’t translate,” citing in particular the production’s titular airborne game of croquet.[32] In TimeOut, Helen Shaw also praises Wickets but takes the production to task for evading “Fornes’s free-floating dread,” finding it excessively “sweet.”[33] It is too soon to know precisely where Galilee’s Generation X perspective on feminism will take the company’s aesthetics, but the journey is undoubtedly underway. Imagining the Imaginary Invalid was initiated by Maleczech for Mabou Mines based on Molière’s Imaginary Invalid and Versailles Impromptu as well as the history of medicine. Galilee, who began as a collaborator, became the lead artist and Trick Saddle a co-producer when Maleczech died before the project was completed. Galilee’s keenest contribution was her insistent underscoring of Maleczech’s absence. In a certain sense, the production, which never came to fruition in Maleczech’s lifetime, stages the failure of the human body and the limits of medical intervention. In a doctor’s office scene during which Maleczech declines further treatment for cancer, Marylouise Burke plays Maleczech, Christianna Nelson plays Galilee, and Galilee plays the doctor. This dislocated round-robin casting is a visceral reminder that the real Maleczech is not there, as is a chair that sits empty on stage for much of the performance. Galilee’s intervention in Imagining the Imaginary Invalid follows in the footsteps of another Mabou Mines production in its meta-theatrical representation of personal family drama: Hajj was based in part on Maleczech’s regret about an unpaid debt. Her father died before she had the opportunity to repay the money he lent her to her to fund her first directing work, Vanishing Pictures. Fittingly, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid was staged at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La Mama: another old company’s new space. David Neumann’s co-production with Mabou Mines also exteriorizes his private process of mourning parents who were public figures of the theatre. Neumann, a Bessie-award winning director, choreographer, and performer, founded the Advanced Beginner Group, which “utilizes experimental dance-making approaches with a humorous outlook and an inclusive layering of disciplines to create complex, thought-provoking dance works.”[34] I Understand Everything Better, which premiered at the Abrons Arts Center in 2015, was inspired by Hurricane Sandy and the death of Neumann's parents in 2012. Honora Fergusson passed away quickly in July of that year, while Fred Neumann was in the throes of a long decline into dementia. “‘He would have terrible dreams,’” David Neumann told the New Yorker’s Joan Acocella, “‘He’d wake up and tell me. He was driving in the mountains and there was all this furniture in the road. He didn’t know how to get past it.’” Acocella documents the younger Neumann’s correlation to Hurricane Sandy: “Meanwhile, on the TV, weathermen would stand on beaches and report that the hurricane was moving north.”[35] She also makes note of another parallel: Fred Neumann’s ignominious aging process and his history of performing Beckett’s unflinching exposure of mortal fragility with Mabou Mines. While David Neumann does not reference Beckett explicitly in his piece, he embodies the link between the storm and his father’s decline by playing both a meteorologist and “a man of distinction.” As Gia Kourlas writes for the New York Times, the production “dances around dementia and double meanings – the cleanup of a storm, the cleanup of a body….”[36] Those familiar with Fred Neumann’s fluency in Beckett’s works can connect the dots easily enough. I Understand Everything Better is also linked to Mabou Mines’s aesthetic in its pastiche style, evident in its juxtaposition of comedy and pathos and blend of Japanese dance-theatre techniques, weather reports, and family history. Imagining the Imaginary Invalid and I Understand Everything Better dramatize Galilee and Neumann’s process of grappling in artistic terms with the personal and aesthetic legacies of their parents. These productions are thus apt metaphors for Mabou Mines’s current liminal state in its newly minted space under the guidance of an updated composition of co-artistic directors and artistic associates. Galilee and Neumann’s works show us both where the company is now and suggests where it might be going. How will the next generation of Mabou Mines artists “try again” in the refurbished 122 Community Center? Both came of age as artists in upgraded performance spaces in the East Village and in newer, sophisticated spaces for alternative work that appeared in surrounding neighborhoods; Neumann has worked regularly in a number of capacities at NYTW and Wickets premiered at 3LD in lower Manhattan. Although Guignol baptized the new theater, it was work by a former Mabou Mines resident artist that spoke particularly poignantly about the ebb and flow of the company’s past and future. Mallory Catlett’s This Was the End, a cerebral rumination on Uncle Vanya, was presented at the refurbished space in June 2018. Catlett developed the piece between 2009 and 2011 as a resident artist in SUITE/Space, a residency program that provides artists with space, mentorship, and funds to create new work. Mabou Mines resident artists worked in the ToRoNaDa studio prior to the renovation, and Catlett came to rely upon the built-in cabinets along the wall in her spatial conception of the piece. “I knew the building was going to be renovated,” Catlett writes in her director’s note, “so I asked Mabou if I could take it and they said yes. This wall carries with it a history of their generosity. Think of all the things that happened in front of it.”[37] This Was the End was commissioned by and presented at the Chocolate Factory in Queens in 2014. Catlett stored the cabinet in her parents’ barn before returning it to the reconfigured 122 Community Center for this revival. Catlett employs several strategies to distort the relationship between past and present. She casts older actors to play the typically youthful Sonya and Yelena; Black-Eyed Susan as the former and Rae C. Wright as the latter. As a result, not just Vanya, but Yelena too seems to be a fly stuck in amber. Any hopes we had that Sonya might have escaped are dashed; the three are trapped where Chekhov left them in 1898 but now aged (as Chekhov’s characters are in Brian Friel’s Afterplay [2002]). The production also features prominent performers from the history of downtown New York performance: in addition to Black-Eyed Susan, a founding member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Paul Zimet, a member of the Open Theater, plays Vanya. There is a jarring juxtaposition between the rugged East Village history that Black-Eyed Susan and Zimet personify and the sleek interior of the updated building. And then there is the cabinet. Extracted from its schoolhouse surroundings, the cabinet appears to float in the cavernous, ageless black box, the last ice cap in the melting Antarctic of a twenty-first century East Village. But the cabinet does not appear exactly as it did in the ToRoNaDa—the interior has been embellished in size to accommodate the presence of more than one performer. For those familiar with the original built-in, the revelation that even the cabinet has been renovated augments the strange sensation that actors and audience are caught outside of temporal boundaries. One performer, G Lucas Crane, remains inside the cabinet for the entire performance, playing cassette tape recordings of Sonya, Vanya, Astrov, and Yelena back to them. This archivist is literally, corporeally, stuck in the past. The use of the old cabinet in this new-old space emphasizes what McAuley describes as “the constant dual presence of the performance space and the fictional world or worlds created. The space the spectator is watching during the performance…is always both stage and somewhere else. … [H]owever convincing the fictional world may be, the stage itself is always also present at some level of our consciousness.”[38] Here, Catlett simultaneously evokes 122 Community Center pre- and post-renovation, engaging in what Levin might describe as “a mischievous tactic of” spatial “infiltration.”[39] Video work by Crane and Ryan Holsopple further warps our sensibilities. As the performers climb in and out of the cabinet and circle it, looking for someone or something, pre-recorded images of the performers doing the same thing flicker eerily on the cabinet’s façade and on the actors as we watch Chekhov’s characters try to catch up with or outrun other versions of themselves. “We were working with Uncle Vanya,” Catlett explains but also with Proust’s notion of time as the convergence of past and present, which came from optics—the popular science of his day. The stereoscope showed how our eyes worked to create three-dimensional perception and Proust applied this to memory. In the studio we were projecting and mapping this wall onto itself—playing with the idea of blur and convergence.[40] In a certain sense, This Was the End fills in the dramatic dots between Chekov and Beckett. Time and habit have worn Catlett’s characters into threadbare versions of the originals who are still waiting. “There is no escape from the hours and the days,” Beckett writes on Proust, Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous.[41] In Guignol, Breuer and Mitchell stage the artist as Frankenstein as they transmogrify The Glass Menagerie’s Laura into a monster, stitching Mitchell into a gruesome, larger-than-life puppet. Catlett’s monster is a theatre purgatory where Chekhov, Beckett, and Mabou Mines co-artistic directors come and gone collide with East Village architecture of the past and present. In Mabou Mines’s new space, This Was the End bids a fond farewell to 122 Community Center as we knew it. In an homage to the ToRoNaDa, Fogarty says that the new theater was initially painted midnight blue, the color Archer selected for the walls of the former studio. But the blue walls were quickly painted over with black for the Guignol set. A flash of blue remains on the ceiling, just visible behind the lighting grid. This is for the best; should the company insist upon a distinction between its past and future, it would betray the boundaries of its own avant-garde perspective which refuses to categorize process and product in oppositional terms. For Mabou Mines artists, as for Beckett, “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.”[42] The purgatory of performance space can be ecstasy as well as agony. Each day in Mabou Mines’s new theater is an opportunity to try again. Jessica Brater is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the BA and MA programs in Theatre Studies at Montclair State University. She is also a Community Engaged Teaching and Learning Fellow at Montclair. Forthcoming publications include chapters in Analysing Gender in Performance (Palgrave), the Great North American Stage Directors and American Theatre Ensembles series (both Bloomsbury) and The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945. [1] Josh Jones, “The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, ‘Fountain,’ Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” OpenCulture.com, http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/the-iconic-urinal-work-of-art-fountain-wasnt-created-by-marcel-duchamp.html. Accessed July 17, 2018. [2] Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 69. [3] Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 471. [4] Mabou Mines was founded in 1970. For thorough discussion of the company’s founding and its work in the 1970s, see Iris Smith Fisher, Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). [5] Lee Breuer, in discussion, “Ruth Maleczech: Art + Impact,” Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, 7 April 2014. [6] Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 7. [7] McAuley, 41. [8] Kim Solga with Shelly Orr and D.J. Hopkins, “Introduction: City/Text/Performance” in Performance and the City, edited by Kim Solga, Shelly Orr, and D.J. Hopkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6. [9] “History,” Mabou Mines website. For thorough discussion of the company’s founding and its work in the 1970s, see Fisher. [10] McAuley, 38. [11] For more information on the origins of the studio’s name, see “Program History/Artist Alumni,” Mabou Mines website, www.maboumines.org/residency/program-historyartist-alumni. Accessed 29 August 2017. [12] “About,” PS122 website, www.ps122.org/about. Accessed 21 August 2017. [13] Ibid. [14] “Mission,” FABnyc website, fabnyc.org/mission. Accessed 21 August 2017. [15] McAuley, 25-26. [16] Levin, 14. [17] Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues” in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006) 563. [18] Claudia La Rocco, “An Affectionate Shout-Out to New York,” review of Song for New York by Mabou Mines, The New York Times, 3 September 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/theater/reviews/03song.html. Accessed 9 August 2017. [19] For a more extensive examination of Mabou Mines’s collective structure and aesthetic and a number of productions discussed here, see Jessica Silsby Brater, Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). [20] Maleczech’s original vision was to present the performance on docks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island, as well as in Queens. But the cost, which included a hefty fee for both the barge and the tug needed to move the barge, was prohibitively expensive, even if the company had been willing to charge for tickets. [21] Levin, 27-28. [22] Jason Zinoman, “Celtic Tale Becomes Video Game for the Stage,” review of FINN by Mabou Mines, The New York Times, 5 March 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/theater/reviews/06finn.html. Accessed 9 August 2017. [23] Mel Gussow, “‘Hajj,’ A Journey by Monologue,” review of Hajj by Mabou Mines, The New York Times, 11 May 1983, www.nytimes.com/1983/05/11/theater/theater-hajj-a-journey-by-monologue.html. Accessed 10 August 2017. [24] Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 204. [25] Ruth Maleczech, interviews conducted by the author between July 2011 and March 2012. [26] Ibid. [27] Sarah Bess Rowen, “Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell’s Glass Guignol: The Brother Sister Play,” review of Glass Guignol by Mabou Mines, The Huffington Post, 14 December 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/through-the-looking-glass-darkly-lee-breuer-and-maude_us_5a32d032e4b0e7f1200cf93e. Accessed 21 June 2018. [28] Alexis Soloski, Review of Glass Guignol by Mabou Mines, The New York Times, 17 December 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/theater/review-glass-guignol-tennessee-williams-mabou-mines.html. Accessed 25 June 2018. [29] “Glass Guignol: The Brother Sister Play,” Mabou Mines website, www.maboumines.org/production/glass-guignol-the-brother-and-sister-play. Accessed 2 October 2019. [30] Annette Saddik, “Glass Guignol: the Brother and Sister Play,” Theatre Review, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Number 17, tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/journal/work.php?ID=154. Accessed 2 October 2019. [31] Samuel Beckett, “Proust” in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 513. [32] Garrett Eisler, “Wickets is Faux Site-Specific Performance at Its Best,” review of Wickets by Trick Saddle, The Village Voice, 14 January 2009, www.villagevoice.com/2009/01/14/wickets-is-faux-site-specific-performance-at-its-best. Accessed 26 October 2017. [33] Helen Shaw, “Wickets,” review of Wickets by Trick Saddle, Time Out New York, 12 January 2009, www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/wickets. Accessed 26 October 2017. [34] Advanced Beginner Group, “About,” www.advancedbeginnergroup.org/advanced-beginner-group. Accessed 23 October 2017. [35] Joan Acocella, “David Neumann’s I Understand Everything Better,” The New Yorker, 13 April 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/dance-a-perfect-storm-joan-acocella. Accessed 23 October 2017. [36] Gia Kourlas, “In ‘I Understand Everything Better,’ Ruthless Elemental Forces,” review of I Understand Everything Better by David Neumann, The New York Times, 20 April 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/arts/dance/review-in-i-understand-everything-better-ruthless-elemental-forces.html. Accessed 24 October 2017. [37] Mallory Catlett, “Director’s Note.” Program for Mallory Catlett’s This Was the End at Mabou Mines, New York, NY, 2018, 2. [38] McAuley, 27-28. [39] Levin, 15. [40] Catlett. [41] Beckett, “Proust,” 512. [42] Ibid., 515-516. "Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space" by Jessica Brater ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 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: Jess Applebaum Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu 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: "Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon" by Verna A. Foster "Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space" by Jessica Brater "Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning" by Seokhun Choi www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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Deric McNish Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Directing Shakespeare in America Deric McNish By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Charles Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices is an illuminating and much-needed resource for directors, scholars, students, and Shakespeare aficionados. Between 2004 and 2015, Ney interviewed a veritable “who’s who” in the American Shakespeare scene. He selected 65 directors to participate in this study, an impressive feat as these are among the most prolific practitioners and artistic directors in the United States. Any of the interviewees in Charles Ney’s book could be the subject of an entire monograph, but Ney demonstrates a remarkable ability to curate this wealth of wisdom in a way that is compelling and easy to follow. Rather than presenting the interviews as self-contained essays, he has taken the much more useful approach of extracting and collating advice from each interviewee and organizing it based on topic. He identifies common approaches and creates convincing categories in which each director can be viewed. The book is engaging as a straight read-through, but it’s equally useful for the reader that wants to skip ahead and explore concise essays on various topics, such as approaches to table work, or how to navigate tech and previews. These practices are invaluable for directors of Shakespeare, but can be more broadly applied as resources for directing any kind of live theatre. A prolific director himself, Ney no doubt has his own informed opinions about how to approach directing Shakespeare, and yet he manages to serve as a fair and impartial conduit for each interviewee’s ideas. He transmits a variety of approaches without prejudice, saying “… there is more that can be learned by setting those judgements aside” (28). He is present in this work, not as a director, but as a keen scholar organizing a chaotic cacophony of ideas. Still, his underlying tone in this book is that of a person with great reverence for the artistic process and great respect for a diversity of approaches. Part I includes an introduction to each director’s career and attempts to identify their major beliefs and aesthetic sensibilities. Part II focuses on preproduction, how the director prepares to work with designers and actors. Part III explores the various approaches to rehearsal, with focuses on table work, staging, speaking the language, and middle stage rehearsals. Part IV, titled “Finishing the Production,” explores tech and dress, as well as the added element of the audience. Ney intends this book “to be a framework in which to view an individual’s work” (1). It accomplishes that and much more. A director can read Ney’s book and apply this framework to their own process. For example, a “Shakespeare as a Contemporary” director takes artistic license to promote the text’s relevance to the present. Conversely, an “Original Practices Director” works as a “director archeologist,” using Elizabethan staging practices to reveal possibilities in the text (31). The “Invisible Director” aims to “erase the traces” of the director (31) while the “Interpretive Director” actively attempts to collaborate with Shakespeare while putting forth a strong artistic vision for the play. For each of these approaches, Ney provides examples of specific directors’ processes. Categorizing directors based on their theoretical or practical approaches is challenging, but Ney makes convincing arguments for his breakdowns, while acknowledging that any individual director will defy those at times, based on the practical demands of their production or the nature of collaboration. These approaches are sometimes contradictory in a way that feels invigorating, as Ney creates a dialectic between powerful voices. The book then presents a breakdown of the common elements of production – selection, casting, concept, table-work, rehearsals, tech, previews, performance, etc. – and each section offers reflective advice from a number of directors. Ney doesn’t allow the discussions to become a collection of disconnected essays, but curates this information, extracting relevant information and placing it in appropriate sections. He develops useful categories and identifies major themes in each chapter. He sometimes identifies which approach is dominant, but never which approach is right. One can assume, based on the success of the interviewees, that every approach delineated has merit. The reader is invited to pick and choose. He manages to contextualize without getting in the way. These directors’ voices shine through. Ney’s contribution is unparalleled, in part because of his specific focus on the rich community of directors in the United States. A 1990 book by Ralph Berry called On Directing Shakespeare featured 12 interviews, including Trevor Nunn and Peter Brook, with no specific geographic focus. The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, edited in 2008 by John Russell Brown, includes interviews with 31 directors (4 of which were American), and each chapter focused on a different director’s approach. Nancy Taylor’s 2005 book, Women Direct Shakespeare in America, focused on feminist performance theory in practice during the 1990s. Elizabeth Schafer took a similar approach in 2000 with her Ms – Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare. Countless instructional books exist that focus on directing Shakespeare, but each of those only focuses on one author’s specific approach. Ney’s book astonishingly avoids privileging one approach over another. This is a study that attempts to truly capture diverse approaches and contextualize them. Each interviewee generously throws open the doors to their process and the result is instructive. There were moments when I craved more examples from specific productions to illustrate points, or to more clearly set up the contrast between directors, but I understand this would have made things lengthier and perhaps cumbersome. This book is an effective snapshot of an incredibly diverse body of work and a must read for Shakespeare directors, scholars, and enthusiasts. Deric McNish Michigan State University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References 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 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Blue-Collar Broadway By Published on May 25, 2016 Download Article as PDF Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater. By Timothy R. White. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; Pp. 275. Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater adds a refreshing urban studies point of view to the increasingly interdisciplinary body of work on Times Square, alongside Marlis Schweitzer’s When Broadway was the Runway, Lynne Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette, and Steven Adler’s On Broadway. Timothy White’s study is a history of the “craftspeople and proprietors” of theater-related business from approximately 1875-1980, including in this categorization scenery and costume shop workers, dance shoe and wig vendors, and rehearsal space managers, among others. The book is most successful in its deployment of methods particular to urban studies. For White, economic development is best measured by the number and proximity of theater-related businesses, an argument supported by useful maps of such businesses over the decades (4-5, 75, 128-133). Using these maps, as well as directories, building ownership records, and business listings, White crafts an engaging history of Broadway’s blocks and the workers walking its streets. The first three chapters support later case studies by discussing foundational developments: the nineteenth-century road company, the consolidation of production under producer-managers such as David Belasco, the establishment of Times Square, the rise of labor unionism, and the effects of theater rental by radio and film companies in the 1930s and ‘40s. On the whole these chapters are more synoptic than argumentative. Nonetheless White uncovers meaningful patterns in details, for instance, in scene shop tenancy on the western side of 47th street (49). The proximate locations of shops, suppliers, and their customers afforded the informal advantages of an industrial district, maximizing collaborative networks and minimizing transportation costs. Where White keeps focus on individuals’ strategies and practices, such as the then-fading procedure of renting out Broadway houses for auditions and rehearsals during the other productions’ runs (110), the ad-hoc but mutually supportive arrangements between producers/management and craft labor is clearest. Three case studies form the core of the book. In chapter four, Oklahoma!’s 1943 premiere finds craft artists at peak efficacy, yet this also presages the doom of centralized craft production; the production’s multi-year run actually deprived costume and scenic shops of regular and diverse work, White notes (100). Further analysis of the musical’s development launches his discussion of the century’s trends, such as reliance on Broadway’s “angel” investors, negotiations within costumers’ unions over bought rather than built productions, and the effect of protectionist regulation of truck transportation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. This case study is the most extensive of the book, and effectively explains the obstacles surmounted by Broadway businesses when working within a robust, localized theatre district. Chapter six features a longitudinal case study of the decline in theatrical business activity on the 100 block of West 45th Street, and the resulting increase in crime and adult-oriented businesses. Through the study of this block in detail, and similar ones in a subsequent summary, White argues that the loss of theatre businesses and their “casual enforcement of sidewalk safety” contributed to Times Square’s transition into a dangerous and licentious landscape. This chapter also calls attention to crime by unearthing obscure news stories from the seventies and eighties, such as the grisly murder of James Eng. Here the connection between business and decline is somewhat overstated. While larger changes to the city, such as its inequitable development priorities, the effects of immigration and white flight, and the end of the postwar boom may not be apparent given White’s more focused methodology, their absence from White’s analysis of the “slide from craft to crime” puts inordinate blame on the reorganization of the theatre economy toward a resident and regional model. Chapter seven’s case study of Evita’s 1979 New York transfer illustrates a globalizing production market. This production encountered difficulties in securing audition and rehearsal space, mastering sound and lighting, and the increased burden of designing, ordering, and shipping production components from a distance, which White explains in detail. It also provided a model for funding a global hit musical at the expense of local craft laborers, breaking what White identifies as the “feedback loop” of Broadway. This concept connects the three studies. Intact, the loop incentivized local producers to support nearby businesses, and to occasionally invest capital in necessary offstage spaces, such as Michael Bennett’s purchase of the mixed-use rehearsal, studio, and office space at 890 Broadway (210). Strained by the regional theaters, the loop finally broke when the globalized musical (Evita, Les Miserables, Cats) pivoted to internationally constructed components. Worse, “absentee” producers’ profit would not return to Broadway’s shops. This broken loop became the new normal, White notes, citing Maurya Wickstrom’s observation that Disney has also not invested in independently managed space or support for craft (226). The most engaging portions of this book identify individual workers and use their actions as telling indicators of larger shifts. For example, costumer Barbara Karinska and lighting designer Eddie Kook’s salaried employment at Lincoln Center illustrates the blow dealt to the industrial district by hiring in-house labor, a reduction in workers’ flexibility only compounded as jobs arose in resident theatres outside of New York. Another valuable connection made by this book is its discussion of theatre’s relationship to city development plans, first the Regional Development Plan of the 1930s (67-74) and, later, Mayor Lindsay’s establishment of the “Special Theater District” in 1967 (194). While these ideas are mentioned in other histories, White’s approach foregrounds the ways in which municipal policy changes shaped the fates of theatre’s backstage workers. However, due to its emphasis on business listings, the book equates the success of craft workers with a healthy crop of independently owned theatre-related businesses. The workers themselves periodically become lost in this history of business ownership, which cannot effectively track labor performed in larger institutions like regional theatres. More troublingly, the book doesn’t fully interrogate the concepts invoked by its title, using “blue-collar,” “craft,” and “industry” more or less interchangeably. Further research would benefit from investigating the social networks and class position of specific theatre workers. Nonetheless, solid in its understanding of the period and its urban geography, Blue-Collar Broadway is a good resource for scholars interested in Times Square history. By appropriately positioning theater as a small but important part of New York City’s developing economic power, White establishes the usefulness of urban history methods for the study of American theatre’s most influential urban landscape. David Bisaha Binghamton University, State University of New York The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 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.

Kate Valk of The Wooster Group talks about the Group’s latest work, including their new production of Richard Foreman’s 1988 play Symphony of Rats. PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Kate Valk and The Wooster Group Discussion, Theater English 60 minutes 2:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Kate Valk of The Wooster Group talks about the Group’s latest work, including their new production of Richard Foreman’s 1988 play Symphony of Rats. Content / Trigger Description: Kate Valk Kate Valk joined The Wooster Group in 1979. Since then, she has performed and/or acted as dramaturg in all of the Group’s theater and media works. As a director, Valk has created three productions with The Wooster Group, all record album interpretations: Early Shaker Spirituals (2014); The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons" (2017); and Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (2022-23). She is currently co-directing with LeCompte the Group’s new version of Symphony of Rats, based on Richard Foreman’s 1988 play. Valk founded the Summer Institute, a free three-week workshop for public high school students now in its 27th year. The Wooster Group The Wooster Group is a company of artists who make new work for theater and media. Since its formation in 1975, the Group has been led by director Elizabeth LeCompte. The Performing Garage, located at 33 Wooster Street in lower Manhattan, is the Group’s permanent home. The Group has created over 40 theater productions, and more than 25 works for dance, radio, film and video. Its projects have pioneered new artistic practices, notably through the use of video and sound technology in live performance. The Group has developed methods of composition that incorporate non-dramatic texts, autobiography, and documentary materials along with new readings of classic dramatic works. LeCompte's first compositions were based on Spalding Gray’s personal history (the “Three Places In Rhode Island” trilogy.) In 1980, LeCompte and Gray formally founded The Wooster Group, along with Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, and Peyton Smith. Since then, the Group has sustained a full-time working company with an evolving core membership, joined by dozens of artistic associates including performers, composers, choreographers, and filmmakers who work on a project-basis. In addition to creating and producing its own work, the company hosts visiting artists at The Performing Garage and conducts a free summer performance intensive, the Summer Institute, for New York City high school students. This fall and winter, The Wooster Group will perform two new works at The Performing Garage: "Symphony of Rats" in November and "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me" in January. www.thewoostergroup.org https://thewoostergroup.org/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Book Reviews Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Slavery, Murder, and an American Tragedy Book Reviews By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Susan Kattwinkel, Editor American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth By Daniel J. Watermeier Reviewed by Karl Kippola The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North By Douglas A. Jones, Jr. Reviewed by Beck Holden Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater By Jordan Schildcrout Reviewed by Laura Dorwart Performing Anti-slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages By Gay Gibson Cima Reviewed by Heather S. Nathans If you know of a publication appropriate for review, please send the information to current book review editor Susan Kattwinkel at kattwinkels@cofc.edu . A list of books received can be found at www.susankattwinkel.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.

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

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Twenty-First Century American Playwrights By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. In 1982, Christopher Bigsby penned A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. What was originally planned as a single volume expanded to three, with volume 2 being released in 1984 and Volume 3 in 1985. Although Bigsby, a literary analyst and novelist with more than 50 books to his credit, hails from Britain, he is drawn to American playwrights because of their “stylistic inventiveness…sexual directness…[and] characters ranged across the social spectrum in a way that for long, and for the most part, had not been true of the English theatre” (1). This admiration brought Bigsby’s research across the millennium line to give us his latest offering Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. What Bigsby provides is an in-depth survey of nine writers who entered the American theatre landscape during the past twenty years, including chapters on Annie Baker, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Katori Hall, Amy Herzog, Tracy Letts, David Lindsay-Abaire, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, and Naomi Wallace. While these playwrights vary in the manner they work and styles of creative output, what places them together in this volume “is the sense that theatre has a unique ability to engage with audiences in search of some insight into the way we live…to witness how words become manifest, how artifice can, at its best, be the midwife of truth” (5). This explanation, however vague, does little to provide a concrete rubric for why these dramatists were included over others. Yet productively, although most of the playwrights included in this collection have had productions on Broadway, Bigsby eschews the misguided notion that American theatre means only Broadway with his inclusion of several writers more well-known in universities, regional theatres, and Off-Broadway—providing a refreshing change from many playwright surveys. Bigsby’s recent monograph presents a combination of playwright biography, oeuvre studies, philosophies, working methods, and dramaturgical analysis. Detailed and information-rich, his discussions can be experienced like episodes in a documentary series, gently guiding audiences through the life and catalog of these nine playwrights, proving it an accessible read for academics and enthusiasts, alike. The volume is organized so that each playwright gets their own chapter, any of which could be read independently from the rest of the text for artists and scholars wishing to do a deep dive on a single playwright. Readers do not need to be familiar with each playwright’s work to follow Bigsby’s scholarship, as he takes time to give a thorough description of each play while also unearthing the themes, styles, and methods favored by each writer. The tell-tale marks of each dramatist is dissected, including, for example: Annie Baker’s penchant for pauses (“it’s not actually silence I’m after so much as the things that we do when we’re not talking” (19)); Naomi Wallace’s political narratives (“politics and art can never be divided…that’s terribly exciting” (194)); Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “radically different” oeuvre (“each of my projects are in part a rejection of or violent departure from a previous project” (35)); Katori Hall’s examination of diverse Black experiences (“everybody is influenced by who they are and unfortunately how other people perceive them” (68)); and Lynn Nottage’s unearthing of “memoir-less” narratives that implicate audiences (“I think that provocations is when you enter in the space and everything you believe in is challenged” (165)). In allowing the playwrights to speak for themselves, Bigsby opens the door to revealing the dramatists’ relationships to the canon. This proves useful to both students and scholars searching for context in placing the latest generation of American writers against the dominant voices of the 20th century. He analyzes many of their plays against titans of not only the American theatre, but also the world’s stage. He draws parallels between Baker’s characters in The Aliens to the vaudevillian clowns of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the “characters on pause” from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, for instance. Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County gets read against Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for its ability to “get through the skin and muscle, down to the bone and the marrow” of familial secrets (109). David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is compared to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, both plays having to “recycle their sense of lost purpose within the constraints of what should have been a place of safety” (132). Yet the text is more than an exercise in comparing and contrasting work with what came before, and 20th century models; Bigsby also considers how these works navigate contemporary socio-political issues and historical contexts on both macro and micro levels. Thus he evokes Amy Herzog’s uncomfortable family history as inspiration for After the Revolution (77-78), Sarah Ruhl being inspired to write The Clean House after overhearing a conversation at a cocktail party in which a doctor claimed they “didn’t go to medical school to clean house” (178), and Lynn Nottage’s use of the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street as the inspiration for Sweat (164). If there are any flaws to the volume, they mostly lie with the publishers themselves. There are proofreading errors throughout — including calling Albee’s work Whose [sic] Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, referencing the Vermont Senator Bernie Saunders [sic], and an indecision about whether or not there is a second hyphen in “twenty-first century.” These detract from an otherwise engaging and solid read. Bigsby himself is not above question, however. Although he doesn’t say so directly, Bigsby gives the impression that his definition of “playwright” rejects those who write for the musical theatre, a disappointing exclusion. His introduction gives credit to the “financially no less than critically rewarding” plays—sorry, musicals—of Lin-Manuel Miranda, for instance, but still Bigsby denies him a chapter’s sustained discussion. (And because Miranda is denied, we are less likely to question the omission of other critically, commercially and culturally successful musical theatre writers). Bigsby addresses this line of critique in a way, stating that “to name some of [the excluded writers] would invite complaints of further omissions” (2). While none of his volumes to date have examined musical theater writers with his impressive, engaging lens, one can hope that he is deliberately keeping a few aces hidden up his sleeve that will serve as the basis for the inevitable—and welcome—volumes yet to come. Shane Strawbridge Texas Tech University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 1 (Fall 2020) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Thomas F. Connolly Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Thomas F. Connolly By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Robert E. Sherwood’s biblical source for the title of his play There Shall Be No Night is useful for establishing context for the contemporary controversy the play was part of, as well as the lack of subsequent commentary it has received. Sherwood dearly wanted to create something profoundly relevant. The inherent paradox in such an ambition is something any writer who wishes to be a contemporary voice must contend with. The play was presented by the Theatre Guild and originally ran from 29 April 1940 to 9 August 1940, re-opening 9 September 1940, closing 2 November 1940. It dramatizes the collapse of Finland between 1938 and 1940, and concerns a Nobel Prize-winning Finnish scientist (played by Alfred Lunt), and his American-born wife (played by Lynn Fontanne). He is a renowned pacifist who refuses to believe that war will overtake his country. When the war does come, their son Erik (played by Montgomery Clift) joins the Finnish army, and after he is killed, the father joins the fight. It is possible now though, to consider a larger question that the play and its production raises. Can an “up-to-the-minute” play survive a long run? What is more, Sherwood’s play crystalizes an Horatian dilemma: does the play “enlighten” or “entertain”? It also raises decidedly post-classical issues. The work of Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1929) can assist us in assessing the pitfalls that may beset a playwright who relies too much on current events and enable us to consider the microhistorical concerns that this production may address. Ginzburg is one of the most important microhistorians; significantly, he originally wanted to study literature and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has always been a starting point for him. In Ginzburg’s approach, literature precedes history. So using Ginzburg to consider a play about its own time that is of greater historical than literary interest provides a useful twist. Sherwood takes such an approach dramatically in his World War II play by drawing on the Finnish Winter War and subsequently in a revision, the invasion of Greece. There Shall Be No Night’s urgency precludes history in no small measure because the play is primarily a polemic. Thus, there is only one perspective in it, as noted earlier, that the United States should join the war against Germany. It has no use as a means of fathoming the greater complexity of the alliance with the Soviet Union or what the United Nations[2] would become, to mention but two issues confronting Americans after they entered the war. By failing to comment on his own revision, Sherwood also offered only one perspective towards it. The question of perspective takes us to one of Ginzburg’s favorite concerns. He has revitalized the microhistorical approach through a, perhaps ironic, expansion of its focus. His recent work has expanded via discursions rather than monographs.[3] Challenging aesthetic history, Ginzburg has called out art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1928) as an exemplar of method to be challenged, questioned, and indeed resituated. Ginzburg takes issue with Panofsky’s foundational assumptions about iconography (relating the subject matter of a work of art contextually to symbolic meaning drawn from literature and other art works).[4] The notion of perspective as an immutable is something theatre historians have challenged in recent years, yet recalling the “invention” of scenographic perspective as an evolutionary phenomenon is also an example of how Ginzburg’s work may inform our more skeptical inquiries. Theatre historians who remember Alberti’s 1435 text outlining the “rules” for drawing with a three-dimensional perspective will be interested in the way that Ginzburg’s discussions of Alberti call into question the idea of precise “sight-lines” through history.[5] Noting how quickly Sherwood’s drama inspired by a wartime broadcast so quickly dated instructs us here. What is more, when Ginzburg references Erich Auerbach as an ultimate authority due to Auerbach’s disregard for generic distinctions between “history” and “literature,” he may lead theatre theorists and historians to see past such false dichotomies as “theatre” and “drama” or “stage” and “performance.” Auerbach’s Mimesis[6] is itself a legend of scholarship (and a testament to a scholar’s memory in the literal sense, considering the circumstances of its composition).[7] The ongoing use to which Mimesis is put in the 21st century also allows us to enter into the discourse of a work such as There Shall Be No Night and consider the importance of the performances of the famous acting couple Alfred Lunt (1892-1977) and Lynne Fontanne (1887-1983). “The Lunts,” as they were known, were a mainstay of the Theatre Guild and were best known for their work in comedy, though their reputation was somewhat belied by their performances in plays by O’Neill and Chekhov. Without the Lunts, the play would have been inconceivable. They were at the crest of their fame and reputation. They had also starred in Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (opened 16 November 1931, ran for 264 performances) and his anti-war play Idiot’s Delight (opened 24 March 1936, ran for 300 performances). Two star performers at the height of their careers, a playwright renouncing his own pacifism, and a nation riven by controversy over intervening in the war are the elements behind the play’s contemporary triumph. Thus, we have before us, the current events that Sherwood dramatized, the historical moment of Finland’s Winter War with the Soviet Union, and the theatrical phenomenon of the production starring the Lunts (and directed by Alfred Lunt) that would not have been successful without these factors. Sherwood wrote the play in response to the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland. It opened 29 April 1940, went on a month’s hiatus while Sherwood rewrote it in August for a September re-opening, and it closed 2 November 1940. It then went on tour through the United States and Canada. It crossed the Atlantic and opened in Liverpool 1 November 1943, toured England and opened in London 15 December, running until 30 June 1944, thence for another month on tour. An interventionist polemic and star vehicle for a celebrated acting couple, nevertheless the play was also mired in politics; Sherwood was attacked by right and left as a “war-monger” and “capitalist stooge,” respectively. Irrespective of these accusations, Sherwood closed it when the United States entered the war, believing that the play’s heroic depiction of Finland, which had become Hitler’s ally by then, was bad for the war effort. Some accounts have President Roosevelt himself asking Sherwood to close it down.[8] Before considering Sherwood’s discontinuities, a brief review of Sherwood’s career is necessary as he is largely unknown today. Sherwood reveals in the preface that he was so eager to serve in the First World War that when the United States army rejected him because of his height, he crossed the border to join a Canadian Black Watch regiment in 1917. He was severely wounded and suffered for the rest of his life from his wartime injuries. Thereafter, he was an avowed pacifist for several years. While his serious political interests seemed not to jibe with his literary reputation as a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, the celebrated circle of Broadway wits that included including Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, and others, Sherwood was the only one of that group to have consistently made a serious literary career. Kaufman was a most successful playwright and director, but no other Algonquin Round Table member had anything like Sherwood’s level of success. (Sherwood’s 1948 joint biographical history, Roosevelt and Hopkins won the Pulitzer Prize, his third, and almost every other literary prize, as well as the Bancroft Prize and many other awards for history writing.) Robert Benchley, one of Sherwood’s Algonquin confreres, with whom he had shared an office at Vanity Fair in the 1920s, was a beloved comic writer and performer whose final Hollywood years were marked by alcoholism and depression. He eventually could not bear to be in the same room with Sherwood. Benchley grimly remarked after walking out of a party where he had seen his old friend, “Those eyes, I can’t stand those eyes looking at me. He’s looking at me and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer—and he’s thinking, now look at what I am!”[9] Benchley was excoriating himself, for Sherwood was a remarkably generous writer who was doubtless more concerned with slaying his own inner dragons of despair than looking daggers at Benchley. Years later, Sherwood even wrote the foreword to Nathaniel Benchley’s biography of his father. For his own part, Sherwood continually lamented the fact that he always seemed to start out with something serious only to end up with lighthearted entertainment. Nevertheless, after There Shall Be No Night opened, another of Sherwood’s erstwhile Algonquin comrades, Alexander Woollcott, wrote to Lynne Fontanne about his talent, “Not one of the Algonquin crowd has made such good use of the stuff he has in him.”[10] Sherwood’s success as a writer and public servant and his relatively uncomplicated personal life obscure his inner conflicts. The lingering physical pain from his war wounds was exacerbated by his own self-doubt and sense of failure. He may well have suffered from depression, and there is even the thought that his war service may have left him with more severe mental scars than the shrapnel he carried in his legs. With these issues in mind, There Shall Be No Night is the culmination of Sherwood’s playwriting ambitions; it is the play he had been trying to write for his entire career. Even so, it betrays the plight of the commercial playwright in service to a cause. Sherwood had to write the play as quickly as possible in order to insure its relevance; thus, while Sherwood made a theatrical milestone, he fell short of creating a dramatic landmark. If Sherwood is remembered, it is for The Petrified Forest (1935), which provided Humphrey Bogart with a career-making role and was made into a successful film the following year that also established Bette Davis once and for all as an A-List star for Warner Brothers. Less well-known today is the fact that its original Broadway star, Leslie Howard stipulated that he would only act in the film if Bogart were cast as well. It is perhaps amusing that those who grew up watching films on television probably remember it as a 1930s “gangster” movie. In his preface to the published version of There Shall Be No Night Sherwood notes the influence of his earlier plays. Sherwood carefully traces the play’s genesis, and his introduction is an exculpation of his transformation from pacifist to interventionist. He begins by recounting how he was accosted in the lobby after the first try-out of the play by a “young man” who “accused” Sherwood of having become a “War-monger.”[11] He adds that many critics continue to echo that accusation. After a lengthy review of his playwriting career, he concludes: It seems to me as this Preface is written, that Doctor Valkonen’s pessimism concerning man’s mechanical defenses and his optimistic faith in man himself have been justified by events. The Mannerheim and Maginot Lines have gone. But the individual human spirit still lives and resists in the tortured streets of London.[12] Sherwood defends his vision, but curiously makes no mention of the “Greek” re-visioning of the play. Sherwood subsequently relocated the play to Greece (“re-righting” history via dramatic setting).[13] Sherwood had to do so in order to maintain a coherent liberal, democratic vision of the Allied war effort that America could rally behind. Finland’s alliance with Germany was an issue even for non-Stalinists. Sherwood’s choice of Greece was both “historically” accurate and appropriate. The Greeks fought valiantly against the Italians and the Germans. There was no chance of a Soviet invasion there that might necessitate any political or military realignment. Drawing on the irresistible heritage of “the glory that was Greece,” Sherwood found a perfect way to maintain the political message of his play and its urgency for its audiences. Location and ideology merged perfectly, indeed instantly, for no one would need any explanations about which country “Greece” was or which side Greece was on. The play won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal, and the Lunts successfully transferred the play to London, where it was even more highly acclaimed. Most observers agreed that their performances were tremendously moving and that it was a great production, in spite of signs of hasty composition.[14] In Sherwood’s papers the typescripts reveal that he completed the play in less than three months and, as mentioned above, revised it in three weeks.[15] He chastised himself for “sloppy writing.”[16] Reconsidering the play as an emblem of problematic liberal bourgeois decency allows us to question whether it was the play or its performance that was so effective. Its protagonist is Dr. Kaarlo Valkonen, a Nobel-prize winning pacifist physician, who is married to Miranda, an American woman. The introductory scenes allow Dr. Valkonen opportunity to espouse his philosophy that the world has gone mad because of too much scientific and technological success. He argues humanity has grown complacent. Nonetheless, Sherwood offers a vision of a liberal and humane Northern European paradise. This is shattered with the Russian invasion. Valkonen’s son, a soldier, leaves his inamorata just after getting her pregnant (albeit he does not know it), though he does manage to marry her from his hospital bed before dying from his wounds (providing emotional melodrama alongside the political). After the invasion, Dr. Valkonen joins the medical corps but after his son’s death joins the partisans, tearing off his Red Cross armband and strapping on a revolver as he exits. There are additional debates among secondary characters, English and American volunteers who are Spanish Civil War veterans, about fighting the good fight and what will happen after the war. After learning of her husband’s death, Mrs. Valkonen escapes with her pregnant daughter-in-law to America. The play is no masterpiece, but it remains moving. The problem lies not with its success as melodrama, but with its failure as ideological explication. The play’s “dramatic” and “historical” problems will be discussed when the London production is taken up. Now the question of the success of a production of a given play in the midst of World War II, vis-à-vis the relative failure of that play, in itself may not seem crucial to one’s understanding of either the war or American drama as a whole. Nevertheless, if we consider the problem of Sherwood’s expansive vision of the role of the playwright as a player on the field of history with the contractive nature of “timeliness” we can come to an understanding of the microhistorical usefulness of both the text and the production of There Shall Be No Night. Auerbach’s notion of mimesis pertains here only indirectly. We should not look to Sherwood’s play for a “realistic” depiction of wartime Finland (or Greece), but for a recapitulation of American attitudes towards World War II. Eight decades later, Sherwood’s work appears to be a theatrical monument that memorializes the playwright’s belief in his audience’s capacity for liberal, humanist idealism. By studying the reaction the play inspired we gain insight, not into the front lines, but the home front. We observe the impossibility of a play “recreating” battlefield issues. Yet, we may note the possibility of understanding why a contemporary audience would want to believe in the possibility of a genuine dramatization of wartime perceptions and sensations. It is not Sherwood’s play per se that offers us this insight. It is recognizing how the combination of the play, its preface, its revision, and its production history (including audience and critics’ reactions) reflect their historical moment that entails our attempt to discern this wartime mentalité. The ephemeral nature of performance is dismissed by the historical record of There Shall Be No Night. Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s levels of history, we can balance the putative timeliness of the play against the timelessness of the Lunts’ achievement and consider that their artistic achievement transcends their own or Sherwood’s humane or patriotic ambitions. It is aesthetic ambition that endures here. The Lunts took a hastily-written, topical melodrama and made it into an icon of United Nations idealism. What the play offered was an enactment of what the allies were fighting for. Sherwood asserts his right to express in public the ideology of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms; Sherwood had already given Roosevelt the powerful term, “arsenal of democracy.” He was involved with the moment, though his historical reach exceeded his playwriting grasp. For Sherwood there was a particular urgency here. He had chastised himself for not being able to sustain a serious dramatic situation, even if he does manage to maintain acute tension with this play. It is misleading that latter-day critics have lumped the play with Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (opened 1 April 1941); distance may make the plays seem similar, nevertheless, Thomas P. Adler goes so far to argue that Sherwood’s play “actually helped shape and alter the opinions of Americans about entrance into the war.” While the contemporary critical debate was lively, subsequent scholarly commentary is limited. The play is discussed more in terms of Sherwood’s turning away from pacifism and as somehow adjunct to his work for the Roosevelt administration than as part of his playwriting career. Bigsby devotes as much space to Sherwood’s war work as he does to the play. Wertheim mostly discusses it as part of Broadway’s march toward wartime awareness.[19] As noted, Adler makes even stronger claims for the play’s contemporary impact. What the critical commentary lacks is an appreciation for the play’s production. By limiting their approach to a reading of the play, Bigsby, Adler, and Wertheim overlook an indispensable aspect of the play’s success: the Lunts’ performance. In terms of Sherwood’s literary career it is seen as a sort of sequel to Idiot’s Delight, dramatizing the war that that play presaged. The aesthetic dilemma that this play presents is daunting. Particularly in light of its liberal ideology: it is a life lesson in the humane. But the Lunts and their audiences found they could not sustain their own line of defense when confronted with V-2 rockets. Sherwood defended his work (and interventionism) in the preface,[20] and Roosevelt supporters praised the play more for its message than for its dramatic soundness. The play was a box-office hit, and Sherwood donated some of the profits to war relief. After their Broadway success, the Lunts were eager to bring the production to London, where they were equally successful. In spite of this seeming triumph though, even before it closed in 1944, some argued that the play had already become dated.[21] Additionally, the London production was literally stopped by bombs. The Aldwych Theatre suffered a direct hit. In an excruciating example of art and history colliding, Lunt himself believed the play’s resonance had become too strong. Audiences had begun to thin and the other actors found performing difficult to endure. Such lines as “the enemy is near” while bombs were falling outside the theatre seemed to have nearly choked up Lunt’s ability to act.[22] There are many war plays, and Wertheim’s study considers American World War II plays in particular, but he writes almost entirely about plays being performed on Broadway. One cannot neglect the unique London production of There Shall be No Night. Historically, there have been plays about wars being fought as the plays themselves were being performed. Lysistrata is probably the most famous example. Yet, Aristophanes’s play was originally written for a single performance and the Spartans were not yet at gates of Athens at that time. Nineteenth-century examples might include the Battle of Little Big Horn recreated in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show or Philip Astley’s hippodramatic military spectacles presented during the Boer War. None of these were performed under fire, nor were any performed for anywhere near the number of consecutive performances as was There Shall Be No Night in London (15 December 1943 to 30 June 30 1944). Even so, a play such as There Shall Be No Night, whose least significant aspect is its script, offers a cautionary tale for the playwright who wants to be timely. The ephemeral “performance” of the current events taking place in Finland is eclipsed by the “great performance” of the Lunts; both elide over the text of the play itself. Current event and performance phenomenon are washed over by the tide of history. Commenting on the original production, George Jean Nathan, usually unabashedly caustic, seemed reticent plowing under Sherwood’s hallowed ground, but was prescient: If the Federal Theatre Project gave us what with considerable exactness was called The Living Newspaper, Sherwood is giving us what with at least a measure of exactness may be called the Living Editorial. Neither, however, is in form the least like the other and both differ further and widely in the fact that, whereas the former was contrived with plan and deliberation, the latter is the hapless consequence of dramaturgical insufficiency.[23] Nathan sums up the play’s central problem. There Shall Be No Night is not so much concerned with drama as it is with amplifying a call to arms. I would add that when Nathan’s colleague, drama critic John Mason Brown, embarked on the second volume of his biography of Sherwood, he made it clear that this play summed up Sherwood’s career. Indeed, Brown died before he completed the volume and the entire text of the play was included when the biography was published posthumously. Brown’s failure to assimilate this assertion with his own vision as a writer demonstrates the collapse of genteel liberalism’s aesthetic consciousness.[24] I also wonder if the Lunts being the production’s stars had an impact on the seriousness with which the play was taken. Even though their performances were praised, the Lunts had long been associated with light comedy. This would be a problem for them in their final years; the London production of The Visit (opened 23 June 1960) was advertised as a sparkling comedy and this had a negative effect on its initial reception. In the context of Sherwood’s work and There Shall Be No Night, the Lunts had performed in Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (opened 16 November 1931) and Idiot’s Delight (opened 24 March 1936) , so were established as regulars with his Playwrights’ Company productions. By the 1940s, in spite of their performances in O’Neill and Chekhov, the Lunts had seemingly turned their backs on serious drama. This would become more of an issue in their post-Their Shall Be No Night careers. The Lunts as a couple were the arbiter elegantarium of the American theatre, and in the post-war years would continue as leading stars, but would not take part in any of the groundbreaking work of the 1940s and 1950s—until their final performance in The Visit in 1959 directed by Peter Brook (who still maintains that Alfred Lunt was one of the greatest actors he ever worked with). For their part the Lunts later expressed regret that they were not considered for plays such as Death of a Salesman or Long Day’s Journey Into Night. One wonders if they had performed in an American classic rather than in an adaptation of a Duerrenmatt play as their finale whether they might be better remembered. Ultimately though, they served their public, which limited their artistic range but won them a huge and devoted following in their lifetime. Looking back on them, it is most unfortunate that the American theatre could never have had the means to provide them with a living legacy, but something only memorialized.[25] Tradition is not something that American culture has ever been able to sustain. The play’s critical reaction discussed earlier gives us insight into the split the American left was undergoing in the final days of the Roosevelt administration.[26] The cause of the dissension was whether to revive the New Deal or focus on America’s new place in the world, with the additional issue of the United Nations: what would be the role of the United States in this international organization? By the 1948 presidential election, the Democratic Party would splinter into three factions: the mainstream party that nominated Harry Truman; the leftist Progressive party whose candidate was FDR’s former vice-president and secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace; and the so-called Dixie-crats who ran Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on their states-rights platform. Sherwood’s politics were comfortably mainstream, and he supported the United Nations. While Sherwood was never a “red-baiter,” he became a Cold Warrior because he was convinced that Communism presented the same threat to the world that Fascism had been. Thus, in the context of its time we may see that There Shall Be No Night was never really considered for its dramatic value; it was always part of an ideology. Judging from two contemporary observers, it was from the rise of the curtain, the sort of play that forward-thinking patriots or citizens-of-the-world could not help but admire. Noël Coward was among the Broadway first-nighters and provides testimony for this. He was moved to tears throughout the performance, and he said after the curtain fell that his entire trip to America would have been worthwhile if he had had no other reason for making it than seeing There Shall Be No Night.[27] Former drama critic Alexander Woollcott considered the first night the final proof of Sherwood’s worth as a high-minded playwright.[28] When Sherwood published the play in 1940, he used the original version set in Finland, but after 1944, neither the Finnish nor the Greek version was ever performed again on Broadway. An adaptation by Morton Wishengrad was performed on television in 1957 two years after Sherwood’s death. Starring Katharine Cornell in a rare screen appearance, Wishengrad’s version was set during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Charles Boyer co-starred. It is interesting to consider the double-phenomenon of the published text set in Finland and the performance text set in Greece. The play’s theatrical/historical relocation queries how a war/time[ly] drama that is a response to an immediate conflict ultimately becomes an historical monument rather than a play, as mentioned earlier. Given Sherwood’s apologia for the play’s ideology in his “Preface,” and that the second version earned praise for its even closer connection to the Allied war effort, one would think that Sherwood would have used the revision as the final version. Sherwood’s publication of the original version suggests that Sherwood’s theatrical vision does not cohere. This is so because the revision was made in order to keep the play pertinent, yet it was largely discarded when Sherwood published it. Sherwood retained his added references to Pericles, but the slightly longer discussions of democracy and its future were not retained.[29] Sherwood’s “present” dramaturgy is contradicted by his reversion to the original Finnish setting. Resituating the play to Greece appears expedient. Carlo Ginzburg’s reading of Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of the discontinuity of reality is useful here.[30] I would amplify this by turning to Ginzburg directly and noting that what he describes as “estrangement, detachment, the interweaving of micro- and macrohistory, a rejection of the philosophy of history” applies here. In other words, “the search for a comprehensive sense in human history” is an essential quality of a perspective which oddly enough stems from a key modernist literary antecedent, L’education sentimentale.[31] I say “oddly” because this line of argument allows a post-modern perspective to consider how more than half-a-century after the play was presented, Sherwood’s unified vision now appears skewed. I would argue that Sherwood believed he was dramatizing Finland’s Winter War and offering a macrohistorical perspective. His politically liberal and psychologically realistic dramaturgy was the product of his own personal struggle to overcome pacifism and embrace interventionism. Even so, Sherwood’s vision was challenged before the war(s) ended (the Finnish Winter War and World War II as a whole).[32] The play was an artifact of liberal idealism even before its run concluded. The preface to the play and much of the speechifying of the characters reveals that Sherwood believes he is dramatizing the ultimate battle for civilization.[33] He does this through the use of characters such as a radio reporter who initially sets up the radio broadcast for Dr. Valkonen’s disquisition about human progress and degeneration, but returns throughout the play to “update” the other characters on Nazi aggression. Valkonen’s life story stands as a précis for Finland’s 20th century history: he served in the Russian army’s medical corps, even met his future wife in St. Petersburg, thence returning to his native land. He engages in philosophical debates with the pessimistic Uncle Waldemar and with Dr. Ziemssen, a cynical German diplomat, who early in the play blithely asserts that the neutrality of the United States is part of the Herrenvolk’s master plan for world domination. Sherwood punctuates the play with news from the front and characters’ speeches about the indomitable spirit of the human race. Thus, it would seem to be a sweeping dramatization of the world, or at least Europe, in extremis. Ultimately though, it is a pièce à thèse in which liberal faith in humanistic ideals is given pride of place. The play’s only ideological development is Dr. Valkonen’s rejection of pacifism. In his summative study of history, Siegfried Kracauer’s point about the “micro dimension” suggests Sherwood’s drawing room wartime drama is not a macrohistorical work: In the micro dimension a more or less dense fabric of given data canalizes the historian's imagination, his interpretative designs. As the distance from the data increases, they become scattered, thin out. The evidence thus loses its binding power, inviting less committed subjectivity to take over.[34] Sherwood’s play is neither an adequate reflection of une mentalité nor a depiction of un événement. It is in Kracauer’s term a “close-up shot or establishing shot.” There Shall be No Night is an index of Kracauer’s “law of levels”: contexts established at each level [that] are valid for that level but do not apply to findings at other levels; which is to say that there is no way of deriving the regularities of macrohistory, as Toynbee does, from the facts and interpretations provided by microhistory.[35] The characters in the play offer sweeping historical and cultural summaries or sociological pronouncements, but even though Dr. Valkonen makes an international radio broadcast, shortly after the play begins, and is something of an international figure, the moment of the play is contained by the play itself. It does not resound beyond the ovations it inspired during its performance. Sherwood never takes the play beyond the immediate liberal ideology that seeks to justify America’s entry into the war. Thus it even negates both its European settings; it is really a dramatic debate by an American for and about Americans. This is why I would argue that to attentive critics it seemed dated by 1943. It had only the “committed subjectivity” of 1940 to offer the more complex situation of the latter part of the war. Its “facts” and interpretation were inadequate for contemplating a post-war world. After Finland joined the Axis, Sherwood rapidly rewrote the play, but the only substantial change Sherwood made was substituting lines from Pericles’ funeral oration for those from the Kalevala.[36] It is also worth mentioning that he located the penultimate scene in “a classroom near Thermopylae.”[37] He saw no reason to significantly revise a play that was a “[report] of current fact that the human race was in danger of going insane,” as one of Sherwood’s characters, an American radio correspondent, describes the play’s protagonist’s recent book: The Defense of Man. Sherwood was in England during the London run where he received a commendation from the exiled King of Greece and playwriting advice from Winston Churchill, who suggested that he add a scene in which the characters would discuss the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Churchill said to the playwright, “I want to know what those people thought and said about that.” Sherwood had to suppress laughter at Churchill’s dramatic criticism.[38] As noted, the second version was brought to London, where it would collide with history. (The production literally suffered a “direct hit.”) This version remained a conversation play about liberal values; ironically the off-stage combat that was discussed on stage was horrifically reified by the air raid that ended the play’s London run. The London performances had been continually endangered by the Germans’ renewed bombing campaign. The Lunts insisted on performing even during air raids. The raids made lines such as, “The enemy is not very far away” resonate with the London audience who reacted to the play with more tears and sobs than even New Yorkers had. Fontanne commented that even though they had “drenched” many theaters in North America, Londoners wept with even greater abandon. Alfred Lunt maintained Londoners let their emotions out in the darkened theatre because they would not do so in public or even in their homes.[39] One night bombs fell so close to the theater that the scenery wobbled, the fire curtain descended, and a blast hurled one actor out the stage door.[40] The London run of the play ended on 30 June 1944 as a result of damage done to the playhouse by a V-1 rocket attack, which killed a member of the air corps who was buying a ticket at the box office. Adjacent current events coming so fatally close to the performance of wartime casualties is a morbid continuity revealing the unintended yet omnipresent hubris behind any artistic endeavor that attempts to dramatize war on stage synchronously with contemporary combat, thereby creating a discontinuity. Audiences diminished during the play’s final London performances while people were experiencing warfare. Stage pictures of characters cowering during bombardments became paltry. Under the circumstances, how could such an enactment meet any Horatian requirements? Any question of “delight” in such scenes is superfluous. Nevertheless, what of an audience not threatened by war (the original American one) listening to dialogue exhorting them to accept the virtues of the struggle against the enemy? Apparently, it worked up to a point in London, but when the war came to the theatre itself, the best intentions of playwriting faltered. Late in the London run, the company gave a performance in a private home. Performers and spectators were in the midst of each other and the extraordinary discipline of the Lunts and their company created a performance that “was almost too painful to watch.” Contrary to dismissals of their work as purely external, they used any device they could, even elements of so-called emotional memory.[42] Such dedication to their art is best evidenced by the powerful impact of their extraordinarily “close” performance in a private home. Sherwood’s own preface makes it clear that the play is primarily about America. It details the connections between The Petrified Forest and There Shall Be No Night. Specifically, Sherwood argues that both are representative American plays because they confront contemporary complacency: The Petrified Forest achieves this on a domestic level; There Shall Be No Night on a foreign one. As the “Finnish” drama is a play about the 1940s, The Petrified Forest is about the previous decade—thereby making it a fascinating social document of the 1930s, but it is also timelessly American in a way that There Shall Be No Night is not. Sherwood identifies The Petrified Forest as the play that “pointed him in a new direction.”[43] There Shall Be No Night is only ostensibly “existential” in the way that it addresses the pacifist scientist hero’s dilemma of how to live in a war-torn world that could not care less that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Of course, ironically, Alfred Nobel’s fortune was founded on dynamite and munitions; he established his foundation after one of his brothers was killed in an accident at their factory and when an obituary for another brother mistaking this Nobel for Alfred seemed to gloat that “the merchant of death” was dead. Sherwood’s character remarks on this in the first scene when Dr. Valkonen and his family toast Nobel’s memory sarcastically.[44] Sherwood was fascinated by apocalyptic violence, which is evident in Idiot’s Delight, written a year after The Petrified Forest. Idiot’s Delight is a strange pacifist satire that concludes as Europe plunges into war—indeed, its finale seems to be Armageddon. The play blends serious anti-war statements with vaudeville jokes and jabs at ethnic identities and national rivalries. Sherwood’s next play, which he wrote just before his Finnish play and which was still playing when There Shall be No Night opened, was Abe Lincoln in Illinois, a drama about Lincoln’s early career. It is a simple, if slightly romanticized vision of the Great Emancipator. Unsurprisingly, the play, which concludes with Lincoln’s departure for Washington, foreshadows Lincoln’s death: a sacrifice made for the Union and the abolition of slavery. In a fitting parallel the conclusion of There Shall Be No Night shows that fighting and dying for freedom is necessary if civilized humanity is to survive. Though it predates Sartre’s post-war usage, Sherwood saw himself as an American écrivain engagé from the outset of fascism. Indicative of Sherwood’s status as an activist writer, he was a film critic, editor, speechwriter, biographer, historian, soldier and pacifist, always supporting liberal points of view, and yet was one of the most self-effacing writers our nation has produced. One could also say he sacrificed his career for his country. Few now remember that he was the nation’s leading commercial playwright at the time of the New Deal, but his devotion to the cause of Roosevelt and his fury at the wrenching events of the Second World War caused him to disdain the Broadway box office and attempt to awaken the consciousness of his fellow citizens. Sherwood was at the height of his career when he became a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt, thereafter joining the Roosevelt administration as head of the Office of War Information. Fortuitously, he chose to write about Finland—almost always called “Brave Little Finland” then. He was inspired to write the play while listening to a wartime Christmas broadcast direct from Finland, “Come In, Helsinki” featuring Bill White, the son of the famous editor of the Emporia Gazette. Sherwood had been struggling with the idea of a sequel to Idiot’s Delight, and also felt that he had let earlier events pass him by. One rather outré attempt to write about contemporary political issues was a play called Footsteps on the Danube, which featured a group of Jewish refugees fleeing from Vienna in an overcrowded boat. They are about to give up hope when they are hailed by another refugee, a bearded man dressed in white who walks across the water to their boat and offers solace. Sherwood quickly put that attempt aside. After he settled on the idea of a play set in Finland, he used the same title as the radio broadcast (“Come In, Helsinki”). According to the manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard, some time after February 1940 he changed the title to “Revelation.” The title Sherwood ultimately chose was taken from the Book of Revelations 22:5: And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.[45] As mentioned earlier, Sherwood clearly sought biblical resonance for his latest play. The 1939-40 Broadway season paid some dramatic attention to the war with several plays about it being produced. A headline in The New York Times of 12 May 1940 declared: “The Broadway Stage Has Its First War Play.” The reporter Jack Gould quoted Sherwood’s assessment of the state of the nation using a phrase that President Roosevelt himself would adapt for the pre-war effort, “this country is already, in effect, an arsenal for the democratic Allies.” Indeed, the fact that Europe was at war was not quite lost on Broadway in the first two years of the 1940s, but Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer winning There Shall Be No Night was really the first play to seriously depict the war. Sherwood generously donated his proceeds from the play to the American Red Cross and the Finnish War Relief Fund to further their resistance to Russia. Lillian Hellman's anti-fascist Drama Critic's Circle winner, Watch on the Rhine, opened one year later. In October of 1941, a second performance of this play was scheduled after the evening's performance and broadcast in German to the people of Germany. Another example of Broadway’s war work was when The American Theater Wing volunteered its services and was serving as an auxiliary to British War Relief (Lynne Fontanne declared she was “knittin’ for Britain”). It is sometimes hard for twenty-first century Americans to recall how controversial it was to support any kind of intervention in Europe before Pearl Harbor. The rise of the “America First” movement had galvanized Sherwood’s determination to do something. For instance, he was profoundly disturbed by Charles Lindbergh’s speeches broadcast on the radio in September and October 1939, in the two months before the Russian invasion of Finland. Sherwood believed this was proof “that Hitlerism was already powerfully and persuasively represented in our own midst.”[49] As a result, Sherwood was criticized from both the right and the left for his support for Finland. The playwright himself was convinced the attack on Finland was the beginning of the end for Scandinavia. He believed Norway and Sweden would fall if nothing was done to help Finland. American Communist sympathizers, such as Lillian Hellman attacked Sherwood for writing about the Finns sympathetically. Hellman was an unrepentant apologist for Stalin and never repudiated her stance. Contrarily, she fabricated an image of herself as liberty’s greatest defender. Sherwood’s opposition to Hellman and her ilk shows his consistently humane idealism. Nevertheless, Sherwood’s reputation for sometimes dark comedy and social satire had stretched the Broadway audience’s sensibility to its limits. In spite of his self-criticism, Sherwood’s style of writing was suited to the mainstream audience. He never deviated far enough from their expectations to experience outright rejection. An anecdote of Sherwood’s about himself reveals the essence of his place in the theatre of his time. On the eve of writing his Finnish play, in spite of his raised consciousness, Sherwood felt particularly conflicted because he wanted to escape from the crushing anxiety provoked by European crises. He told the film producer Alexander Korda that he wished he could write a “sparkling drawing-room comedy without a suggestion of international calamity or social significance or anything else of immediate importance.” Korda scoffed at his escapist ambitions, “Go ahead and write that comedy and you’ll find that international calamity and social significance are right there in the drawing room.”[50] It seems as though Sherwood absorbed Korda’s comment and applied it to his play about a Finnish family trying to live their lives in the face of invasion and guerilla war. There Shall Be No Night is not a drawing-room comedy, and though in the long run Sherwood’s dramatic ambitions were daunted, his political and humane aims were met, if only briefly. In spite of the play’s limits, the Lunts’ performance enabled a brilliant staging. Yet even with a great production, Sherwood’s liberal perspective could not be sustained in performance. The bombs falling around the theatre eventually struck the theatre and stopped performances. History itself intervened and time ran out on the playwright. Sherwood’s overarching concern with timeliness in a real sense made the play time-sensitive, in that its message and merits expired. Finally, recalling the microhistorical approach and considering these issues from a 21st century perspective demonstrate that There Shall Be No Night is very much one of Ginzburg’s “normal exceptions,” an amplified example of what Ginzburg discusses as “anomalous evidence that casts light on a widespread, otherwise undocumented phenomenon.”[51] The ephemeral nature of performance is a phenomenon that cannot be documented. Even so, the record of Sherwood’s now dated playwriting that fleetingly influenced his own time combined with the timeless success of the Lunts’ performance, becomes a document in its own right. Revisiting what happened when this play depicted and then came under enemy fire, shows us how art and history can collide, if not cohere. Thomas F. Connolly is Professor of English at Suffolk University. His most recent book is Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of Work. Connolly is a former Fulbright Senior Scholar and the recipient of the Parliamentary Medal of the Czech Republic. [1] “And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.”Revelation 22:5. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-22-5 [2] Here and elsewhere by “United Nations” I mean the allied nations of World War II. This term was introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. [3] Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012). [4] Among Panofsky’s major works are, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924), Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), and Studies in Iconology (1939). [5] Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990). Ginzburg discusses his interest in “figurative evidence as historical source, but also…forms and formulae outside the context in which they had originated” (ix). He elaborates on this in the second chapter “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method.” 17-59. [6] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). [7] Driven from the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach famously wrote Mimeis while in Istanbul where he had taken up a post at the university there. Drawing only on primary literary sources it is a work without footnotes, informed only by Auerbach’s erudition. [8] Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 77. [9] Billy Altman, Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 331. One of Benchley’s greatest disappointments was that, unlike Sherwood’s great success with his history, he failed to produce his long-projected history of England during the reign of Queen Anne. One suspects Benchley never did anything more than talk about it. [10] Quoted in Harriet Hyman Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 212. [11] Robert E. Sherwood, “Preface,” There Shall Be No Night (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), ix. [12] Ibid., xxx. [13] Ilkka Joki and Roger D. Sell, “Robert E. Sherwood and the Finnish Winter War: Drama, Propaganda and the Finnish Winter War Context 50 Years Ago,” American Studies in Scandinavia XXI, (1989): 51-69. This article goes into great detail about the differences between the two versions. [14] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1940]. The file folders in the Sherwood papers are arranged chronologically. He began the first draft on 28 December 1939 and finished it 28 January 1940. On 31 January he began typing the second draft and completed this 10 February. [15] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [16] John Mason Brown, The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 67. [17] Thomas P. Adler, Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1987), 61. [18] Ibid. [19] C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to 20th Century American Drama, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 145. Bigsby sums up the scholarly assessment of Sherwood’s 1940s career. Albert Wertheim, Staging the War: American Drama and World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 22-25. [20] Sherwood, “Preface,” xi-xii. [21] Joki and Sell review contemporary reactions in the press as the urgency of current events receded. 61, 64. [22] In a letter dated 25 August 1944 Lunt expressed his and Fontanne’s “relief” that the bombing of the theatre caused the London run to end. He added that the play was “too close” and neither the cast nor the audience could take it any longer. Letter of Graham Robinson quoted by Margot Peters in Design for Living (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 212. [23] George Jean Nathan, The Entertainment of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 25. [24] Thomas F. Connolly, Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of Work (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010). See the chapter on John Mason Brown, 41-65. [25] Jared Brown cogently summarizes the Lunts’ career and legacy. Of particular interest is the testimony of actor John Randolph, who worked with the Lunts and with Lee Strasberg. Randolph’s contrasting of their work with Strasberg’s is a case study in the limitations of “the method” as practiced by Strasberg, The Fabulous Lunts (New York: Athenaeum, 1986), 462-65. The efforts of the Ten Chimneys Foundation must be noted here: “Ten Chimneys Foundation preserves and shares the Lunts’ historic estate, serves American theatre, and offers public programs in keeping with the Lunts’ interests and values.” http://www.tenchimneys.org [26] Alonzo reviews the praise the original New York production received (211-12), and the reviews I have cited: Nathan and Conlin offer counterpoints. Nathan’s relative disdain for the play may have kept it from winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Prize. John von Szeliski writing in Tragedy and Fear: Why Modern Tragic Drama Fails (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971) reduces the play to a “tragedy of social disintegration,” which is of course the opposite of what Sherwood thought he was writing. [27] Alonso, 82-83. [28] Quoted in Alonzo, 212. [29] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [30] Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 208. [31] Ibid., 189. In addition to Ginzburg, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis, Clifford Geertz, Mark Kurlansky, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Jonathan D. Spence, among many others, have been identified as “micro historians.” Ginzburg identifies the first use of the term occurring in 1959 with George R Stewart’s Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg, July 3 1863 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959). See Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 193-214. [32] See Joki and Sell. [33] See the play’s third scene, 79-80 and 86-90. Sherwood, There Shall Be No Night. [34] Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 123. [35] Ibid, 134. [36] Richard Conlin, “London Theatre,” America 70, no. 23 (1944):633-634. Conlin praises the London version for being more “cogent” in its depiction of civilization versus barbarism. [37] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [38] Alonso, 255-256. [39] Brown, 357. [40] Alonso, 255. [41] Brown, 312. [42] Peters, 284-85. See also Brown, 462-65. [43] Sherwood, “Preface.” xxi. [44] See the play’s opening scene, 31-32. [45] The English Bible: King James Version, eds. Gerald Hammond and Austin Busch (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2012), 604. [46] Among such plays were Another Sun by the celebrated journalist Dorothy Thompson and Fritz Kortner, which lasted eleven performances. It depicted a German acting couple who protest anti-Semitism by fleeing to America, but ultimately the wife cannot resist a personal invitation from Hitler to return to Berlin. A revision of Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column emphasized Fascism as a present danger. Key Largo is Maxwell Anderson’s verse drama about Americans who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and discover moral corruption when they return home (John Huston’s 1948 film adaptation makes major changes to Anderson’s original script). Clare Boothe’s Margin for Error was a whodunnit set behind the scenes at the German consulate in New York. (Expatriate Austrian actor Otto Preminger, soon to be famous as a film director, played a lead role). Henry R. Luce, the playwright’s husband, opined in his introduction to the play that she had “half-succeeded where all others had failed in dramatizing the Nazis. No doubt the strangest theatrical offering was “The Devil is a Good Man” a one-act comedy by William Kozlenko, a protégé of the drama critic George Jean Nathan. The Devil, an upstanding family man, sends his son up to earth armed with a rabbit’s foot where he meets “Adolf Schukelgruber” and is subsequently arrested as a pickpocket. [47] Jack Gould. "The Broadway Stage has its First War Play." New York Times (1923-Current file): 133. May 12 1940. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008). Web. 22 Aug. 2012 . [48] The 1943 film Stage Door Canteen (dir. Frank Borzage) depicts one aspect of Broadway performers’ war relief efforts. It is also a rare chance to see the Lunts on screen. Most interesting is Katharine Cornell’s poignant performance as “herself” in which she plays a brief scene from Romeo and Juliet with a young soldier. It offers a glimpse of her talent; not only in her “performance” as Juliet, but in her silent and poignant expression of concern for the soldier’s fate quickly juxtaposed with self-deprecation of her own stardom. [49] Quoted in Brown, 48. [50] Quoted in Brown, 36. [51] Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), xi. “‘Re-righting’ Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s]” by Thomas F. Connolly ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 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: "The State of the Field" by Michael Y. Bennett, Kevin Byrne, Jorge Huerta, Esther Kim Lee, Jordan Schildcrout, Maurya Wickstrom, and Stacy Wolf “‘Re-righting’ Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s]” by Thomas F. Connolly “Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway” by Peter Zazzali 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.

Maurya Wickstrom Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Maurya Wickstrom By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF by Maurya Wickstrom The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Over the past couple of years, I have been increasingly taken with the question of temporality. Giorgio Agamben writes in Infancy and History that: Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to “change the world,” but also—and above all—to “change time.” Although Agamben first published this astonishing recommendation in Italian in 1978 and in English in 2007, I first encountered it in a 2012 book by art historian Christine Ross. In her volume The Past is the Present: It’s the Future Too, Ross identifies characteristics-in-common of work by artists who she sees as participating in what she calls “the temporal turn.” It seems that in the visual arts (including video, performance and installation), artists have for awhile been attuned to and working specifically on alterations in common assumptions about, and the lived experience and capitalist formations of, temporality. Similarly, in queer studies, and in other analyses like that of the brilliant Cruel Optimism, by Lauren Berlant, both visions of changed time, and the identification of new forms of neoliberal time have been underway for some time. Although theatre as a medium is strikingly fluent in and fluid with temporality, we have not perhaps been as engaged with temporality in its own right as some other disciplines have been. This is not to say that there has not been brilliant work of lasting significance in theatre scholarship that has touched on temporality and time. At the risk of generalization, I would say that this work has tended to circulate around phenomenology, finitude, death, memory, hauntings and returns, as well as aspects of Delueze’s thought. And at the risk of generalization, I will repeat that most of this work has not been engaged with the question of temporality per se, with opening out the very meaning and practices of temporality itself. Increasingly, my interest, and the interest of a growing number of scholars and theatre artists, is in how theatre and performance are engaging with time in ways that do just this, guided by explorations undertaken through a variety of philosophical and theoretical apertures which influence political thinking in unfamiliar ways. I think we could say that, if not always explicitly stated, this work wonders how we might continue to open up new insights and practices in order to gesture toward forms of “revolution” initiated by changes to time. Matthew Wagner’s 2012 book Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time stands as one of the few monographs specifically on time currently available in theatre and performance studies. Although guided by some of the conceptual apparatus of phenomenology, Wagner’s book is an important step toward opening temporality and theatre as a significant sub-field within theatre studies in that it is explicitly and fully about time and its multiplicity and variations. I applaud his goal “to revitalize our temporal sensibilities in respect to theatre.” Although remaining committed to the familiar assumption that theatre is implicitly temporally bound to and limited by a passage through time that always must come to an end, Wagner insists throughout on the unruliness of time in the theatre, its refusal to obey the clock. The past few years have seen other work emerging that opens the field more radically, departing from phenomenology as the philosophical center for theorization and description. I will mention just a few of these in the short space that I have. The excellent 2014 issue of Performance Research opens an international and interdisciplinary scope for thinking about temporality and performance. The issue follows from the 2013 Performance Studies Conference at Stanford University entitled “Now Then: Performance and Temporality”—a conference which staged a plethora of emerging thought on time. The essays range from a consideration of cyclical time in a twelve-year Finish performance, to an exploration of translation and temporality through Anne Carson’s translation of Antigonik, to the Chinese concept of yu zhou (something like Einstein’s unified field of space and time), to the concept of dyssynchrony in performance in Bogota, Columbia, to name a few examples. Nicholas Ridout’s 2013 monograph Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love is for me an exemplary innovation in thinking about theatre and time. While the book engages most deeply with labor (in its amateur forms), part of Ridout’s work is to articulate the ways in which labor (capitalist and otherwise) is always caught up in time. In one chapter in particular he places Walter Benjamin front and center, reaffirming Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” as the central text that it is, above and beyond the familiar (although endlessly rich), image of the angel of history. Agamben, in the quote above, forcefully reminds us that one must think about temporality in conjunction with history and vice versa. He reminds us thus, as Benjamin does, to problematize dominate conceptions of history by drawing them through time. One of the ways I have been investigating temporality is through historically introduced genres, especially tragedy. Two wonderful books are helping my own efforts and should be of note for our field. One is David Scott’s 2014 Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, and the other is the 2016 The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution by Jeremy Glick. The latter is a constellation of a study moving among Brecht, Glissant, C.L.R. James, Paul Robeson, Eisenstein, Adorno, Brecht, Badiou, and Fanon among others to study in part the timeliness or untimeliness of tragedy. The former questions the temporal expectations implicit in revolutionary planning and puts those expectations up against revolutionary failure and devastation, suggesting a temporality of the tragic genre. Another work, Freedom Time, by Gary Wilder, includes a close examination of the political temporalities imagined and practiced by Aimé Césaire, with particular attention to his play about Toussaint Louverture. I cannot close this very partial overview without mentioning, at least in passing, some of the most striking theatrical work with temporality that I have seen in the past year. These include Andrew Schneider’s You Are Nowhere, Gob Squad’s Before Your Very Eyes and Western Society, William Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour, and, most recently, the counter-tenor, “Negro-gothic” performer, M. Lamar. Each of these works experimentally and courageously in modalities of time that seem to be invented before our eyes. Maurya Wickstrom is Professor of Theatre at The Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Her newest monograph, Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama’s Engage series. 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.

Michelle Dvoskin Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 Michelle Dvoskin By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF In Elegies: A Song Cycle, the 2003 William Finn musical first produced at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five performers sing both in honor of and as the lost.[1] More specifically, they perform losses from the life of the gay Jewish composer-lyricist William Finn, embodying and/or narrating the lives of a diverse array of characters linked only by their connections to him. From a nameless English teacher, to Finn’s mother Barbara, to the architect who designed the Twin Towers, to producer/director Joseph Papp, to Finn himself, this musical engages with a range of histories. Some of those histories are obviously public (the events of 9/11, which are presented at the end of the evening); others are seemingly personal (the death of Finn’s mother); all are approached from a queer perspective. Finn (b. 1952 ) is perhaps best known as the composer and lyricist for the 1992 Broadway musical Falsettos, which tells the story of Marvin, a gay Jewish man, and his queer family: his ex-wife Trina, their son, Jason, Marvin’s lover, Whizzer, and Trina’s husband (and Marvin’s former psychiatrist) Mendel. While the first act focuses on these characters as they awkwardly attempt to negotiate their relationships, the second centers largely on Whizzer’s battle with, and eventual death from, AIDS.[2] Finn’s other well-known shows include A New Brain (1998), about a gay musician suffering from a brain tumor, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), which humorously dramatizes the competition, camaraderie, and struggle for (and against) perfection amongst idiosyncratic children at a local spelling bee. An interest in queer characters is a hallmark of Finn’s work, and Elegies is no exception. I use the term “queer” as a way of describing opposition to normativity broadly writ: a way of tweaking our vision so that we recognize that the normal, the “natural,” is in fact a construction. In this definition sexuality is one kind of normalcy queer challenges, but other structures of power that create and enforce the illusion that there is such a thing as “normal” in the first place, other “regimes of the normal,” can be challenged as well.[3] Elegies is arguably a bit queer in all sorts of ways. Most important to my project here, however, are the ways Elegies queers ideas about history and how it can and should be performed. Elegies challenges normativity in how it presents and structures its histories, as well as heteronormativity in the content of those histories. Initially performed in the highly respected and culturally valued public space of Lincoln Center (and later in other respected theatres in later productions, as well as on the commercially available cast album), Elegies challenge audience expectations about what histories deserve presentation in the public sphere, as well as how those histories should be crafted.[4] Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Elegies’ challenge to normative ideas about history comes from how it takes what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed a “reparative” approach, one that performs not simply what “really” was, but also what might have been. By incorporating a range of losses into a profoundly public performance, Elegies queers ideas about what kind of losses are worthy of public memorialization: in other words, what losses can be acknowledged as such in history. I am particularly interested in how Elegies’ reparative approach to the history of 9/11 both reiterates the (hetero)normative narrative of national trauma and subtly insists, through various performance strategies, on a more nuanced representation that incorporates queer lives and losses. Including queer people in histories of 9/11 is profoundly important given that many “moral conservatives” in its immediate aftermath “blame[d] the event on homosexuals and the women’s movement.”[5] Elegies’ complex, inclusive performance of 9/11, and its positioning of the event as one among a range of (queer) personal griefs, offers a chance for audiences to productively reconsider the story we assume we know, creating the possibility for a more nuanced understanding of history—and by extension, the present and the future—to emerge. Before proceeding to a discussion of Elegies itself, I want to briefly elaborate on my use of Sedgwick’s conceptualization of reparative reading. In her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Sedgwick argues for the importance of moving beyond what she sees as critical theory’s, particularly queer theory’s, dependence on paranoia. Paranoid readings emphasize the revelation of all possible relevant injustices and oppressions, in order to both rouse opposition and protect against unpleasant surprises. This approach limits possibility, as the need to avoid negative surprises in some ways renders negativity inevitable.[6] Sedgwick is critical of the “faith in exposure” this approach relies on, which “acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known.”[7] This assumption, of course, requires one to ignore the very real possibilities that the story was already known, or that the audience for that story, once aware of the situation, might remain uncaring or unable to help. Reparative reading takes a different approach to exposure and to surprise. According to Sedgwick, To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new: to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope . . . is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because she has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.[8] Reparative readings, then, allow for possibility. They are not denials of injustices, past, present, or future; they are, however, readings that don’t see the exposure of those failures as determinative of all possible encounters. The unexpected response is possible, and things can, in fact, happen differently. In her description here, Sedgwick is focusing on the role of surprise and hope in future-oriented work. In my consideration of Elegies, I apply her principle in reverse: that is, by presenting a vision of the past that exposes what was while demonstrating what could have been, this musical allows for the possibility of more just, ethical futures. The affective power of musical theatre assists in this reparative project. Writing about reenactments—large-scale performances of the past in the present moment—Tavia Nyong’o points out that “if reenactment risks reifying the past as it was, the transmission of affect permits us to reimagine as well as to repeat, inserting new subjectivities and new desires into familiar landscapes.”[9] Smaller-scale performances of history like those in musical theatre offer a similarly affective engagement with the past, allowing for the possibility of showing both what was and what might have been (and, by extension, might still be). Elegies takes advantage of this fundamentally reparative possibility by performing histories of trauma and marginalization in ways that acknowledge the injustices of the past while also performing other possibilities, thereby opening up hope for the present and future. I will begin my discussion of Elegies’ reparative work by considering how it fractures the linear temporality associated with traditional history, engaging with time in fluid, nuanced ways that embrace possibilities alongside “realities.” I will then address the ways in which this musical encourages audiences to engage with a range of losses, some obviously public and others seemingly private, and to treat them all as worthy of attention and respect. Finally, I will focus on the final section of the musical, which considers the events of 9/11, and the ways in which performance strategies enable a nuanced, complex approach to this history of a national trauma. Elegies takes a decidedly different approach to most traditional, normative history, which relies on a chronologically organized narrative with a clear rupture between the past and the present. First, the overall structure of the performance is entirely episodic and non-linear, bouncing around Finn’s life without regard to chronological order. The show is essentially organized as a revue, a series of songs linked by theme and subject matter rather than narrative. There is no spoken dialogue, and while some characters recur, many appear or are mentioned only in one number. Second—and more crucially for my arguments here—there is no clear border between past and present in Elegies. This queer approach to temporality comes in part from the very nature of performing history: performances of the past create an experience of co-temporality as the past exists in the unmistakably present time of performance.[10] Elegies takes this a step further, however, by taking a melancholic approach to the losses it represents. According to Freudian understandings of grief, mourning requires the bereaved to reckon with their loss in order to let go of the lost object, while melancholia insists on holding on to the lost. While Freud initially conceptualized melancholia as pathological, alternative understandings of melancholia see it as a potentially ethical response to loss. Rather than a disordered failure to let go, “we might” as David Eng suggests, “see in the call of the melancholic . . . an ethical demand to provide another kind of language for loss, another story, another history.”[11] Queer scholars have been influential in this reclamation of melancholia, particularly in relation to the AIDS crisis.[12] Finn is a gay man, and Elegies operates within a visibly queer world: lesbians, gay men, and queer communities are all among the losses grieved onstage. The queer potential of melancholia extends beyond the identities of the grieved and grieving, however, shaping a relationship with history that is queer in its form as well as (potentially) its characters. As Eng and David Kazanjian point out in their introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), melancholia can be read as offering “a continuous engagement with loss and its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.”[13] Melancholia, they suggest, prevents a clear separation of past, present, and future; the rupture that defines history is present, but permeable. By offering the space for “rewriting” and “reimagining” both past and future, a melancholic approach to loss allows for a reparative approach to history, one which recognizes events from the past without seeing them as inevitable or as determinate of negative futures. Elegies takes up just such a melancholic project, calling the losses of Finn’s past into being in the present moment of performance. And while some losses are simply narrated, others are brought into momentary being through performance as the singers embody them as characters. In the case of Elegies, performance allows loss to be made tangible and concrete through the bodies of the five performers. In the world of musical theatre, however, it isn’t only the performers who embody the lost. Musical theatre scholars have noted the predisposition of the form towards particularly physicalized reception practices, what Stacy Wolf terms a “performative spectatorship” that includes “tapping toes . . . humming tunes . . . learning physical bits and choreography . . . the visceral experience of watching and listening to a musical play. In this way, spectatorship of musicals is literally active.” As Wolf points out, “what we take from the musical is embodied.” [14] Audiences take musicals into them; in the case of Elegies, the song that enters the spectator carries the trace of the dead or absent. As the five performers of Elegies sing both about and for the losses Finn has sustained, then, the letting go associated with mourning becomes literally impossible as the lost are held in the living bodies of performers and audience members alike. Finn’s lyrics suggest that this melancholic project was intentional. One of the first songs in the show, “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving,” offers a clear example. As he tells the story of the Thanksgiving dinners thrown by Finn’s friend Mark Thalen before Thalen’s death from AIDS, Michael Rupert, singing as the character of Finn, directly articulates the song’s purpose: “I wrote this song to not forget Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving.”[15] Rather than allowing the distance between himself and the event to grow, as it should in “healthy” mourning, Finn chooses to stay connected to the past, to “not forget” or let go. The song “Anytime” makes a similar point, this time from the perspective of Finn’s friend Monica. The song, written by Finn for Monica’s funeral at her request, is “told from her point of view” and sung by Carolee Carmello. Imagined as “a mother singing to her daughters,” “Anytime” refuses the idea that the dead can be left behind by the living. Sung with conviction by Carmello as she stands alone in a spotlight center stage, the song repeatedly declares in its refrain that despite her death, Monica will not miss a moment of her children’s lives: “I am there each morning / I am there each fall. / I am present without warning. And I’m watching it all. . . . I am there.”[16] When she leaves the stage at the end of the number, she pauses to sing a final “I am there” over her shoulder, reaffirming that even in her absence, she will remain.[17] Once again, the character refuses to acquiesce to loss, choosing continued connection instead. In an interview about the writing of Elegies, Finn states that his greatest fear in creating the piece was that “I wouldn't write a song that would bring my mother back to life.”[18] His language is telling; he doesn’t fear writing a song that represents her poorly, he fears he won’t be able to resurrect her. The dead are not allowed to stay dead in the world of Elegies, and that is by design: the goal of the piece is to continually “bring [them] back to life” not just for Finn, but also for everyone who encounters the show. Melancholia is not merely a byproduct of performance here; it is the goal. Elegies’ melancholic, queer approach to temporality allows for the appearance of small reparative moments throughout the performance. Time is extremely fluid within this show, denying audiences any comfortable, chronological understanding of events. Even within individual numbers the present and the past (and occasionally the future) continually collide. In the song “Monica and Mark,” for example, the three men (presumably playing the roles of William Finn in the past and the present, as well as his partner Arthur within both moments) narrate the following exchange: “He [the doctor] explained that Mark had AIDS / He explained that AIDS was then fatal / Something we did not know at the time.”[19] The men sing from the present moment of performance, looking back on a moment in Finn’s personal history of AIDS, while Christian Borle and Keith Byron Kirk sit together in chairs as Finn and his partner might have done in the past moment they describe. Complicating matters still further is the inclusion of the word “then” in the second phrase. The doctor would not, in the past moment, likely have said that “AIDS was then fatal”; he would have said “AIDS was fatal,” as he had no knowledge of a future when AIDS might be understood instead as a chronic condition. By writing the line in this way, however, Finn enacts a reparative moment, embedding hope in a brief reenactment of the past, and by extension, reminding us of hope in the present as well. The song “Venice,” in which Finn recalls the illness and death of “the former lover of [his] lover, a sophisticated Pole named Bolek,” offers another illustration of the reparative possibilities offered by a queer approach to time. Temporality seems unstable from the very beginning of the song, which features Rupert, as Finn, reminiscing about how he and Bolek would fight during dinner: “He’d say, ‘You’re being a dick.’ / I’d say, ‘Bolek,’ he’d say, ‘Billy.’ / I’d say, ‘Bolek,’ he’d say, ‘What?’” The interaction seems continuous, repeated—until the next line brings time into sharp focus, as Rupert-as-Finn sings, “That then was the night I knew that Bolek was sick.” Performance matters in this shift, as the melody and Rupert’s vocal quality mark the change in grammar. From the playful, up-tempo back and forth of the earlier lines, the sound becomes more mournful and legato. Rupert’s voice becomes softer, smoother, and somehow more emotionally charged. Later in the song, Rupert-as-Finn tells us about the trip he, Arthur, and Bolek took to Venice, answering the call of Bolek’s (and the song’s) refrain, “My friends, I’m taking you to Venice.” After several lines describing the trip, Finn acknowledges that the story never happened, that what he has just reenacted in song was an alternate history: “In truth, we never went to Venice / We said we would, but Bolek died too quickly.” Once again, fluid temporality enables a reparative moment. The past is not over and gone; Finn can manipulate and re-imagine his history, suggesting what might have happened rather than simply exposing the sorrow of what “really” was. Rupert’s performance choices heighten this effect, as he performs the section describing the trip in an earnest, matter-of-fact manner that allows the “false” history to be real for a moment. If, as I have been arguing, Elegies poses a queer challenge to the “when” of history, to its temporality, it also takes a distinctly queer approach to its “who” and “what,” insisting on the importance of all kinds of people, places, lives, and memories often deemed too trivial or too marginal(ized). There are unspoken rules as to what can be grieved in an open public, which losses are worthy of consideration. As Judith Butler has argued, society sees certain marginalized lives as invalid; publicly eulogizing those lives becomes, therefore, impossible. Butler asserts that “we have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in . . . acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving.”[20] Performance, like the obituaries Butler writes about, has a productive function in creating public understandings of what can count as a grievable loss. Elegies takes up just this project, as it publicly memorializes a wide range of losses from the life of its queer, Jewish composer. Moreover, its challenges to normative history take place not in a paranoid style that might focus on how often queer personal losses are excluded from the historical record, but rather in a reparative spirit that assumes the value of publicly sharing such losses. In doing so, Elegies expands what losses “count” as deserving of public grief and attention—in other words, what losses deserve inclusion in public histories. Elegies performs grief for a wide variety of losses, some more obviously public than others. On the seemingly personal level, the songs of Elegies honor and sometimes embody Finn’s family: his mother features in multiple songs, and “Passover” invokes a number of other family members, as well as the holiday celebration and its accoutrements. Other “personal” songs feature an unnamed English teacher, Finn’s friend (and mother of his goddaughter) Monica, and Finn’s childhood neighborhood, memorialized in his mother’s voice. Other losses seem to exist within a blend of private and public: a corner store and the Korean family who ran it; Peggy Hewitt, a little known character actress, and her partner Dr. Misty del Giorno; and performer and composer Jack Eric Williams all fit in this category. While they might be known outside of Finn’s immediate circle, the wider public of Elegies is likely unfamiliar with them. Joseph Papp, the founder of New York’s Public Theater, is more well-known than the rest of these individuals, but even he is not precisely a household name, and the song that honors him blends public recollections—“Joe saw a theatre in Central Park, and Moses builds what Joe proposes”—with more personal ones: “I never understood what Joe was sayin’ to me—he’d quote Shakespeare, and I’d simply nod.” Also fitting into this liminal space are the numerous losses to AIDS grieved throughout the piece. While Finn uses the word AIDS in only one song, the disease’s presence resonates throughout the show, most notably in three numbers I have already mentioned. “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving” features a gay male community and one of its rituals, decimated by AIDS. “Monica and Mark” returns Mark to the forefront, narrating his death and the advent of AIDS simultaneously. Finally, Bolek, the featured character in “Venice,” is presumably a casualty of AIDS as well.[21] The AIDS-related deaths of gay men have often been among those deemed ungrievable by the larger culture. As Douglas Crimp points out, “for anyone living daily with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times. The violence we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder.”[22] By addressing these losses in the public forum of a musical, Elegies challenges this violent silence. And in doing so, Finn claims the right to publicly grieve less tangible losses. For example, “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving” grieves for a gay male community marked as outside normativity, a community which included “diplomats, poets, opera guys, guys dressed in leather britches,” and a ritual shared among them.[23] It isn’t just individual people he misses; it’s a community and its practices ravaged by AIDS. This song, like so many others in the show, insists on the importance of not only those people and things most central to our lives, but those that are more peripheral as well. While Mark was clearly a close friend, the song is not simply a lament for him. It is a remembrance of the various men who attended and the details of their culture. For example, Finn gives space to memories of the food they shared: [M]en cooked the turkey, and men made the cranberry sauce Without nuts—because men don’t like nuts! But the stuffing was manly, and the finger bowls ditto -- And ditto, the pureed sweet yams -- Very manly, when Mark made his All-Male Thanksgiving.[24] Certainly, there is humor in this description; specific word choices like “manly” finger bowls and sweet yams play lightly on gay stereotypes for comic effect. There is also humor in the quotidian nature of the material. Hearing a man sing, in a lovely high baritone, about side dishes is funny for its very incongruity. It’s also touching, however, as the addition of music gives heft to the quotidian memory: this is important enough to sing about, and to sing about publicly.[25] This emphasis on the importance of the quotidian, the mundane, the everyday—things, places, and people—is in some ways a radical act. Crimp, discussing his first viewing of the AIDS quilt, comments that he was moved by the realization that he “had lost not just the center of my world [close friends or intellectual idols] but its periphery, too. I remember at the time saying to friends that it was the symbols of the ordinariness of human lives that make the quilt such a profoundly moving experience.”[26] Elegies honors the idea that the “ordinary” needs to be attended to, to be mourned. It celebrates people central to Finn’s life (for example, his mother), but also those, like the unnamed English teacher, who appear somewhat peripheral, arguing that attention to them is relevant not just for Finn but for audiences as well. Elegies also moves beyond the immediately personal to address national traumas, both in its treatment of AIDS and, most notably, in the closing sequence of the show, which (re)presents losses incurred on September 11, 2001. This segment immediately follows the song “When the Earth Stopped Turning,” which focuses on the death of Finn’s mother. “When the Earth Stopped Turning” is a personal song, but as the title (a recurring lyric) suggests, one that addresses an emotional event of great magnitude.[27] Using this to lead in to the least obviously personal, most public sequence of the evening encourages audiences to recognize that personal losses can be as important, as meaningful, and as deserving of a place in history as public ones. The structure also reminds us that 9/11 represents a day when the world changed for individuals, not just for the nation as a whole. This emphasis on individual meanings is a valuable intervention into the historical narratives around 9/11, which have tended to be somewhat totalizing. Writing not long after the events, Harry J. Elam Jr. noted in Theatre Journal’s “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001” that “descriptions of the events of September 11, 2001 commonly conjoin other words such as ‘American’ or ‘National’ with that of ‘tragedy ,’” nomenclature that suggests both an identity and a politics.” The “conspicuous outpourings of nationalism” that accompanied this linkage are, he suggests, certainly not uncomplicated or necessarily positive.[28] Ann Cvetkovich, writing in 2003, uses the lens of trauma rather than tragedy, but offers a similar warning. She writes that “In the United States, September 11 has already joined the pantheon of great national traumas, and I fear that its many and heterogeneous meanings . . . will be displaced by a more singular and celebratory story.” She goes on to note her concern with the ways in which “certain forms of suffering are deemed worthy of national public attention, while others are left to individuals or minority groups to tend to on their own.”[29] One of Elegies’ major contributions is to offer, through performance, a heterogeneous awareness within the “more singular and celebratory story” that has become the normative narrative. In considering how Elegies queers the history of 9/11, it is important to understand that normative narrative, and how the musical both engages with and challenges it. Trauma scholar Dori Laub expresses the most common understanding of 9/11, referring to it as “an experience of collective massive psychic trauma.”[30] While “trauma” is a term that defies easy definition, a “traumatic experience” can be understood as one that cannot be completely engaged in the moment of encounter, an experience too negative to fully comprehend in relation to oneself.[31] Drawing on Cathy Caruth, as well as other scholars of trauma, Irene Kacandes argues that “In fundamental ways trauma is connected to incomprehensibility,” be it an inability to fully experience an event or to clearly name or describe it.[32] In essence, trauma occurs when an event is too upsetting, too horrible, for someone to fully comprehend as it occurs. A victim of trauma cannot truly understand what has happened as something that has happened to them, and subsequently cannot (consciously) tell their story. Most approaches to trauma tend to position it as the cause of clinically recognizable symptoms requiring some sort of treatment or “cure.” Ann Cvetkovich, in contrast, takes a less pathologizing approach to what trauma can mean, one more attuned to the experiences of everyday life. She takes as her working definition of trauma “a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events.”[33] Elegies’ final section draws on understandings of trauma in order to ask audiences to “grapple” with a variety of perspectives on the events of 9/11. The two songs in the 9/11 section of Elegies represent trauma lyrically, musically, and through specific moments of physical performance. The first song, “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” features two stories: a husband calling home, presumably from the towers, to say goodbye to his wife and child, and the architect grieving for his buildings. Two singers, Keith Byron Kirk and Carollee Carmello, perform the bulk of the number, with Kirk playing the husband while Carmello sings for both his wife and the architect. Lyrically, the song’s narrative is a bit confusing; for example, the wife “turns the TV on, and scrolling down is a list of tiny names. The place he works is in flames,” suggesting that somehow the victims were being named even as the tragedy was still in progress. The husband, leaving a message for his wife, sings that their child was “the first of an expected four. I’m thinking we won’t have many more,” although since he knows he’s dying, “any” would seem a more appropriate word choice.[34] The slightly off-kilter moments in the lyrics may be disorienting for audience members, who are trying to make linear sense of this story as they have of the others in the show. I would argue, however that the evocation of this very disorientation is a skillful choice on Finn’s part, as it produces for the audience an echo of traumatic affect. Similarly, Carmello sings the wife’s part in third person: “she turns the TV on”; “still her feet held firmer”; “when he hung up she went to bed,” but also performs her physically. When Carmello sings that “she turns the TV on,” for example, she lifts her hand as if turning on the television with a remote control, embodying the story even as she narrates it in third person.[35] The character cannot narrate the story as her own, a hallmark of trauma. Carmello’s affect throughout much of the song also offers a clear performance of trauma. While Kirk, singing in first person as the husband, performs looking at her, she does not face him at all. In fact, she spends much of the song frozen, staring into space or at the imagined telephone with almost no expression as her husband leaves his farewell message. The choice to play the sequence through stillness and a conspicuous lack of (obvious) emotion resonates with descriptions of traumatic affect, particularly in relationship to 9/11.[36] Certainly, the lyrics support this reading of her performance. As the machine plays the husband’s message, she cannot answer the phone and say her own goodbye because “her feet were made of lead.” She is helpless, paralyzed by the suddenness and immensity of loss—of trauma. Finally, at the close of the song, Kirk and Carmello join together to beg for a chance to try again, to “restart the day” and “say it never happened.” As their voices wrap around one another in a passionate plea, they ask in a harmonized wail, “why won’t the picture fit the frame?” In this moment, the foundation of trauma is laid bare for the audience: the events don’t, can’t, fit our frame of understanding. This section of Elegies also represents trauma through musical and vocal choices. In “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” the wife begins to show more emotion after her husband hangs up. The tempo of the piano accompaniment accelerates moving into this section, from a gentle, almost rolling sound to a more pounding, percussive rhythm. Carmello’s vocal quality becomes increasingly harsh as she sings fragments of thoughts, each punctuated with a “boom” and a strong chord from the piano: “Boom—her son at school. Boom, boom boom—life shattered,” before coming to the final musical breakdown. Rather than yells of anger or a legato ballad of sorrow, she breaks down into a series of four repeated “booms,” each accompanied by a crashing, almost dissonant chord. While she has sung the word “boom” throughout the song, it has primarily been smooth and relatively legato, with a tight, pure “oo” sound. In this section, the vowel becomes muddier, her opening consonant becomes more percussive, and her vocal quality becomes darker and almost guttural. It sounds, in many ways, like a child’s temper tantrum. This is not to say that it seems petulant, but rather that it captures that quality of childhood rage and despair that comes from an inability to understand the world around you, or to articulate your frustration—a description that also applies quite usefully to trauma. “Looking Up,” the second song in the section, opens with a lament for the towers and the hole they have left in the sky: “Looking up, seeing nothing but sky / In a blink of an eye / Where something once rose high, and higher—/ Now, nothing does.” This emphasis on the changed skyline is also part of the normative narrative around 9/11. Judith Greenberg, for example, emphasizes the importance of the towers themselves to the experience of 9/11 as a trauma: “The towers now overwhelm in their absence. . . . A profound dislocation is created when part of our landscape is missing.”[37] Betty Buckley performs this number as a solo; as she sings, long vocal rests throughout the song suggest the difficulty in finding words for the experience. As the song continues Buckley often sings on an “ahh” in between verses, and in the final section words fail entirely as she moves to syllables, “da da di,” etc. As she begins singing the nonsense syllables, Buckley gestures as though lost. Then, gradually, her delivery increases in confidence and clarity. There still aren't words for what she needs to express, her performance suggests, but now she at least knows what she means, and feels comfortable expressing it through melody and dynamics. Although characters occasionally sing on nonsense syllables throughout the show, that technique is especially prevalent in this number. This failure of language emphasizes that it is simply not possible to tell this story literally. Even as Elegies follows normative discourses around 9/11 through its performance of trauma, however, it calls into question the (hetero)normative perspective implied by the idea of “national” trauma. Certainly, heteronormativity has been a structuring element in the normative narrative of 9/11; finding a place for queer subjects has been a challenge.[38] Judith Butler points out that “queer lives that vanished on September 11 were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built into the obituary pages.”[39] Erasing queer bodies from national histories of any kind is obviously problematic, but removing them from traumatic histories, which typically call forth a kind of public grieving, has particularly disturbing implications. Removing queer people from the ranks of the grievable arguably represents a larger erasure. As Sara Ahmed, drawing on Butler’s work, suggests, “queer lives have to be recognized as lives in order to be grieved. In a way . . . queer losses cannot be admitted as forms of loss in the first place, as queer lives are not recognized as ‘lives to be lost.’”[40] Writing queer losses into history, then, implies a wider intervention; acknowledgment of loss in the past implies lives worth recognizing in the present. Scott Bravmann argues persuasively that, History helps circumvent the censorship, denial, and amnesia that have continued to inform so much of lesbian and gay existence. Public celebrations such as the commemorations of the Stonewall riots, the annual Harvey Milk memorial march in San Francisco, and various AIDS-related memory projects such as the Names Project Quilt provide gay men and lesbians with powerful collective forms of historical recollection that animate the present in a variety of complex ways.[41] Notably, the examples Bravmann cites are memorializations of arguably traumatic events: riots following systemic and often violent oppression; assassination; AIDS. The imperative for queer people to write ourselves back into history in meaningful ways, as lives worthy of recognition and grief, seems particularly strong in relationship to moments of violence, of loss—of trauma. While I am arguing that challenging the notion of queer losses as publicly ungrievable is a key part of Elegies’ overall project, in “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” Finn does not explicitly address the invisibility of queer victims of 9/11. The couple singing their goodbyes and their grief is heterosexual. Yet through performance—rather than narrative or text—this number implicitly honors queer lives and losses as well. Its ability to do so comes, in large part, from the lack of actor-character congruence in Elegies. The five performers all play multiple roles over the course of the evening, although Finn does not often make it easy to decipher the identity of a given character. In fact, only two songs feature a character explicitly naming him or herself. While careful attention and contextual clues suggest the narrator’s identity in most other songs, some openness remains. In a few songs, most notably “Infinite Joy,” it is impossible to identify the character with any certainty. Additionally, while the actors play multiple characters, characters are also played by multiple actors: for example, at least four, and possibly all five, of the performers play Finn at some point in the evening. This points to a further complication, Finn’s (and director Graciela Daniele’s) lack of adherence to traditional identity categories in parceling out roles. Of the five actor-singers, two are female and three are male. Four are white, while one of the men, Kirk, is African American. Kirk is actually the first of the performers to sing as Finn during the show, in the number “Mister Choi and Madame G.” The performers are also of varied ages, appearing to range from mid-to-late twenties to late fifties. Their sexual identities and religions are unmarked. The identity of “William Finn,” a white, Jewish, gay man in his fifties, then, is performed by several people over a range of varied identity positions, some congruent with the “real” individual, some visibly incongruent. This lack of actor-character congruence is the key to Elegies’ queering of 9/11; the actors in this song have played a variety of other characters over the course of the evening. Even within “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” Carmello sings as/for two characters: the wife and the architect. Doubling her in this way—and having her play the second character across gender (pronouns mark the architect as male)—reminds the audience of the multi-layered relationship between characters and actors in this production. Marvin Carlson writes eloquently about the ways audiences are haunted in their reception by elements from past performances, and notes that actors’ bodies are not exempt from this effect. In fact, an “actor’s new roles become, in a very real sense, ghosted by previous ones.”[42] If this is true in productions separated by long spans of time, it seems evident that this effect also operates within a single production when an actor is obviously playing multiple roles. Since “Goodbye / Boom, Boom” comes at the end of the production, Kirk and Carmello carry all the roles they have performed just under the surface of the ostensibly heteronormative couple they portray. So Carmello’s wife is haunted by Finn, as well as Monica; Kirk’s husband carries Arthur Salvatore and Finn just under his skin. Both Carmello and Kirk have performed as queer people and have sung in honor of queer people over the course of the evening, and that queerness haunts their performances here. At the end of “Goodbye / Boom, Boom,” Borle and Rupert leave their chairs to join Carmello and Kirk for a final chorus of “booms.” Bringing in the additional singers—not just as voices, but as visible bodies—further emphasizes that the scope of 9/11 was not limited to the nuclear family unit. Of course, Borle and Rupert also carry their various roles with them, bringing further heterogeneity to the moment. In the end, the array of bodies, and the residue they carry from the evening’s performance, reminds us that despite the familiar, heteronormative narrative, the events of 9/11 did not only affect those who fit into that mold. Arguably, the very notion of presenting a nuclear family unit (parents with a child), gay or straight, as the focus of grief can be problematic from a queer perspective. Eng, for example, suggests that this approach causes “certain deprivileged losses [to be] summarily erased, as alternative narratives of community and belonging, too, are diminished. . . . The rhetoric of the loss of ‘fathers and mothers,’ ‘sons and daughters,’ and ‘brothers and sisters’ attempts to trace a smooth alignment between the nation-state and the nuclear family.”[43] Eng’s point, that grieving a national tragedy through the figures of nuclear family members erases those who live outside those structures from the larger body of the nation, is an important one. But of course, even those who choose not to replicate those structures are still implicated in them, as queer people are also sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and even fathers and mothers. As Ahmed notes, “Queer lives do not suspend the attachments that are crucial to the reproduction of heteronormativity, and this does not diminish ‘queerness,’ but intensifies the work it can do.” Highlighting “the gap between the script and the body, including the bodily form of ‘the family,’” she suggests, may invoke a certain cognitive dissonance that helps point out the fallibility of the “script(s)” followed by normative society.[44] In Elegies, beginning with a heterosexual couple and their nuclear family unit allows space to acknowledge the normative narrative, while leaving room for a queer re-imagining—a useful reparative project. Elegies advocates for the inclusion of gay and lesbian bodies and lives in histories of national traumas, and encourages audiences to question the idea that historical events and narratives were inevitable by performing how things might have been, as well as how they were. Tellingly, while the text and score of this musical contain the seeds for its queer interventions, it is in performance that those interventions find their full expression: without the actors’ bodies and voices, and their engagement with the audience, Elegies would be unable to fully accomplish its progressive work. Future productions may also find ways to make other, extra-textual losses that occurred after the musical’s moment of creation part of the experience as well. For example, when I attended the Los Angeles premiere of Elegies in 2004, the show was performed as the closing event for the Canon Theater. Demolished following the production, the Canon was one of the few remaining mid-sized theatres in its part of Los Angeles. While the audience knew the event was a goodbye to the theatre, this was also staged in the performance. The final chorus of “goodbyes” were sung as the back wall and stage door were revealed, emphasizing the soon-to-be emptiness of the space. In this moment, production choices expanded Elegies’ repertoire of grievable losses to include a cultural space, and to add the history of the Canon Theater to the histories memorialized onstage. Through performance, Elegies enacts a reparative history as it gently reminds audiences that there are also other narratives available for telling the (hi)story of 9/11, and that queer losses incurred that day must also be reckoned with. By placing that performance alongside a wide range of losses over the course of the musical, Finn also makes another important reparative move. By juxtaposing 9/11 with other losses, from the personally world-changing loss of his mother, to the more peripheral loss of an English teacher whose name we never know, to a community ritual decimated by AIDS, to other spaces or losses, like the Canon, perhaps yet to occur, Elegies queers our understanding of 9/11 as a unique event requiring particular reactions. Without minimizing the tragedy or the trauma, he encourages us to place it into a broader context: one grief among many, and one we might respond to in any number of ways. This approach, I think, resonates with Jill Dolan’s moving consideration of the role of empathy in performance and in performances’ response to tragedy. Calling for “the space of performance [to] be harnessed to imagine love instead of hatred,” she expresses profound hope that performance can “continue to grace our lives with meaning, generosity, understanding, and memory, however provisional and fleeting” even—or perhaps especially—in the face of a tragedy like 9/11.[45] Elegies’ reparative response to the events of 9/11 and to the project of public memorialization more broadly seems to me to do precisely this work, encouraging us to share in Finn’s love for these people, places, and things, and to make more complex, nuanced, and potentially hopeful sense of traumas and tragedies endured, and perhaps those still to come. Michelle Dvoskin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Western Kentucky University. She has been published in The Oxford Handbook of American Drama and The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, as well as Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture. Her current research interests focus on musical theatre as queer historical practice, as well as the queer feminist potential of the diva in musicals. [1] First performed on Sunday and Monday nights at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center (on the set of the production then taking place on the Newhouse stage), Elegies featured five performers: Christian Borle, Betty Buckley, Carolee Carmello, Keith Byron Kirk, and Michael Rupert. It was directed by Graciela Daniele. Performance descriptions are taken from my viewing of the archival recording of this production, housed at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Elegies: A Song Cycle. Dir. Graciela Daniele. Perf. Michael Rupert, Keith Byron Kirk, Carolee Carmello, Betty Buckley, and Christian Borle. (Lincoln Center Theater. Mitzi E. Newhouse, New York. Rec. 18 April 2003). Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York. NCOV 2724. [2] Falsettos is a compilation with revisions of Finn’s earlier off-Broadway trilogy of one-act musicals: In Trousers (1979), March of the Falsettos (1981), and Falsettoland (1990), with the bulk of the material coming from the latter two shows. [3] Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi. [4] I use the term public here not solely in the sense of a theatrical public, which Michael Warner describes as “a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space” that “has a sense of totality. . . . A performer on stage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is.” While a specific performance of Elegies certainly creates such a finite public, as a musical the show as a whole has a far broader reach, since people who may never see a live performance can obtain the original cast album. It can be taken up by anyone who, for any reason, finds themselves hailed to pick it up and listen to it, and there is no way to know the parameters of the public formed through it. For this reason, I consider Elegies as constituting what Warner describes as a textual public, one which is “in principle open ended” and that “exist[s] by virtue of [its] address.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 50, 155. [5] Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, introduction to 9/11 in American Culture, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2003), xvi. [6] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10. [7] Ibid., 17. [8] Ibid., 24-25. [9] Tavia Nyong’o, “Period Rush: Affective Transfers in Recent Queer Art and Performance,” Theatre History Studies 28 (2008): 45. [10] For more on the relationship between performance, history, and temporality, see Charlotte Canning, “Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography,” Theatre Survey 45, no. 2 (2004); and Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). [11] David Eng, “The Value of Silence,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 94. [12] See, for example, Ann Cvetkovitch, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 47; and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, Routledge, 2004), 159-161. [13] David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. [14] Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 33. See also D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). [15] William Finn, Selections from Elegies: A Song Cycle (n.p.: Alfred Publishing, 2006), 22-23. [16] Ibid., 59-60. [17] Reviewer Suzanne Bixby, writing about a Boston production, makes a similar argument, declaring that “‘Anytime (I Am There)’ says everything there is to say about how we stay connected to people who are gone from our lives - and how they stay connected to us.” Suzanne Bixby, “Rev. of Elegies: A Song Cycle, by William Finn. Speakeasy Stage Company, Boston Center for the Arts,” Talkin’ Broadway, 10 May 2007, http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/boston/boston78.html, (accessed 6 February 2015). [18] Finn qtd. in Richard Ouzounian, “Alive with the Sound of Music: Triple Tony Award Winning Composer Captivates in the Way He Sees Dead People,” The Toronto Star, 8 February 2007, http://www.thestar.com/article/178862, (accessed 6 February 2015). [19] Quotations from Elegies that aren’t available in the published vocal selections are my transcriptions from the cast album. William Finn, Elegies: A Song Cycle (New York: Varese Sarabonde, 2003), Original Cast Album. [20] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 37. [21] According to his 1995 New York Times obituary, Bolek Greczynski died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a type of cancer often found in AIDS patients. Although the word AIDS is never used in describing his death, AIDS has already been brought up in earlier songs and so is present in the audience’s mind. It seems likely that most audience members will read the lingering death of a gay man, who continually “grew thinner” as his illness progressed, as AIDS related. [22] Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 137. [23] Finn, Selections from Elegies, 20. [24] Ibid., 16-17. [25] I want to thank Ann Cvetkovich for reminding me of this fact. [26] Crimp, Melancholia, 196. [27] The title also echoes Alan Jackson’s country song written just after 9/11, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” The similarity in titles suggests a connection between the personal loss Finn is honoring and the more “public” events that he will attend to next. [28] Harry J. Elam, Jr., in “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001” Theatre Journal 54 no. 1 (2002): 102. [29] Ann Cvetkovich, “Trauma Ongoing,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 61. [30] Dori Laub, “September 11, 2001—an Event without a Voice,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 204. [31] Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7. [32] Irene Kacandes, “9/11/01 = 1/27/01: The Changed Posttraumatic Self,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 171. [33] Cvetkovich, An Archive, 18. [34] Finn, Selections from Elegies, 95. [35] Although this performance strategy—narrating a character’s action in the third person—resonates with Brechtian acting techniques, in the case of Carmello’s performance the distancing effect is twofold. The primary image for the audience is a character distanced from her life due to a traumatic event. The more typically Brechtian notion of distance between actor and character is also potentially present, but less focal. [36] Laub, for example, claims that “following the events of September 11, we witnessed an instantaneous sense of paralysis, a helpless confusion.” Laub, “September 11,” 205. [37] Judith Greenberg, “Wounded New York,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 25. [38] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 157. [39] Butler, Precarious, 35. [40]Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 156. [41] Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. [42] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 67. It is worth noting that the performer who becomes most associated with Finn in the present moment over the course of the show is Michael Rupert, who originated the lead role of “Marvin” in Finn’s Falsettos—a show which deals with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Rupert’s presence in this production capitalizes on this ghosting effect, as the echo of Marvin in his performance will, for many audience members, make the presence of AIDS even more obvious than it is textually. [43] Eng, “The Value of Silence,” 90. [44] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 152. [45] Jill Dolan, in “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy,” 106-07. "Just Saying Our Goodbyes: Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11" by Michelle Dvoskin ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 1 (Winter 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents: "Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom” by Jordan Schildcrout "Just Saying Our Goodbyes: Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11" by Michelle Dvoskin James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus" by Michael Y. Bennett “Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama" by Andrea Harris www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jose Fernandez 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.

Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF PRECARIOUS FORMS. PERFORMING UTOPIA IN THE NEOLIBERAL AMERICAS. Candice Amich. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 232. Discussions about our current society must wrestle with neoliberalism and its impacts: from the existence of billionaires to the defunding of public services, from deregulations of capital to restrictions for migrants, neoliberalism’s consequences are present everywhere and shape the economies of this century in the Americas. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas , by Candice Amich, makes an important contribution to multiple conversations and fields by centering utopic performance art, poetry, and installations from the Global South. In Precarious Forms , an accessible interdisciplinary book, Amich frames neoliberalism as the centering of entrepreneurial activities, which require free markets, free trade and strong property rights. To achieve this capitalist imperative, she critiques in her introduction that the state must not provide social services, assuming that human needs would be better fulfilled by private action. But Amich argues that what actually characterizes neoliberalism is the “accumulation by dispossession (…) without regard to social costs” (4). This dispossession of human needs prioritizes individualism over collectivity, sustained by a “perceptual regime that disciplines time and space” (4). To resist neoliberal regimes, she analyzes “corporeal and textual performances that not only despair for the world as it is, but also dream other visions of the world as it could be” (155). This book explores the utopic impulses of several artists that respond to and resist the action of neoliberalism, understanding the violence it inflicts across bodies and societies in the Americas and then imagining spaces outside or beyond that dispossession. The art pieces Amich discusses not only imagine different presents or futures but also aim to create and experience utopic possibilities in the here and now. They are united through the notion of the precarious , understood as “a response to neoliberalism’s flexible modes of accumulation, (…) neither certain nor secure in its attachment to form, privileging precarious life over capital.” (19) The book centers on the work of artists like Dionne Brand (Canada), Coco Fusco (Cuba-USA), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Ana Mendieta (Cuba), Cecilia Vicuña (Chile), and Raúl Zurita (Chile), each one the focus of a chapter in which Amich presents their oeuvre . The book’s emphasis on Chile and Cuba is intentional since both are key sites for the deployment of neoliberalism: the first because of the coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet and the development of a neoliberal constitution before the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA; and the second because of the conflicts with the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as its internal crisis. By choosing central zones of neoliberal impact, Amich effectively achieves a hemispheric scope, connecting processes across the Americas. Tracing transnational connections enables the book to understand contemporary processes, including those that cross borders and generate exchanges between different countries and locations. (It is impossible to analyze phenomena without following these relations.) Thus, Amich succeeds in presenting a complex and comprehensive portrait of neoliberal action and its violences, as well as vivid case studies of creative resistance and collective imagining of new worlds that endow human life with dignity. From the Washington Consensus to the dictatorship of Pinochet, from the maquiladoras (factories in México owned by foreign corporations) along the US-México border to the Cuban exile, Precarious Forms follows the consequences of neoliberal policy and how it impacts citizens across the continent. One strength of this volume is that Amich does not only document violence. Whereas many approaches to neoliberal action can disempower those affected by it, by presenting people only as victims, Amich centers strategies of effective resistance and worldmaking by Latin American and Latine artists. Fusing the methods of Performance Studies and Latin/e American Studies, the book’s six central chapters analyze poetry, video, performance, and installations. This wide range offers the reader a broad, multifaceted understanding of the utopic potential and action of art. While each chapter offers insightful readings of systemic and lived contexts. Amich proposes that creative interventions can reveal what is hidden: for instance, readers learn how Dolores from 10 to 22 by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez exposes the violence in the maquiladoras . Utopic performance, she demonstrates, can turn individuals into a temporary community of people, operating together against the individualism of the times, as Comunidad by Regina José Galindo epitomizes. Art can restitute, or perform restitution of, ties with the land of a displaced, exiled body, as the Esculturas Rupestres of Ana Mendieta proposes. Or it can offer a voice to the dead in the words of Raúl Zurita, moving across his poems published in the book INRI . Amich’s multidisciplinary focus—and the wide scope of each artwork she examines—finds connections in diverse experiences and pieces. As the book develops, we grasp how economic, political, and social processes cannot be thought of without tracing transnational connections. Likewise, the book explores how these artists’ and thinkers’ “precarious visions” act in constant conversation with each other. Through these strategies, Amich presents art as a vehicle for transformation. Precarious Forms provides a relevant contribution to the analysis of contemporary creators in Latin/e America. It offers solid and rigorous approaches to analyzing artists working in different media across the continent while tracing transnational connections among them. Its interdisciplinarity strongly contributes to several fields, including American Studies, Spanish, Literature, Gender Studies, and Performance Studies. Its significance is also derived from how it deals with urgent and contemporary public issues and economic violence. The book effectively questions practices that frame art and scholarship in very limited ways, instead of developing expansive categories and cross-sectional lenses. Conceptually, Amich links the precarity of lives with the precarity of artistic forms: fertilizing the soil for the emergence of art pieces and collective practices that create utopias in the middle of dark times. Rooted in a truly hemispheric analysis, Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas should be read closely and discussed across fields and art forms as we make sense of the times in which we are living. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References About The Authors SEBASTIÁN EDDOWES-VARGAS (he/they) is a Peruvian theater artist and scholar, author of "La Muerte Danza" (with Espalda de Bogo), "Nunca Estaremos en Broadway" (with Rodrigo Yllaric), "Fronteiras" (with Colectivo Âmbar) "Hasta Que Choque El Hueso" (with Mario Zanatta), "Debut" (with Caro Black Tam), "Una Historia de (Poli)Amor," "Can The Peruvian Speak?", among others. His academic and artistic work has been presented in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, UK and USA, receiving several awards. Currently, they are a DFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, with the dissertation "Post-National Dramaturgies of the Américas, or, The Nation Fails", and a Lecturer at Boston University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Anh Vo's work Weather in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with . 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

Watch next...II (Mali/Island) by Janne Gregor at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In the film project next...II (Mali/Iceland) two dance artists in the diaspora enter into a dialogue through performative video letters; Charmene Pang and Kettly Noël. Kettly Noël, a Haitian, has built one of the most important dance centers in West Africa for over 20 years in Bamako. Charmene Pang, born in Geneva and raised in her Hong Kong family, dances in Erna Ómarsdóttir's company in Reykjavík. For both of them, drastic changes in their lives are imminent, which they discuss artistically. Their stories are always closely related to the continent on which they currently live, its landscapes, soil, layers of earth and climatic conditions, which could hardly be more different: One country shrinking, the other expanding - Earth plates drifting apart and the desert displacing. Movement, change of place and isolation. What does this mean for them and their relationship to the ground on which they move? What for their work as artists? What does the soil reveal about the land and what does it say about its culture? And what structures do they offer to find each other in dance in a digital exchange across continents? The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents next...II (Mali/Island) At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Janne Gregor Dance, Documentary, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Island, Mali, Germany Language English, French, Bambara Running Time 50 minutes Year of Release 2022 In the film project next...II (Mali/Iceland) two dance artists in the diaspora enter into a dialogue through performative video letters; Charmene Pang and Kettly Noël. Kettly Noël, a Haitian, has built one of the most important dance centers in West Africa for over 20 years in Bamako. Charmene Pang, born in Geneva and raised in her Hong Kong family, dances in Erna Ómarsdóttir's company in Reykjavík. For both of them, drastic changes in their lives are imminent, which they discuss artistically. Their stories are always closely related to the continent on which they currently live, its landscapes, soil, layers of earth and climatic conditions, which could hardly be more different: One country shrinking, the other expanding - Earth plates drifting apart and the desert displacing. Movement, change of place and isolation. What does this mean for them and their relationship to the ground on which they move? What for their work as artists? What does the soil reveal about the land and what does it say about its culture? And what structures do they offer to find each other in dance in a digital exchange across continents? Credits Artistic Direction: Janne Gregor, Artist Bamako: Kettly Noël, Artist Iceland: Charmene Pang, Camera Bamako: Salimata Tapily, Camera Iceland: Omra Harding, Music: Moritz Thorbeckebased on the song „Vex“ by Sigrún including Ngomi tracks played by Yacouba Sissoko and voice tracks by Sigrún, Editor + Advice: Lutz Gregor, Production: Sina Kießling, Iceland location scout: Dísa Hulda Árnadóttir, Revision Subtitles: Anke Nehrig, Nora Amin Thanks to Thomas Schaupp, Arnbjörg María Danielsen, Nah Kamaké, Erna Ómarsdóttir, Oumou Diarra, Nassiga Coulibaly dit Coumba, Kolo Traoré dit Tènin, Mariam M. Traoré, Mariam K. Traoré, Fatoumata Traoré, Maminata Traoré, Yaya Traoré, Boubacar Gakou, Djelika dit Mama Traoré, Amberscript, Anti Logic Mastering. Research Phase 2021/ 22: Created in the context of GOETHE MORPH* ICELAND, with the support of the Goethe-Institut. Project Realisation 2022: Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK - STEPPING OUT, funded by the Minister of State for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance. About The Artist(s) Janne Gregor born in Berlin, is a choreographer, performer and was a team member of the steering group of the dance mediation centre Berlin. She studied physical theatre and completed her MA Choreography at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin – HZT in 2017. Her intergenerational and interdisciplinary works have been shown at various theatres since 2006: e.g. Nordic House Reykjavík/Iceland, Radialsystem, TD Berlin, Donko Seko Bamako/Mali, Houseclub des Hebbel am Ufer – HAU Berlin, LOFFT Leipzig, Junges Staatstheater Braunschweig…, Junges DT/Deutsches Theater, Schwankhalle Bremen, Fringe Festival/Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Orangerie Köln, Tanzfabrik, Tanzkomplizen, Theater o.N., Uferstudios Berlin. As a performer she has worked with, among others: Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Micha Purucker, Willi Dorner, Kiriakos Hadjiioannou, Michael Vogel (Familie Flöz), Theater Duisburg, Theater Strahl Berlin, Consol Theater Gelsenkirchen, Jule Gruner (Schauspiel Dortmund). Get in touch with the artist(s) mail@jannegregor.de and follow them on social media www.jannegregor.de Facebook: Janne Gregor Instagram: Janne Gregor 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.

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

Carol Westcamp Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Late Work of Sam Shepard Carol Westcamp By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. The Late Work of Sam Shepard, by Shannon Blake Skelton, brings necessary attention to the later phase of Sam Shepard’s works, including his short prose, plays, acting performances, and screenplays. Previously published scholarship has tended to focus on Shepard’s most prolific period, roughly categorized as 1965 to 1985, as well as his family plays, such as Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1980), and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Skelton argues that with Shepard’s 1988 directorial debut in Far North and 1991 play States of Shock, Shepard transitioned to a “Late Style” that mixed genres and “resisted the clichéd notions that an aged artist in their autumnal period will offer gentle reflection” (3, 5). In the introduction, Skelton maps out the main points of the project from Shepard’s personality to the gender dynamics of his works. Each chapter corresponds with each key point, creating a thematically organized structure to the book. The first chapter studies the Shepard persona. Since Shepard was an actor, a writer, and even a celebrity, his image circulated widely during the height of his fame in the 1980s. Skelton argues that during his Late Style, Shepard adopted a paternal character due to his acting roles as well as his “status as an elder statesman of American theatre” (72). This new persona began to emerge when he was cast as law professor Thomas Callahan in the movie The Pelican Brief (1993) and was solidified in his role as father and husband Patrick Singer in the movie Safe Passage (1994). These father figure roles continued in subsequent films: Allie’s father Frank Calhoun in The Notebook (2004) and the elder mentor Tom in Mud (2012). This Late Style identity showed an artist who may have passed beyond his most popular period but stayed active in a variety of art forms. Skelton writes, “From acting and directing to writing, Shepard has seemingly made peace with himself, his art, his legacy, and his persona” (72). In the next chapter, Skelton examines Shepard’s self-reflexive exploration of authenticity and the artist in American culture. Much of Shepard’s earlier work probed how artists struggle with authenticity, trying to remain true to the art or the artistic self while facing a world of capitalism, which tries to change art to make it more commercially popular. Some plays such as Cowboy Mouth (1964), Angel City (1976), and True West may have represented this struggle, but they did not offer resolutions. During his Late Style, Shepard positioned the artist as older and wiser. Using close reading, Skelton focuses on two specific works and two solutions. Howard in the film Don’t Come Knocking (2005) achieves authenticity by forming relationships with others. For Hobart in the play Kicking a Dead Horse (2007), authenticity is ultimately unobtainable in life, so he finds it by embracing death. Chapter three explores the relationship between memory and trauma as demonstrated in the plays Simpatico (1993), The Late Henry Moss (2000), and When the World Was Green (1996), the latter of which was co-written with Joseph Chaikin. As with many of his earlier works, Shepard never offered easy answers but revealed characters struggling to comprehend a “past that consistently informs the present” (13). For instance, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind address the personal dynamics of remembering and forgetting traumatic events in families’ pasts. But it was not until the Late Style works when Shepard revealed ways of “grappling with the past and its memories to transform the individual” (135). Sympatico demonstrates that one can achieve peace through confronting and then letting go of painful histories. Late Henry Moss and When the World Was Green show that one can reconcile with a past trauma by reenacting the event. Focusing on the two plays States of Shock (1991) and The God of Hell (2004), the fourth chapter addresses the politics of Shepard’s work during the Gulf War and the War on Terror. These two plays, unlike earlier ones, “unabashedly engage with political issues and offer commentary on broader concerns of the contemporary world” (137). Skelton argues that both plays show masculine, political conservatives attempting to change the minds of the other (potentially subversive) characters who question the supremacy of patriarchal narratives. Through these plays, Shepard suggests that “conservative ideology can be defeated through (1) direct action (States of Shock) (2) resistance by women (The God of Hell) and (3) the responsibility of one to be politically aware and engaged” (161). In the final chapters, Skelton analyzes how Shepard engages with the legacy of colonialism as well as gender dynamics. While the body of Shepard’s work has focused on the mystique of the American cowboy, his Late Style showcased the perspective of indigenous people, as in the plays Silent Tongue (1994) and Eyes for Consuela (1998). Shepard tried to move past romanticized notions of the Native American figure, showing instead more in-depth characters. Much of Shepard’s early work has been criticized for its lack of women and glorification of masculinity. However, during the Late Style, Shepard used the homosocial space in plays such as Ages of the Moon (2009) and Heartless (2012) to challenge patriarchal assumptions, tackle the collapse of masculine expectations, and address same-sex desire. Skelton’s book is an important contribution to the critical studies of Sam Shepard, offering discussion of Shepard’s major themes, stylistic changes, and late works. The book builds upon previous publications such as Stephen J. Bottoms’s The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (1998) and Matthew Roudané’s The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (2002). Roudané’s collection does offer two essays that address Shepard’s Late Style, but the essays do not provide the comprehensive insight of Skelton’s monograph. Skelton gives a personal touch to the striking impact that Shepard has had on American culture. Carol Westcamp University of Arkansas at Fort Smith The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Drew Barker Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Drew Barker By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF by Drew Barker The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Between this interview (edited for length and clarity from October 2022) and the publication of this issue, Gancher and Mezzocchi’s 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm won an OBIE Award. Since it was one of three productions to be given such an honor in the category of “Digital+Virtual+Hybrid Production,” all of which were reviewed over the last three seasons due to the pandemic, one wonders how such recognition will impact and inspire other digital+virtual+hybrid projects in the future. Regardless, it can certainly be argued that Gancher and Mezzocchi’s production (co-directed by Elizabeth Williamson) met the historical moment better than most digital theatre productions. The play satirically addresses the weaponization of misinformation via social media during a presidential election season that mirrored not only the prior presidential election season, but also the weaponization of misinformation in other parts of the world. Ultimately, using satire and a suite of digital technologies allowed the production to feel familiar and dangerous at the same time. If new times demand new forms, what will we miss if we hesitate to embrace the progress made in terms of theatrical creativity and audience engagement? We should remember what Barbara Fuchs declares: “At its most elaborate, digital theater does more than simulate the real: it complicates and remixes it, foregrounding the artifice and conventionality in how we think about production, performance, audiences, and theater itself.” [1] Playwright Sarah Gancher and multimedia creator Jared Mezzocchi collaborated on the critically-acclaimed, digital production of Russian Troll Farm in late 2020, and are now working on a new project -- even as other productions of Russian Troll Farm continue their success. In this interview by Performing Arts Librarian, Drew Barker, Gancher and Mezzocchi discuss how their creative process has evolved. BARKER: Your 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm was a benchmark for digital theatre during the pandemic. Now you’re both teaming up again, and the word “epic” has been tossed around. What can you tell us about this new project you’re working on? GANCHER: We are working on an epic about deep time that is set throughout all the different eras of history present in one Brooklyn bar -- Sunny's in Red Hook. It has been in continuous operation since 1890. And of course, there's a lot of history on that spot before that point, and there will be a lot of history on that spot after this time. We are asking the question: What would you learn if you were able to see all of the history in one spot superimposed on top of all the moments of history superimposed on top of each other? If you were able to hop back and forth between them, remix and match them? What would we find out about ourselves, and what will we find out about the patterns that we live? We're hoping that when superimposed that they all add up to make a giant question that none of them make individually. I think that it's going to be a massive participatory art project sort of made by the community, consisting of a film shoot at Sunny's with snippets of video that are like scenes or seamless moments from across all the different eras of Sunny's, and then after playing their part in that people can walk down the street to this big warehouse where there will be an installation showing everything that's being shot at Sunny's superimposed on top of each other and allowing people to hop back and forth between them and see the composite story as it begins to emerge. And there's bluegrass involved because of the famous bluegrass jam that happens at Sunny's. It will also have an on-line component. It's very cool, but it's currently hard to explain. MEZZOCCHI: I would add that it's a two-part process for an audience member to participate in the scene, and then go into an entirely different space, and see how that participation plays a role in a much wider, larger container of time and space. And now you're both the viewer of a kind of a gallery installation of live mixed video, while also seeing yourself reflected inside of it. And so, you're kind of unlocking the history of the place, but also you're participating in a new part of the history of the place. What does it mean when we are aware of our own immediate footprint in time? It's like a widening of the consciousness of the participant. And I think that's the big question for me -- what does that do to a person when they know that they're a part of the history of a place? GANCHER: It’ll be an experiment and obsession, and it's sort of in two senses: one where we'll literally have people playing music and jamming, and then also there's going to be a kind of like a visual jam session as people, essentially solo with images taking turns, matching the images to the music, finding and making meaning in the connection between these different moments. MEZZOCCHI: So, perhaps we can create a jam session, both audibly and visually. All of those things are for me, as a technologist, taking the discoveries of Russian Troll Farm which made that thing feel more full of breath in life. Because the editor was present, the editor was doing the thing live. Now in this residency [at Bethany Arts Center] working with Sarah, watching Sarah now take the reins, I don't think our collaboration would have led to this without Russian Troll Farm. I also don't think that my technological inventions would have brought me where I am today without Russian Troll Farm. GANCHER: I think that we both -- if I may speak for Jared and I certainly intend to -- we found Russian Troll Farm so thrilling because we were making up something that nobody had ever done before, and that we weren't sure whether or not it was going to work, or how it would work. And so we had to also invent a process, and we both got really into that. I mean, it's painstaking, it's slow. It's frustrating. But it's also so fun. And so cool, because you feel like you're making a new form. MEZZOCCHI: And I think that, I don't know, the older I'm getting, the more rare I'm realizing it is to find people that you can kind of run around in the dark with. And the pandemic felt like the darkest time. And I felt so fortunate with Sarah, with Elizabeth [Williamson], with that cast, that we all in the middle of a pandemic found each other and said, “Let's keep playing tag for a second” I wanted to hold onto that accidental joy that was found in the middle of horrific trauma, because that was a joy that I've never felt before, ever. BARKER: Sarah, you've written that as a playwright you're obsessed with questions of how history shapes us. How has the pandemic shaped your storytelling process? GANCHER: My main experience of the pandemic was as a parent trying to raise a five year old, who became a six year old, and then a seven year old, all while in a shoebox apartment. I went from being a full time playwright, writing a minimum of 40 hours a week to virtually having no writing time at all, and kind of going insane. It was a nightmare, watching all of the things that I had planned that I was so excited for all fall apart and crumble. But I do think those ashes have turned out to be very fertile for me, because there have been multiple things that I never would have done, never would have tried, had life continued on its original trajectory. Russian Troll Farm in particular created an appetite to try new things more. So, I just finished the first draft of lyrics for my first musical book, where I'm also writing the music. Considering this new project with Jared, which I'm so hyped on now, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to attempt it before. And I don't think that anybody would have thought about offering me that opportunity before Russian Troll Farm. If we’re considering the pandemic as a whole politically, the themes continued to resonate with Russian Troll Farm -- disinformation, mass delusion, echo chambers, mass hysteria, and the fact that our collective unconscious seems spiraling into a deep depression -- and I don't know, we should probably get on that. BARKER: Indeed. Things were different for you, Jared, but it was still an upheaval, right? MEZZOCCHI: Yeah, I feel like everything changed for me. I look back on the very beginning, when we did She Kills Monsters [at the University of Maryland in April 2020]. Because I decided to call the chair and say, “Don't cancel it, we have an opportunity to do research here.” And I made that call to her while I was in a panic down in Arkansas after a regional theatre production of Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime that I was directing had just shut down. It had been a moment of real, positive, directorial growth for me that was stripped away the day before tech. And so I look back on that and I don't know why I made that phone call. And I also don't know why that same day, I called my board at Andy’s Summer Playhouse and said, “Cancel the summer. Because if we cancel now, then we don't spend any more money preparing for a summer season that won’t happen, and therefore we have more money to deal with what this brings. And let's go weird.” I remember the thrill of being in a support system at UMD and at Andy's that allowed me to take a risk, because the safety net was more educational in both of those realms. And that put me in different shoes, so then I felt more courageous when walking into my freelance life and calling Sarah, which happened about two weeks later. And so, I think that being in two educational environments allowed me -- and I'm really saying this for the first time -- allowed me the courage and to say, “Fuck it. Like, it's research.” The flip to using the term “research” was a big thing for me, and that hasn't changed. And I think that getting the recognition, sharing the lessons learned, getting the positive press, and then making more connections made me realize the power of being an experimenter who could produce things, produce things quickly, and vocalize the flaws of each experiment. Suddenly the power of discovery was the thing, and I'm not ever going to forget that. BARKER: How do words and design influence you both now during your creative process in terms of dramaturgy? Is it like asking about the chicken and the egg? Or, how is the story influenced by the format? GANCHER: I think it's both chicken and egg. And nobody knows where either one came from. One of the nicest things that anybody's ever said to me in my life was when Jared said much of what he technologically invented for Russian Troll Farm only happened because of the demands of the script. A lot of people presumed that it was written for Zoom, but in fact it was barely adapted for that format. In my brain it had always been for the stage. Now in this latest residency, as we began to iterate, I start thinking about the story. What is the event? Sometimes I write “scratch drafts,” like sort of pre-writing, like scenes, but they don't even have character names yet, you know? I've never shown anybody in my life work that early, but I showed it to Jared. And then that sort of kickstarted him thinking from the container and also asking, “What is the event?” What will the tech for this need to look like? And, as we ping pong back and forth, we influence each other. MEZZOCCHI: I would add to that if you're coming from content, and I'm coming from form, we're both kind of saying, “Here's how I would take your offering and make it function inside of my brain,” and vice versa. If the text is the content constant, and the tech is the variable, here's how function can form and then flip it and say, if the tech is the constant, and the text is the variable, here's what happens there. Tech is a tool, and function is the space that we're kind of finger painting in. That to me feels pretty subversive to the industry standards. GANCHER: It's more related to the sort of experimental devising world that we actually both come from -- nobody knows that we're both musicians, and nobody knows that we both come from the world of devising and experimental stuff. It’s actually quite key to the way that we work together, and it reminds me of my favorite Suzan Lori Parks quote: “Form is content.” And I think that I'm trying to work with Jared not like a playwright traditionally works with the designer, but like the other half of my brain, or like I'm the other half of his brain. Also, his live video editing skills responded to hearing the rhythm in the words, which totally amplified the humor and timing in Russian Troll Farm in a unique way. BARKER: Jared, among many other things on Twitter you’ve talked about mediaturgy. Can you comment on how you position that in your current theatrical practice? MEZZOCCHI: That idea was actually based on a course I teach. It’s not about just telling stories on digital terms. We ask questions like: Why and how are we using technology to drive the story forward? What’s its point of view for the story? How is it used differently for each character? It’s not just spectacle. Mediaturgy informs choices which then contributes to the overall dramaturgy. Ideally, it allows for more collaboration, with the actors understanding a new language within a new process, too. Digital storytelling should be seen as a scene partner. GANCHER: I would add that mediaturgy makes you consider new questions as well. For example, how are you casting the audience? Are they spying on the characters? How does the story move in digital theatre? It’s a bit of a filmic question, too, of course. Does it move in jumps, does it move in fades? Does it root us down in one spot, or does it disorient us? But more importantly, does it live up to our vision? MEZZOCCHI: It was helpful that the world slammed to a halt, and we had to interrogate how we use and connect through technology. As a society, and as a theatre community, in order to get to the necessary technological solutions we must also address the problems of how we use technology. We’re continuing to learn how to use the tech as a tool, not have the technology use us. GANCHER: In this new process, the whole team is writing with you. As someone who teaches writing, I want to encourage that kind of collaboration even though it’s scary and difficult. We need to find the people who can make that work. www.sarahgancher.org www.jaredmezzocchi.com (Twitter: @jaredmezzocchi) Drew Barker is the Performing Arts Librarian at the University of Maryland at College Park. As a dramaturg he has worked at Triad Stage (NC), Round House Theatre (MD), Center Stage (MD), and Theatre J (DC). He was the curator for the exhibits The Art Craft of Puppetry (2022), Remembrance Resilience (2021) and The Triumph of Isabella: Exploring Performance Through Art (2018-19) at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. His research and creative projects include information design and literacy, the U.S. Civil War, and the working relationship between playwright Naomi Wallace and historian Marcus Rediker. [1] Barbara Fuchs, Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic. (London: Methuen Drama, 2022), 25. References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 1986, during my first year at Dartmouth College, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on Black Theatre with Professor Errol Hill (1921-2003).[1] More than thirty years later I still count myself lucky to have had my introduction to the history of Black Theatre under Errol's guidance. His rigorous scholarship and penetrating questions helped to set the standards for my own further explorations of Black Theatre History over the coming years, and I still remember our final chat many years later at a 2002 ASTR conference when he was asking me about the progress of my new book on slavery and US theatre. Errol would have been 100 years old this year. A century after his birth, he still stands as one of the giants in the field of Black Theatre scholarship. His landmark History of African American Theatre with Jim Hatch (1929-2020), his work as a playwright, his foundational study, Shakespeare in Sable, his pioneering book, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900, his many edited collections of plays by Black dramatists, as well as his monumental Theatre Collection, now housed at Dartmouth College—all of these contributions have shaped the development of the field in innumerable ways for thousands of scholars and students who never had the chance to meet him. For those who did have the chance to work with him, his mentorship proved equally invaluable—generous and exacting in equal measure. The award that bears his name with the American Society for Theatre Research has recognized more than thirty outstanding works in Black Theatre since its launch in 1997. (The list of those winners is included in the Book Review section of this issue and can also be found on the ASTR website at astr.org.) What I miss most—even thirty-five years after our first encounter in Hanover, NH—is the bellow of laughter that would erupt from this most dignified and handsome of men, transforming him into a joyous figure always ready to welcome new colleagues to the field. I spoke recently with his wife, Grace Hope Hill—his partner in his life, his research, his theatrical productions, and over many years of travel and adventure. I said how much I still missed his laugh. Grace exclaimed, “His laugh was so loud.” She also shared a story of Errol’s early days that links to so many of the themes shared in this issue about the need to support and document Black Theatre. In the 1950s, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica received a 300£ donation from a British bookstore owner (at Foyles Bookshop) and Errol, then serving as a “Drama Tutor” in the program, headed out into communities across Jamaica to develop new works by regional authors. As Grace recalls, “He helped with the writing, directing, and acting… We worked with very limited funds and did everything ourselves. Errol was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” That statement sums up Errol’s contribution to Black Theatre Studies so beautifully – for both those who knew him and those who never had the chance to meet him, “He was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” Help us celebrate Errol’s legacy in this issue dedicated to Black Theatre. Honor the innumerable artists and scholars who have created and documented the field of Black Theatre for more than two centuries of passionate work and those who are propelling it forward into the future. Ronald N. Sherr, "Errol G. Hill," oil on panel, Dartmouth College [1] For more on Errol’s extraordinary career, including his time with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Yale University, Dartmouth College, as a professional actor and playwright, and as an accomplished scholar, see the link to his papers now housed at Dartmouth College: https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/1185. by Heather S. Nathans Tufts University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nathalie Aghoro Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Nathalie Aghoro By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF by Nathalie Aghoro The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Musical variations, the pursuit of belonging, and a persistent specter: These constitutive elements of the three experimental plays by Quiara Alegría Hudes known as the Elliot Trilogy speak of tragedy. They are imbued with the trauma of war, nostalgia, and alienation—a theme that George Steiner identifies as crucial for the dramatic form in his article “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered.” For Steiner, “the necessary and sufficient premise, the axiomatic constant in tragedy is that of ontological homelessness . . . of alienation or ostracism from the safeguard of licensed being. There is no welcome to the self. This is what tragedy is about.”[1] Hudes’s central protagonist Elliot seeks to recover a sense of home in a society removed from the realities of war he experienced as a soldier in Iraq. Over the timespan covered by the three plays Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (2012), Water by the Spoonful (2012), and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2014), the playwright redefines tragedy when she sends her hero on a quest for redemption after a fatal error in judgment. But even when he seems on the cusp of overcoming it, the haunting echoes of his past as well as a family curse catch up with him and threaten to shatter his world. The tragic is at the center of the Elliot Trilogy’s plot, but formally the primary dramatic impulses are theatrical experimentation with form and the inclusion of musical variety as each play focuses either on the classical fugue, free jazz, or classical Puerto Rican music. The plays differ in their structural composition and their aesthetic concerns, an instance that reflects the formation process of the trilogy. In an interview with Anne García-Romero, Hudes explains that she “did not set out to write a trilogy, but a few years after . . . Elliot, . . . [she] felt there was still more story to tell, and more structural and stylistic experimentation . . . to do in regards to music and playwriting.”[2] The plays reflect this evolution of the creative process, since they work effectively as standalone productions as much as they present a conceptual and topical arc that unites them into a three-movement oeuvre. Both a composer and a playwright by training, Hudes combines her vocations in the 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by developing a musical structure for a theatrical staging that poetically reflects on loss and suffering. The second play, Water by the Spoonful, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 because of its “imaginative . . . search for meaning” that emerges from an experimentation with virtual, actual, and theatrical space and an exploration of family and community in the twenty-first century.[3] The tragic dimension in Water by the Spoonful is realized as there is no escape from past fatal mistakes—neither in real life nor online. While in the first two plays Elliot is haunted by the first person he killed as a soldier in Iraq and struggles with the untimely and avoidable death of his little sister as a child, The Happiest Song Plays Last marks a departure from tragedy that still retains the tragic, but merely as one among other more prominent themes. As Hudes explains in a video interview for the 2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Elliot is “poised to overcome” his past troubles in the last part of the trilogy and the play explores this orientation toward the future from a personal and social perspective.[4] This becomes particularly apparent in the renewed formal engagement with music as an auditory medium that, for Hudes, is capable of uniting people in celebration while simultaneously addressing grave social conditions with critical lyrics to promote political change.[5] Indeed, the drama does not lose the nostalgic undertones and dissonances established in the previous plays. However, a bittersweet hopefulness—uncommon for classical tragedy—takes over with the Puerto Rican troubadour tradition that Hudes introduces into performances of The Happiest Song Plays Last through the sound of the cuatro which is the national instrument of Puerto Rico. This article will explore how the Elliot Trilogy reconceptualizes traditional elements of tragedy—such as the psychological isolation of the tragic protagonist or the intersections between the worldly affairs and the realm of the dead—for twenty-first century concerns with formal experiments that link the classical genre to the contemporary stage. The Elliot Trilogy repositions the isolated, tragic subject in a network of human connections by highlighting the intersubjective threads that run into danger of being unacknowledged or hidden from view and by exposing the dynamics of alienation in the process. When the tragic intersects with theatrical experiment in the Elliot Trilogy, apparently incompatible spheres converge, harmonize, and sometimes clash, challenging what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” of “what is visible or not in a common space.”[6] This productive friction in Hudes’s plays turns the stage into a space for the negotiation of contemporary communal concerns and thus invites us to think about tragedy’s sociocultural significance today. Therefore, I will discuss how the dramatic usage of music echoes the characters’ alienation, how the supernatural and other virtual dimensions resonate with an actual world of suffering and fate, and how formal experimentation in the Elliot Trilogy exposes the hamartia of the characters and conveys their struggle to find a new sense of normalcy after their loss of innocence. Tragedy and the Staging of the Sensible Defining tragedy as the drama of alienation means to implicitly link its characters to the absolute absence of companionship. The tragic fate is cast as unique. It is the lonely path of a singular individual caught, according to Steiner, in “the logic of estrangement from life, of man’s ontological fall from grace.”[7] In this vein, a hero’s isolation is the minimum requirement for the unfolding of tragedy. In Aristotelian terms, the hero’s alienation resides in a fatal action, the hamartia, and as soon as it is performed “fallen man is made an unwelcome guest of life or, at best, a threatened stranger on this hostile or indifferent earth (Sophocles’ damning word, dwelt on by Heidegger, is apolis).”[8] The estrangement thus sets the acting subject apart. Even if it remains unsaid in Steiner’s definition of the term, tragedy therefore implies a world populated by human beings, a polis or a community that differs from and eventually interacts with the tragic hero. To conceive of the hero’s homelessness means to relate the uniqueness of tragic fate to discursive practices about citizenship, community, and belonging. To be alienated means that there are processes at play that shatter the hopes for meaningful, intersubjective interactions. Hence, the tragic hero stands in relation to a community (on stage as well as off stage during the performance in front of an audience) and from the dialectical engagement with these relations emerges the political potential of tragedy. Tragedy is a dramatic threshold that renders the blind spots of a community visible by negotiating social practices from the perspective of the tragic lone hero at its margins. If, as Rancière writes in The Politics of Aesthetics, “artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility,” the theatrical experimentation with tragedy’s tropes and characteristics engages simultaneously with the politics of alienation and belonging.[9] When Rancière writes about the politics of the arts, he locates the political in the everyday communal dynamics that influence human perception and in the different possibilities of participation that the division of labor, common space, and time entail. He argues that “the distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.”[10] Such a division has influence on what is palpable, whose voices and actions can be heard, who can be seen and recognized as a member of the community, and who is granted (political) agency. Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts.[11] In other words, the system of in/visibility that governs a community functions through delineations of inclusion and exclusion. Theater is particularly apt to make the distribution of common ground and difference palpable because the theatrical performance simultaneously represents and embodies fictional characters and events. The shared space with living bodies on stage allows the spectators to tap into the various registers of sensory perception available to them and to connect them to a communal experience. When Plato and Aristotle seek to deal with “the split reality of the theatre” by either ascribing to it the function of enacting or practicing the ideal form of community as Plato does or through catharsis representing the world with the purpose to purge the social body from unwanted emotions as in Aristotle’s view, they set the conditions for theater to serve contradictory political purposes.[12] In his discussion of these differing artistic regimes, Rancière observes that the tragic stage simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle . . . redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a monarchical paradigm.[13] This malleable political potential of the stage can be understood as the precondition both for the states of community that it makes palpable and for the subversions of the boundaries that the distribution of the sensible establishes. Hudes challenges the distribution of the sensible in national discourses of collective drama as well as in the private institution of the family through the lens of tragedy. In the Elliot Trilogy, the protagonist’s function as a soldier in wars fought overseas by the US emplaces his actions in a space and time that the civilian community that he rejoins after each tour does not share with him. As such, the very function that determines the protagonist as a national subject instead of a ruler—as someone who serves his country—irrevocably alienates him from the everyday lives of the society he lives in. Consequently, Hudes’s plays are a departure from the monarchical paradigm of the Aristotelian tragedy. They complicate the subject matter of the nation and the interpellation of the individual as national subject with the personal experience of alienation and the precarious state of belonging. Her reconceptualization of tragedy acknowledges the complexity of social and political dynamics in the twenty-first century that is exceedingly high because the global directly ties in with the local. Globalized interconnections expose that there are no simple truths and that the individual needs to navigate their actions as a human being, citizen, and inhabitant of the world simultaneously. Musical Echoes: Tragedy, Dissonance, and Alienation Music is the major acoustic experimental dimension that connects Hudes’s work to tragedy. In his early treatise The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche emphatically posits that music engenders tragedy in classical Greek drama. He writes “that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing else” and he thus elevates it to “the true primal drama.”[14] Consequently, he locates the chorus as the site were tragedy takes place while rejecting A. W. Schlegel’s understanding of the chorus as the “ideal spectator,” or as Nietzsche describes it, “the epitome and concentration of the mass of spectators.”[15] For Nietzsche, this idealized definition of the chorus does not take into account the diegetic function of the chorus: “the true spectator, whoever he might be, must always remain aware that he is watching a work of art and not an empirical reality, while the tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to grant the figures on the stage a physical existence.”[16] However, the chorus also does not merely react to the dramatic actions on stage,[17] but serves as a threshold between both “a living wall that tragedy pulls around itself to close itself off entirely from the world and maintain its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.”[18] Along these lines, the embodied music of the chorus connects the actuality of the performance with the fictional action. It is the invisible fabric that separates the tragic hero from the world and simultaneously has an effect on the audience because it translates her or his actions and, hence, promotes processes of understanding and making sense that allow the spectators to relate the drama on stage to their own lives. Poised at the interstices of human alienation and intersubjective connection, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue lends itself to entering into a dialogue with Nietzsche’s position on the classics from a contemporary perspective – thinking its musical and formal experimentation as the resonant location from which tragedy materializes. The structure of Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue mirrors the structure of the musical genre by the same name. It is divided into preludes and fugue scenes in which four characters take turns in speaking lyrical dialogue sentences. One voice sets the melody and the others join in to create the counterpoints and interweaving parts of the musical whole. The voices of Elliot, his father, adopted mother, and grandfather join forces to relate the experience of three generations of a Puerto Rican family as members of the US military. When the chorus introduces a scene with the grandfather as a soldier in 1950 Korea, they complement each other to provide a description of the fictional space that remains invisible due to the minimalistic stage design: GINNY: A tent. No windows, no door. Walls made of canvas. A floor made of dirt. The soil of Inchon, Korea is frozen. GRANDPOP: Sixteen cots they built by hand. Underwear, towels, unmade beds. Dirty photos. GINNY: That is, snapshots of moms and daughters and wives. . . . GRANDPOP: A boy enters.[19] Only when these last words are spoken, the enactment of the scene begins while the oratory mode continues with two more voices eventually joining in. Hence, the chorus of four voices initiates the action. Without them, the drama could not play out as it does. They introduce each of the three male family members and, together, they bring them to life with their speech. At the same time, their communal effort counterpoints the isolation experienced by the soldiers in the field and the silence regarding their war experiences that they keep to themselves when they come back home. The tragedy, one could argue, happens between these voices – in their musical entanglement as well as in the temporal asynchronicity that keeps them from coming together in perfect harmony. In one of the preludes, Elliot’s grandfather, who owns a flute on which he plays Bach for his comrades during the war, explains the tensions that govern the fugue: Of everything Bach wrote, it is the fugues. The fugue is like an argument. It starts in one voice. The voice is the melody, the single solitary melodic line. The statement. Another voice creeps up on the first one. Voice two responds to voice one. They tangle together. They argue, they become messy. They create dissonance. Two, three, four lines clashing. You think, Good god, they’ll never untie themselves. How did this mess get started in the first place? Major keys, minor keys, all at once on top of each other. (Leans in) It’s about untying the knot (35). The dissonance of the voices pitches the harmonic unity of a shared experience against the isolation of the individual in a situation where lives are lost and nobody wins. When Elliot is injured in Tikrit, the multiplicity of voices recounting the incident clashes with his isolated and solitary position: POP: Seventy-four barbs chew into his bone. GRANDPOP: It is not a sensation of rawness. GINNY: It is not excruciating pain. POP: It is a penetrating weakness. GRANDPOP: Energy pours out of his leg. GINNY: Like water from a garden hose. ELLIOT: Sarge! POP: The boy knows he is trapped (41). Throughout the trilogy, Elliot’s injured leg will serve as a reminder that he has left his physical—and also psychological—integrity behind in an event that cannot be genuinely shared with family or civil society. In the passage above, the fugue resonates with the distance and the sense of alienation that separates and simultaneously unites the four characters. Overall, the temporal layering of the respective wars in which the family members served emphasizes that the war experience remains invariably the same in the 1950s, 1960s, and in 2003. García-Romero argues that by “utilizing the fugue structure, Hudes sets up the expectation of a multi-vocal landscape which surrounds one main theme or idea” underlining “that the impact of the subject of military service is all pervasive and that regardless of generation or military conflict, the devastation of war is universal”.[20] In Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, the grandfather’s commentary that the fugue is all “about untying the knot” can also be considered as a self-reflexive commentary on the joint experimentation with musical and theatrical aesthetics. The tragic tone is supported by the minor key of the grandfather’s flute when he plays a Bach tune several times throughout the entire play: “Minor key, it’s melancholy,” says the grandfather when he assumes the function of the narrator for a moment (36). However, scenes serving as preludes fragment the fugue and thus disrupt the process of melancholic resolution, reflecting that all members of the family choir have their individual stories that they do not necessarily share. The sense of alienation that results from any war experience inhibits the potential for perfect harmony. Supernatural Frictions and Musical Improvisation In Water by the Spoonful, the potential for dissonance to resolve into harmony vanishes even further as tragedy takes over the everyday. Early in the play, Elliot’s cousin Yazmin, a music professor, introduces free jazz as the governing aesthetic principle: Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, 1964. Dissonance is still a gateway to resolution. . .. Diminished chords, tritones, still didn’t have the right to be their own independent thought. In 1965 something changed. The ugliness bore no promise of a happy ending. . . . Coltrane democratized the notes. He said, they’re all equal. Freedom. It was called Free Jazz but freedom is a hard thing to express musically without spinning into noise. This is from Ascension, 1965.[21] The play’s experimentation with jazz aesthetics echoes its concern with the impossibility of both personal and collective traumata to be reconciled into a single and simple narrative of good versus evil that promises but ultimately is incapable of providing solace. The repercussions of violence and death permeate all actual and virtual spaces that the characters inhabit and force them to navigate the complex and intricate affective networks caused by tragic flaws. Water by the Spoonful exposes the uncanny layers of human suffering by tying them to the sonification of noise and freedom in free jazz. The repercussions of Elliot’s past actions become a haunting personification that continues to exist in the now of the world on stage, a spectral tear in the split coexistence of Yazmin’s lecture hall and the sandwich shop Elliot works at after his return. The ghosts from his past are literally trapped in-between worlds and the musical tunes reconceptualize the tragic device of the specter as they render the complexity and democratic dissonance of trauma narratives audible. While Yazmin plays Coltrane for the audience, a ghost appears on stage. The man goes to Elliot and addresses him in Arabic, disrupting his everyday activities. The apparition takes on the form of a civilian Elliot killed during the war, and his appearance in the second part of the trilogy can be understood as an element of dramatic escalation or theatrical noise. In Rancière’s words, the specter and Elliot are interlinked through their respective “bodily positions and movements” that visualize “the parceling out of the visible and the invisible” on stage.[22] The collision of the supernatural with the actual world acts out the distribution of inclusion and exclusion in the communal perception. In the first play, Elliot merely has nightmares about him, but in Water by the Spoonful, the remnant echo from the war becomes an anthropomorphic, supernatural manifestation that only Elliot perceives and renders it difficult for him to perform his task. GHOST: Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? ELLIOT: That’s three teriyaki onion with chicken. First with hots and onions. Second with everything. Third with extra bacon. Two spicy Italian with American cheese on whole grain. One BMT on flatbread. Good so far? GHOST: Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? (18). Without looking the ghost in the eye, Elliot is perturbed when the specter appears but tries to remain professional as he continues his conversation with a customer while the ghost insists on asking Elliot the same question over and over again. It translates into a concern of legal status: “Can I please have my passport back?” (11). The passport—Elliot always carries it in his pocket—acquires a symbolic value on stage for the freedom that Elliot took from a man, i.e. the freedom to live, but also the freedom to pass borders, and, ultimately, to pass peacefully over the threshold to the afterlife. The clashing of languages and the asymmetrical communication situation with an inaudible third party on the phone emphasize their entanglement in the conflict between two nations that holds them captive. The discrepancy between the food order and the struggle for life and freedom could be read as an instance of dramatic irony that underlines the urgency which pervades the situation. In The Happiest Song Plays Last, we finally learn that the passport represents a constant reminder to Elliot’s hamartia or, in other words, the fatal misjudgment that he confesses when he acknowledges that he “knew he was a civilian” in front of his family: “At first I thought it was an AK in his hands. Split second before I shoot, I’m like, that’s a cricket bat. And then I pulled the trigger and took his face off. How am I supposed to tell anyone that?”[23] As long as the passport is not returned to its owner, the suffering continues for all parties involved. Since the passport cannot be returned despite the attempts Elliot makes to send it to the civilian’s family, the suffering continues indefinitely without any prospect of forgiveness or absolution. “Man makes ghost, man keeps ghost,” says one character near the end of The Happiest Song Plays Last (83) and in a pivotal moment when Elliot meets Ali, an ex-Iraqi Armed Forces soldier, the only possibility for resolution is that they can acknowledge each other: “No forgive. I cannot forgive. But you know real who I am. I know real who you are. Witness for each other” (36). The mutual recognition evoked in the scene rejects the possibility of a happy ending while still offering an avenue for reconciliation. It suggests that Elliot’s confession can be considered as the impetus for transforming the haunting memories of the past, the noise, into a jarring, yet encompassing narrative that consists of multiple, dissonant layers told collectively. As García-Romero observes, Hudes adopts the four principles of “cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation” [24] established by the teacher and playwright María Irene Fornés in her dramatic productions. The ghost highlights how closely connected these aspects are in Hudes’s work.[25] On the one hand, the specter is a manifestation of the multiple invisible convergences between hybrid cultural identities and the complex histories emerging from conflict that are potentially silenced. On the other hand, the specter itself is a theatrical experiment. The impossible presence of the dead materializes on stage as a reminder of the potential for fatal misjudgments that haunts every violent confrontation, thus opening up a space for the collective negotiation of the invisible repercussions of war and its silencing effects on the human subject such as trauma or death. Human Connections and Haunting Specters of Alienation Alienation thwarts the successful pursuit of belonging for the characters in the Elliot Trilogy. Any form of human connection that they establish is frail and precarious, but they persist in their search for an allegiance to family and community. In Water by the Spoonful, the additional staging of the virtual dimension of the internet as a potential space for human connections furthers the dominant theme of belonging. The chat room complements the other spatial layers of the lecture hall, the realm of the dead, and Elliot’s living environment. Staged at the same time, these spheres resonate with the formal commitment of Hudes to the delineated free jazz aesthetics since their simultaneity shows how Elliot and other characters seek to overcome their sense of isolation. All spaces are equal and prone to intersect at any time throughout the play. Thus, the theatrical stage is fraught with spatial overlaps and the various actions in different places and spheres often intersect in dissonance, threatening to “spin . . . into noise” (18). The experimental engagement with digital space or, more precisely, the virtual promise of second chances in life upheld by an online community takes center stage in Water by the Spoonful. Scenes in the experiential world alternate with staged conversations in an online chat room and a virtual self-help group hosted by Elliot’s birth mother, a recovered drug addict. Her motivation is only revealed when the separation of her online and offline identities collapses and the virtual clashes with the real world. This happens when Elliot walks in on her in a café where she is meeting an online community member who needs advice. ELLIOT: I looked at that chat room once. The woman I saw there? She’s literally not the same person I know. (To John) Did she tell you how she became such a saint? JOHN: We all have skeletons. ELLIOT: Yeah well she’s an archeological dig. Did she tell you about her daughter? (51). During this encounter, two conceptions of community meet: the online communities that emerged in the digital age and the traditional institution of family that Christopher Perricone considers as a classical tragic theme: “It is essential to Aristotle’s idea of tragedy . . . that it be a family affair.”[26] Perricone argues that the principle of cooperation and support in the family is routinely violated in Greek drama. He writes: “In tragic families, mothers . . . kill their children. Fathers . . . kill their children. Sons routinely kill their fathers. Brothers and sisters . . . kill each other . . . . Tragedy, insofar as it is implicitly a family affair, should not happen. Family members should cooperate.”[27] In Water by the Spoonful, Elliot’s mother did not offer support because she left her small children to their own devices when they fell sick with the stomach flu, an error in judgement that ends in the death of Elliot’s younger sister. Instead of following the doctor’s orders to “give . . . [the] kids a spoonful of water every five minutes,” she leaves them alone to take drugs (52). Neglecting the easiest task leads to tragedy, as Elliot points out: “But you couldn’t stick to something simple like that. You couldn’t sit still like that. You had to have your thing. That’s where I stop remembering” (52). During the confrontation in the café, the mother’s attempt to reinvent herself online fails. In the end, both mother and son are trapped in a cycle of suffering and trauma caused by their respective share in another person’s loss of life. The hamartia becomes a flaw that is passed on from one generation to another. For Perricone, “the ultimate cause of tragedy—is that tragedy hits a Darwinian ‘nerve.’ That ‘nerve’ is the power of the family and the place of the family in the human condition . . . . Think of tragedy as the Darwinian cautionary tale, par excellence.”[28] Along these lines, Water by the Spoonful taps into the classic material of Greek tragedy and reconfigures it for contemporary purposes. In The Happiest Song Plays Last, tragedy becomes a universal matter for several families because of Elliot’s involvement in the war and his hamartia. “Our son is marked. He is going to inherit this,” says Elliot’s pregnant girlfriend Shar, when she learns about the killing of Taarek Taleb (84). The mark of tragedy that she fears her child will inherit echoes the devastation of the remaining family in Iraq. According to a letter that Elliot shares with her, the son who witnesses the violent death of his father does not talk anymore. In the letter, Ali, whom he asked to find the man’s family and to give them the passport that has been in his possession over the years, describes the wife’s account of the situation: “American soldier shoots him in face. He is pretending surprise. American soldier spits on body, she says. American soldier takes wallet and runs away” (83). The roles of father and husband in her account personalize the previously unnamed Iraqi civilian and turn the haunting ghost into a fully fleshed out human being. At the same time, the main protagonist, Elliot, becomes an anonymous American soldier whose actions in this role expose the demise of human ethics in times of war. “I can’t get rid of this,” Elliot says, referring to both the passport and the act itself, after reading the letter (84). The hamartia cannot be redeemed and the resulting human connection between the families is irrevocably marked by tragedy. Conclusion: Tragic Resonances in Contemporary Drama The reconceptualization of tragedy lies at the heart of Hudes’s dramatic conception of an experimental exploration of the sensible. The Elliot Trilogy serves as a resounding echo chamber between classical drama and a reconfiguration that recognizes the contemporary specificities of the human condition in the twenty-first century. The multiplication and overlap of voices, spaces, and their conjunction with supernatural or spiritual forces invoke haunting echoes that resonate back and forth from one play to another, between each character and the stories they share with their family, and between classical tragic material and contemporary theater. As Robert Andreach concludes in his book Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theater: “If Aristotelian form is dead, a new order of forms can restore the genre to life.”[29] In the Elliot Trilogy, the echoes of a tragic past reverberate in the present and spheres that seem incompatible at first sight reveal their permeability and expose the frailty of the human existence. Overall, Hudes’s playwriting is proof for the ongoing relevance of the tragic in the twenty-first century and for the genre’s extensive capacity to change. Nathalie Aghoro is Assistant Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. She earned her doctorate with a PhD thesis on conceptions of voice and sound in contemporary American novels by Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jennifer Egan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. She is the co-editor of the JCDE special issue on Theatre and Mobility (with Kerstin Schmidt) and her publications include essays on postmodern novels, contemporary literature, and Afrofuturism in music. [1] George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (2004): 2–3. [2] Anne García-Romero, The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 161. [3] Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Outstanding Broadway Dramas and Comedies: Pulitzer Prize Winning Theater Productions (Zürich: LIT, 2013), 194. [4] Oregon Shakespeare Festival, “Playwright Notes: Leaving a Legacy,” 7:25, posted on 27 October 2014, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YphF3Qe6M54. [5] Ibid . [6] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2011), 12–13. [7] Steiner, “‘Tragedy’: Reconsidered,” 4. [8] Ibid. , 2–3. In this sense, apolis characterizes the hero as a subject devoid of a place in the world. [9] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. [10] Ibid., 12. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid., 14. [13] Ibid., 17–18. [14] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 36. (emphasis original) [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid., 37. [17] Paul Raimond Daniels, Nietzsche and “The Birth of Tragedy” (London: Routledge, 2013), 76. [18] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 37. [19] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 12. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [20] García-Romero, “Fugue, Hip Hop and Soap Opera: Transcultural Connections and Theatrical Experimentation in Twenty-First Century US Latina Playwriting,” Latin American Theatre Review 43, no. 1 (2009): 88. [21] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 18. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [22] Rancière, The Birth of Tragedy, 19. [23] Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Happiest Song Plays Last (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 85. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [24] García-Romero, The Fornes Frame, 6. [26] Christopher Perricone, “Tragedy: A Lesson in Survival,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 1 (2010): 76. [27] Ibid. , 81. [28] Ibid. , 82. [29] Robert J Andreach, Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham: University Press of America, 2014), 174. "Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy" by Nathalie Aghoro ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre" by Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler "Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003)" by Konstantinos Blatanis "Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy" by Nathalie Aghoro "'Take Caroline Away': Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change" by Joanna Mansbridge "The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America" by Julia Rössler "Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a ‘Lesbian Suicide Musical’" by Maureen McDonnell www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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Kelly I. Aliano Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano By Published on December 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF QUEERING DRAG: REDEFINING THE DISCOURSE OF GENDER BENDING. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. The cultural visibility and prevalence of drag performance has changed dramatically in the fifteen years since the premiere of the television program RuPaul’s Drag Race. Indeed, drag is more commonly presented in the popular culture sphere, as well as more commonly targeted by conservative attacks, than perhaps ever before. Because of this increased cultural significance, there is a renewed need to consider drag from a scholarly perspective. Meredith Heller’s Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending takes up this challenge, offering insight into “the scope of drag practice” (xi) and providing new strategies for discussing drag. Heller’s work is a useful resource for furthering the work of critically engaging drag as a performative and artistic medium that is distinctly queer. Heller reinforces the notion of queer as “not align[ing] with hegemonic structures and expectations” (6), so it can remain a valuable and expansive theoretical framework for discussing performance. Heller’s discussion here pushes beyond other definitions of drag, such as Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood’s in The Drag Queen Anthology , that situate it merely as a performance that one undertakes to convince spectators that they are an individual of the opposing gender. Instead, Heller asks us to conceptualize drag as a discursive practice that includes those witnessing the practice as well as those performing it. Heller’s analysis offers us a new framework for thinking about drag by highlighting the limitations of current language to discuss the practice to use it to consider a more expansive range of performance modes while providing “new definitional guidelines for naming an act as gender-bending” (6). This new perspective centers what a body communicates as opposed to presumptions about said body itself. Queering Drag considers drag as being “what performers do rather than who they are” (17-18). Heller admirably contends with the extensive literature on drag, such as the work of J. Halberstam, Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, and Esther Newton. She then offers a meaningful critique of how language has heretofore been used to discuss the practice without merely dismissing some of the field’s key voices. The lens Heller provides allows for a more comprehensive array of performances to be claimed as queer. However, there is a possibility that such a widely encompassing perspective will undercut the legacy of specifically queer-identified performance modes. Heller intentionally chose examples that have “been linguistically coded or archived as done by women or as a women’s practice” (11) because of the ways in which this might challenge the previously established dominant narrative of drag. To implement this new theorizing of drag, Heller considers “four types of US-based gender-bending”: “male impersonation, sexless mythical characters, queer butchness, and contemporary drag kinging” (33). The examples take us through popular entertainment of the nineteenth century to El Teatro Campesino to the Jewel Box Revue to a variety of community spaces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries incorporating drag king performance. The examples, taken together, offer an interesting discussion of drag that puts women performers–broadly defined–at the center of that practice. The strict framework for performance examples here also offers an opportunity for future scholarship to consider how Heller’s framework might apply to other forms of performance claimed or defined as drag. The studies within individual chapters historicize their subjects well. Chapter 2, which explores performers in vaudeville and variety shows, considers the impact of drag king acts explicitly done for financial gain, for example, as opposed to those covered in the subsequent chapters that were more concerned with “identity politics, civil rights, or community affiliation” (72). It provides meaningful insight into the lived experiences of these figures alongside their popularity on stage. In the next chapter, on El Teatro Campesino, Heller considers the women members of the company and the ways in which their choice to perform in gender-bending projects allowed them to find “empowerment… without wholly acquiescing to unwanted sexual and gender positions” (78). This analysis centers on so-called “sexless” roles, which were by their very nature separate from the gendered identities of the performers. The discussion considers the racialized experience of gender for these performers, a concept expanded in the next chapter on Black queer performers, particularly those active in the Jewel Box Revue. Heller sees the “butch” presentation of these women as being in direct defiance of cisgender norms and “a public signifier of… queer sexual desire” (116). Chapter 5 builds on this discussion, centering smaller-scale presentations of drag king performance, with an emphasis on defining the practice as “fundamentally marked by performers’ intents to express identity queerness or highlight oppressive identity norms” (164). This is a useful framework for considering how to apply Heller’s theories beyond the examples she includes in this volume: we must center the performer’s goal with the performance, not the nature of what we perceive as being performed. Each chapter, on its own, offers a worthwhile and well-analyzed case study, although the book would benefit from a stronger thread connecting the disparate examples across the chapters. Still, Queering Drag offers diverse examples of gender-bending performance and provides a valuable framework for analyzing other examples of drag performance. In highlighting the book’s potential limitations in her conclusion, Heller wisely notes “that it is the very quality of being undefined, unnamed, and unintelligible that makes queer performance queer” (194). Nonetheless, Queering Drag provides a useful theoretical framework and compelling examples from over a century and is thus a valuable entry into the discussion of queer performance. It brings concepts from gender and sexuality theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault into conversation with the rich history of theorizations of drag performance. Then it updates those concepts for our contemporary moment. Heller’s scholarship allows us to contend with the complexities of gender-bent performance by dialoguing about gender in ways that successfully challenge discourses of binary oppositions and instead embrace “the many ways people do gender” (199). This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References About The Authors KELLY I. ALIANO is the author of Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History (McFarland, 2019); The Performance of Video Games (McFarland, 2022); and Immersive Storytelling and Spectatorship in Theatre, Museums, and Video Games (Routledge, 2025). She teaches in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College and is the Manager of Education Special Projects at The New York Historical. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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