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Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future By Published on April 18, 2021 Download Article as PDF Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. James Shapiro is a prolific Shakespeare scholar and award-winning author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare 1606 (2015), A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (2006) and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare (2010), among other groundbreaking works. In this latest book, hailed by the New York Times as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2020,” Shapiro turns the tables on Shakespeare theatre history analysis. Rather than asking how America plays into the history of Shakespeare, he’s asking how Shakespeare plays into the history of America. Indeed, Shapiro identifies the reception of Shakespeare and the performance of his works as a vital vein running through controversial moments in American history. The titles of each chapter specify an exact year and topic that consumed that era, presented chronologically, including: “1833: Miscegenation;” “1845: Manifest Destiny;” “1849 Class Warfare;” “1916: Immigration;” “1948: Marriage;” “1998: Adultery and Same-Sex Love;” and, lastly, “2017: Left/Right.” This volume is accessible to theatre practitioners and historians alike, without requiring prior knowledge of either discipline to enjoy and engage with the crucial analysis woven throughout. Expertly-written, Shapiro’s lens feels at the same time historic and timely—as he uses the past to examine the path we took to our present. Several chapters focus on one major instance of Shakespearean performance in a pivotal time in America, before zooming out to provide context leading up to the focal event. In Chapter 3, “1849: Class Warfare,” Shapiro uses the Astor Place Riots and William Macready’s performance of Macbeth that night, for instance, to show Shakespeare at the center of an explosion of American nationalism, a topic also featured throughout newspaper headlines in 2020, the year of publication. This emblematic chapter opens the evening of the Astor Place Riots, placing the reader in the middle of the action; then Shapiro takes a step back to analyze the ways that everyone there— performers, audience, and mob—arrived at that volatile clash between the working-class, the elites, and the government. This chapter highlights the rivalry between American actor Edwin Forrest and British actor William Macready, a rivalry that culminated in the disaster at the Astor Place Opera House and which exposed growing divisions along class and cultural lines. Shapiro takes a different view than other historians, such as Nigel Cliff, arguing that the riots were not the result of Americans rejecting theatre or Shakespeare more broadly, but rather “an intense desire by the middle and lower classes to continue sharing that space, and to oppose, violently if necessary, efforts to exclude them from it” (78). Shapiro beautifully paints a picture of an America struggling through movements grown beyond the control of their leadership, as whole cultural groups experienced exclusion from common spaces and marked divides grew between socio-economic classes. By this chapter’s conclusion, readers can’t help but see unspoken parallels to currents today. Perhaps the book’s greatest wake-up call for American readers comes here, when Shapiro writes, “The Opera House may be long gone, but the divisions remain” (80). Other chapters showcase a perspective on American history that textbooks overlook, revealed by significant encounters with Shakespeare. In Chapter 1, “1833: Miscegenation,” Shapiro looks into the deep-seated racism of former President John Quincy Adams, who on the surface fought for abolition, but whose readings of Shakespeare revealed his anti-blackness when he said, “My objections to the character of Desdemona arise… from what she herself does. She absconds from her father’s house, in the dead of night, to marry a blackamoor” (8). Throughout the chapter, Shapiro presents the two sides of Adams: one in public pre-Civil War leadership positions, arguing for abolition against John C. Calhoun, and the other in his private life, where he is quoted by his mother, Abigail, and famed Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble, to show disgust for the intermarrying of races, using Othello as a whetstone for his rage. Of Adams, Shapiro writes, “His tentative steps towards becoming an abolitionist seem to have required a counterweight, and he found it in his repudiation of amalgamation. Shakespeare gave him much to work with. By directing his hostility at Desdemona rather than Othello, he was able to sidestep criticizing black men” (20). Shapiro’s analysis underscores that Shakespeare during the abolitionist movement was a scapegoat and incitement for many, most notably a President. The last two chapters catapult the reader into present day, a transition that should feel jarring, as there is a 50-year gap from the previous chapter’s case study. Ironically, the historical jump feels all too natural, as the subject matter of previous chapters has felt so modern. In the final chapter, “2017: Left/Right,” Shapiro expertly ties together all his carefully-chosen examples from earlier chapters, highlighting his premise that in order to critically examine the present, you must first dissect the past. This chapter analyzes the hotly debated production of Julius Caesar, featuring Caesar dressed to vaguely mimic Donald Trump, produced by the Public Theater in 2017. Shapiro synopsizes the controversy surrounding the highly publicized production, consistently reminding the reader that Shakespeare and the Public Theater’s production itself were never the problem, nor its artistic value, but rather the cultural divisions exposed by conversations surrounding the production. Shapiro’s groundwork in prior chapters deftly paves the way for this contemporary case study—culminating in the confusion that the production did not result in ideological arguments, but rather partisan anger concerning optics and perceived personal attacks. Shakespeare in a Divided America ends with this chapter, highlighting America’s evolving cultural schisms through Shakespeare. There’s no epilogue, only Shapiro’s brief Bibliographical Essay, in which he describes his sources and recommends further reading. His spare one-paragraph denouement eloquently meditates on what’s to come, as polarization heightens: “The future of Shakespeare in America, like the future of the nation itself, would appear secure… Yet his future also seems as precarious as it has ever been in this nation’s history” (220). The reader is left here, encouraged to make the same connections Shapiro has given the tools to use Shakespeare as a litmus test for American divisions, using moments of unrest in our past to analyze our present and fathom our future. Kaitlin Nabors University of Colorado, Boulder 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.

S T A R R BUSBY presents Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I S T A R R BUSBY 6-8 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby RSVP Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering is an experience in support of community building and collective liberation that explores the question 'How can we center connection and care in a rapidly changing world?’ A Communal Offering, Part I will take place in Elebash Recital Hall Lobby, where visitors will each individually be invited to experience a private sound meditation. Visitors are welcome to arrive at Elebash Lobby at any time from 6-8 pm. Please also join us for Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II on Saturday, October 19, 5-5:50 pm in the Segal Theater. Working Up A Surrender: Collective Healing Experiments was first produced at JACK with the support of a NYSCA Grant LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). S T A R R busby (they/she/he/we - all pronouns said with respect) is a Black experimental artist who sings, acts, composes, educates, and is committed to the liberation of all people. A recent recipient of a NYSCA grant, S T A R R leads a music project under their name which will release a debut project in 2024 - Working Up A Surrender . She is also the lead singer of dance&b band People's Champs (www.peopleschampsnyc.com ) which released their latest project, Show Up, in the Fall of 2023. S T A R R has also supported and collaborated with artists such as The Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, Son Lux, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, Alice Smith, and Quelle Chris. Selected credits: If You Unfolded Us (Sable Elyse Smith, MoMA); Rest Within the Wake (James Allister Sprang, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Featured Soloist); (pray) (Ars Nova and National Black Theatre, A Singer, Composer, and Music Director)*Lucille Lortel Award Winner; The Beautiful Lady (La Mama, Boris); On Sugarland (NYTW, co-composer); Octet (Signature Theatre, Paula) *Drama Desk Award Winner; Mikrokosmos, Sterischer Herbst (Graz), Nottingham Contemporary; The Girl with the Incredible Feeling , Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi. All music available via Bandcamp and all streaming services. Love, gratitude and ashé to my blessed honorable ancestors, especially MME. linktr.ee/S_T_A_R_R Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Andrea Harris Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Andrea Harris By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF When the frontier melodrama, The Scouts of the Prairie, And, Red Deviltry As It Is!, opened in Chicago in December 1872, it marked the beginning of a performance genre that would have significant impact on the American national imagination. Written by Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), the dime novel author who christened William F. Cody “Buffalo Bill,” The Scouts of the Prairie was the first stage play to star the famous frontiersman as himself, playing out the “real” drama of his Western adventures for spectators. Scouts launched a fourteen-year theatrical tradition that evolved into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the extremely successful performance spectacle that played across the US and in Europe for three decades. Scholars have long credited Cody’s Wild West as “the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier,” the thesis that the road to modernity was necessarily fraught with violent conflicts between “civilized” and “savage” peoples.[1] Appearing alongside Cody in the frontier play were Buntline himself, the scout John “Texas Jack” Omohundro, and, as the American Indian princess Dove Eye and Cody’s love interest, the Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi. The lion’s share of the existing scholarship on Cody’s performance focuses on his better-known large outdoor spectacles, sidelining the theatrical combinations that started his thespian career. More recent studies are expanding our knowledge of Cody’s stage plays, but even here, no one has questioned the incongruous casting of the famous Italian ballerina as an American Indian woman in the production that launched the western celebrity’s stage career, The Scouts of the Prairie.[2] Most authors mention that the cast of Scouts included a well-known Italian dancer, but stop short of asking what kind of dance she did in the play, why dance might have been included, or what meanings it might have expressed. But by casting such a neutral lens on the dancing Dove Eye, scholars have failed to understand dance itself as a meaningful text in the play. As I will show, Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie—not only the fact that she danced, but how, set in context with nineteenth-century discourses on ballet, the female ballet dancer, and the city—produces a more complex reading of Morlacchi’s character and the frontier melodrama. Born in Milan in 1836, Morlacchi was six years old when she entered the famed La Scala ballet academy, then the world’s leader in classical dance under the leadership of Carlo Blasis. With her impeccable training, Morlacchi worked with some of the most reputable choreographers in Europe, and was soon invited to join the ballet company at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. She was engaged by artist-manager Don Juan de Pol to come to the US to appear in the 1867 The Devil’s Auction, one of the elaborate ballet-spectacles that became immensely popular after the success of The Black Crook in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Morlacchi worked as both a dancer and choreographer on the ballet-spectacle stage, until she left that genre to pursue her own choreographic career. Making its home in Boston, the Morlacchi Ballet traveled the country from 1868-1872, performing a mixed repertory drawn from European Romantic and post-Romantic ballets and American spectaculars and melodramas. Critics saw in Morlacchi’s dancing the essence of European culture transported to American stages. “She has sparked an excitement among the most cultivated of our citizens and everyone wants to see her perform,”[3] asserted the New York Evening Transcript, and Boston papers concurred, “Many of the refined and cultivated people . . . whose knowledge of art has been perfected by European experiences have been the first in America to detect the genius of this danseuse.”[4] How interesting, then, to find Morlacchi, the embodiment of European classicism, the exemplar of cultured taste, appearing alongside the rugged western scouts, bringing European academic dance onto Buffalo Bill’s (otherwise) “wild” frontier stage. It is not clear how Morlacchi found her way into the western melodrama. Her company was performing at Nixon’s Opera House in Chicago in late 1872, when Buntline finally convinced Cody and Omohundro to meet him in that city for their theatrical debut. Morlacchi was a sought-after performer by theatre managers, and was known as a talented dramatic mime. Perhaps previous roles she had created for herself, including a mute Native American woman in The Wept of Wish-ton-wish, made her seem an especially attractive choice for the Dove Eye role. Perhaps it was Morlacchi’s manager, Major John M. Burke, who met Cody a year later through the dancer and became the highly influential publicity manager who crafted much of the legendary imagery of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, who pointed her towards Buntline’s cast. At any rate, at the end of her company’s season in Chicago in late 1872, Morlacchi was engaged to join the cast of The Scouts of the Prairie as Dove Eye, the Indian maiden.[5] Though no script survives, scholars have been able to rebuild much of the plot of Scouts through program scene synopses and newspaper reviews.[6] As the play opened, trapper Cale Durg (played by Buntline) entered the camp he shared with his ward, the “lovely white girl” Hazel Eye.[7] Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack (both played by themselves) stormed in “with a fiendish yell”[8] and a tale of their last hunt. Dove Eye ran into the scouts’ camp to warn them of her tribesmen’s plans to attack them, led by Wolf Slayer. Yelling war whoops, the four exited, intent on revenge. In the next scene, Hazel Eye was captured by Wolf Slayer and his Indians, recruited by the renegade Mormon Ben, who desired her for his fiftieth wife. Durg tried to save her, but he was outnumbered, and he and Hazel Eye were tied to the stake to be burned. The Indians danced and sang a “Death Dance” around Durg, while he, unperturbed, taunted his captors. Dove Eye “dance[d] in [and] sever[ed] the bonds of Hazel Eye;” together they freed Durg, and fought the Indians.[9] Bill and Jack came to the rescue, vowing “Death to the Redskins,” and Act I concluded with a massive slaughter of Indians, leading the New York Times reviewer to comment that “the unmitigated bloodshed that ends every act and almost every scene of this unique composition were so satisfactory to the public, that the management might be forgiven for hereafter assuming that the key to success must lie in the exhibition of cataracts of gore.”[10] In Act II, Bill declared his love for Dove Eye, and, in turn, Jack his for Hazel Eye. Their bliss was short-lived, however, as both women were again abducted by the Indians, and Durg again captured. Once again tied up (to a tree this time), Durg took the opportunity to deliver a temperance lecture, one of actor/playwright Buntline’s long-time causes. Durg was shot and killed by Wolf Slayer. As Act III opened, Bill and Jack swore vengeance for their slain friend, and Dove Eye and Hazel Eye expressed their loyalty to one another. The Indians gathered for a “Scalp Dance,” as a struggle between Wolf Slayer and Big Eagle, Dove Eye’s father, ended in the stabbing of the latter. When Dove Eye found her father’s body, she prayed to Manitou, the Indian god of revenge—perhaps another opportunity for a dance—then she and Hazel Eye returned to the camp for a final battle.[11] The renegades started a fire and a ferocious war ensued as the scouts and women “triumph[ed] over their enemies, with a train on the Pacific Railroad and a burning prairie in the background.”[12] In the play’s final tableau, the two couples embraced, the lights fading on the triumph of romance framed by the inevitable progression of America’s western frontier. In the very few studies that give her more than a passing mention, Dove Eye is interpreted as “the ubiquitous friendly native maiden,” or the “noble savage” in contrast to the “utter savage” of the warlike Indians around her.[13] Her character is viewed as a Pocahontas figure, giving up her people and culture for the love of the white man, Cody. A common trope on the nineteenth-century stage, the Pocahontas character served as the “most well known and irresistible symbol” of the absorption of American Indians into white culture and the expropriation of their own culture.[14] That absorption was accomplished through the lens of gender and sexuality; as Mary Dearborn notes, “it is precisely because Pocahontas is expected to embody both aspects of the image [the noble Princess and the randy Squaw] that hers is so convenient, compelling, and ultimately intolerable a legend. . . . Her story functions as a compelling locus for American feeling toward . . . miscegenation, or sexual relations between white men and ethnic women.”[15] As Buffalo Bill’s love interest, Dove Eye’s Indian Princess role fulfilled many of these elements in Scouts: the contrast of royal heritage and sexual availability; the assimilation of the forgiving, supportive Indian woman; and proof of the supremacy of white culture with the reassuring combination of Native consent and cooperation. Although the centrality of movement in Morlacchi’s role has not been taken into account in previous scholarship, a dance analysis would reinforce this reading, particularly given the fact that at least some of her dances as Dove Eye seem to have been performed on pointe. One critic noted how a “few graceful steps inserted into one of the scenes reminded playgoers of [Morlacchi’s] former triumph in the ballet.”[16] Another observed in her performance “the fawnlike bound of the antelope—if the antelope ever bounds on the points of its toes.”[17] Joellen Meglin has shown that ballet served to symbolize “civilization triumphing over savagery” in representations of Native Americans in productions at the pre-Romantic Paris Opéra.[18] In Scouts, Morlacchi’s ballet dancing would seem to have functioned similarly, the consummate European ballerina serving as the “whitening” force that mediated between civilization and savagery in Dove Eye’s character. When the Italian ballet star rose to the pointes of her slippers, the image signaled that Dove Eye was more civilized, closer to European culture than her tribesmen, especially in contrast to the other “Death” and “Scalp” dances in the play that served as signs of an “authentic” Indian culture.[19] The incorporation of ballet into Scouts literally replaced a Native dance form with a European one on Dove Eye’s body, an erasure that colluded with the US government’s efforts to colonize Native lands. Yet the “civilization” and “savagery” binary only in part explains the incongruous mixture of buckskin and pointe shoes in Morlacchi’s Dove Eye performance. Robert C. Allen has shown the way in which the female burlesque performer’s body was a site of multiple interpretations, often ambiguous and contradictory, that were related to changing gender and class roles.[20] As I will show, the ballet dancer (or “ballet-girl,” as she was known in popular discourses, no matter her rank onstage) embodied a similar set of tensions, and Morlacchi brought this complexity with her into The Scouts of the Prairie: a little bit of the burlesque tradition on the frontier stage. When dance becomes an equal part of the analysis, the way in which the foreign ballerina and her dancing served as a necessarily complicated signifier for a host of socio-cultural anxieties appears, many of them conflicting, and all of them indicating the need for the stabilizing and reassuring force of the exemplary western hero, Buffalo Bill, at the end of the play. In what follows, I attempt to widen the scope on the meanings that ballet brought into this frontier melodrama by putting it in dialogue with contemporaneous discourses of ballet and the ballet dancer in the mass circulation print industry out of which Scouts arose. Critics certainly found Morlacchi to be a civilizing force in the play, and a much-needed one at that. Although little venom was spared in appraisals of Scouts or its audience, Morlacchi was persistently set apart in the press. “Mlle Morlacchi deserves a word by herself in this wholesale slaughter,” decreed the Boston reviewer; “In the opening piece . . . she danced exquisitely and with all her accustomed grace and skill, and the audience recognized her merit and called her before the curtain accordingly.”[21] Penned another, “in her opening performance she gave a number of her beautiful dances as gracefully and as equisitely [sic] as ever.”[22] And one reviewer noted that that the “Indian scalping, buffalo shooting and redskin-whooping drama” appealed to the lower classes seated in the gallery, while the better class of patrons in the house preferred Morlacchi’s dancing in the curtain raiser.[23] For critics, Morlacchi’s dancing was a welcome respite of upper-class taste in the otherwise uncouth frontier melodrama. Such praise of Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie has been interpreted rather straightforwardly as evidence of her talent. But here the plot thickens. Critics’ responses to Scouts, and to Morlacchi’s appearance in it, are indicative of the cultural hierarchy that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one that Lawrence Levine has described as a “struggle to establish aesthetic standards, to separate true art from the purely vulgar.”[24] Persistently dividing the audience and the content of Scouts into “high” and “low” components, the extant criticism points to the struggle over class that that was waged in theatrical life in the latter nineteenth century. And critics indeed saw The Scouts of the Prairie as class warfare. “To criticize this composition as a play, or analyze its plot, would be ridiculous, for it has nothing to do with art,” declared a New York writer. “It is simply a dime novel set to scenery.”[25] While critics readily perceived ballet as a civilizing influence in The Scouts of the Prairie, the existing criticism cannot fully demonstrate how the mostly male, working-class audience that cheered the play would have responded to the incongruous contrast of the “best dancer in New York” playing the role of an Indian woman who shot a rifle, fought, screeched war whoops and chased the bad guys—and mixed it all with the occasional Romantic-style divertissement.[26] The comparison to a dime novel pointed to the fact that playwright Ned Buntline was among the highest-paid authors of the dime novel industry: cheap popular fiction mass-produced by publishing firms between the 1840s and the 1890s, predominantly for a male, white, lower class readership.[27] Buntline’s readership was likely the same audience targeted by The Scouts of the Prairie; the script was created very quickly by piecing together characters from his dime novel series on Buffalo Bill (although the novelette on Dove Eye was published after the premiere of the play, which suggests she was a new character he created for the stage,)[28] and, as a celebrity author, Buntline received top billing, along with Cody and Omohundro. Before he turned to Western tales in 1859, Buntline was well known for his mystery-of-the-city books, which unveiled the crime and poverty of the city, along with the extravagance and decadence of the rich.[29] Alexander Saxton aligns Buntline’s turn to the West with an overall shift in dime novels after 1850 that brought the ideological dimensions of the “Free Soil hero,” particularly white egalitarianism and class mobility, into the new Western hero.[30] I will return to Saxton’s argument at the end of this article. For now, it is worth noting that Buntline was committed to a nativist political ideology that preached anti-aristocratic egalitarianism and class mobility, and blamed urban problems onto foreign presence in the US. [31] As author and activist Buntline helped shape a working-class, anti-immigrant culture in opposition to the elite and foreign corruption of the industrial city. In Buntline’s urban fiction, the city is a dangerous and unpredictable place, full of dark, secret corners in which foreign-born villains prey on working class heroes and heroines. As Shelley Streeby describes, Buntline’s urban adventures cast the city “as a feminizing space in which ‘fashion’ holds sway and distinguishes a ‘simple’ yet civilized yeoman masculinity from a ‘savage’ state that is implicitly identified with foreign, nonwhite, or urban others.”[32] Buntline often positioned the theatre as one of the primary sites of corruption and immorality in the city, as was the case in his 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York.[33] More precisely, the ballet theatre was the setting for his urban melodrama, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge. Written seven years before the premiere of The Scouts of the Prairie, this dime novel portrayed the ballet world as a den of underground crime in which wealthy and licentious immigrants preyed on poor American girls. Every time Rose, the impoverished, motherless heroine who auditions to be a ballet-girl, enters the Broadway theatre, or even dons her ballet costume, her situation quickly becomes life-threatening: she is pursued, abducted, imprisoned, lusted after, and even set aflame one night when her muslin skirt brushes the gas lights. At one point, six particularly rough male audience members, overcome by her performance, leapt onto the stage and chased her through the theatre, howling and breaking down doors in their pursuit.[34] Published four years before he gave up urban reform literature for the Buffalo Bill dime novels that launched Scouts, the ballet theatre figured in Buntline’s story as a handy metaphor for urban perversions; a violent place devoid of morals, where passions ran wild, appearances could not be trusted, and dangerous foreigners, “rich, handsome, and liberal,” constantly sought to destroy Rose’s innate American goodness.[35] Buntline’s characterization of the moral and social dangers of the ballet theatre was part of a much larger set of nineteenth-century discourses that viewed ballet as a foreign threat to American values. Anti-ballet rhetoric was multi-faceted: religious reformers saw it as a menace to middle-class morality, while dime novel and story paper authors, like Buntline, cast it as part of the larger threat posed to the working classes by immigration and industrialization. That is, attacks on ballet appeared in a wide variety of popular literature, directed at different segments of the population. But these genres were united in their anxiety over the increasing influence of a rapidly growing middle class after the Civil War. Persistent connections were made in popular discourses between this new “fashionable” class, European social and political decay, and the presence of ballet in the United States. The “ballet-girl” (as she was called, no matter her rank) became a site for these anxieties; as in Buntline’s Rose, she was a trigger for multiple concerns about foreign influence, social divisions, and the dangers to American virtues within a rapidly transforming urban space. Unlike on the Opéra stage, to American audiences in 1872, ballet would not necessarily have served as an uncomplicated or even positive symbol of modern civilization. As Barbara Barker has shown, the history of ballet in the US involved “the slow transplanting and rooting of an essentially foreign form.”[36] Since before the turn of the nineteenth century, French and Italian troupes had been touring to America, and by the early decades, European ballerinas were appearing in the US with increasing regularity. As ballet become more popular, debates raged over the meaning of a European high art on the American stage. According to Christopher Martin, by the late 1820s debates over ballet in the US had evolved into a discourse that superimposed questions of national values and identity—indeed, the very fate of the nation—onto the theatrical representation of the female body.[37] While some hoped that European ballet would help America develop its own high culture, detractors saw ballet as symptomatic of a decadent and degenerate European civilization. The latter is perhaps most famously expressed in Samuel Morse’s vitriolic speech on French ballerina Francisque Hutin’s 1827 appearance in New York, in which he decried ballet, “the PUBLIC EXPOSURE OF A NAKED FEMALE,” as “the importation of these lowest instruments of vice from the sinks of monarchical corruption.”[38] For like-minded dissenters, the problem with ballet was that it went for the senses instead of the intellect, inappropriate for the values of the young republic. As the Christian Register put it: There is nothing in Europe which so directly and effectually saps the fountains of virtue and moral sensibility. It has no fellowship with the mind. . . . It excites none of the finer sensibilities of the heart—it calls forth no moral sentiments of any kind. It is the product of a state of society worn out with luxury and indulgence and seeking excitements in the lowest order of natural propensities. . . . We should consider the establishment of the Ballet in the U. States not only as a wide dereliction from the virtues of our forefathers, but as a great moral evil—an evil more contagious and more pernicious to society than any bodily disease which has ever afflicted our country.[39] In such discourses, ballet, seducing viewers with its spectacular and feminine beauty, represented the bread and circuses of the European monarchy, a threat to not only the American theatergoer’s morals, but also to American political institutions. In the furor over ballet in America that raged for most of the nineteenth century, the dance form was linked to European civilization, and the anxieties it provoked for its critics were inextricable from concerns about the fate of the republic. Some hoped that the European art would help America develop its own high culture, but ballet’s dissenters saw it as a threat to the moral, social, and political fabric of the country. When foreign correspondents wrote columns home about the corruptions of Parisian society, ballet was embedded in their warnings. The Parisian ballet-girl was a representative of “the loosest class in the world”: self-indulgent and reckless with her body, her money, and her health.[40] Behind Paris’s proliferation of glittering amusements—its cafes, gardens, department stores, theatres, operas, and ballets—lay a society in decay, a darker world of courtesans and immorality. An attitude of extravagance had overtaken French culture, replacing the Revolutionary “watchwords” of “liberty, equality, [and] fraternity.” While the French people mouthed these ideas, and were taught that they had a democratic government, in reality, they have undergone a social revolution and have come to regard these words in another sense. Liberty [here] does not imply freedom of political action and opinion. On the contrary it means to be free from all concerns of government and to have license to do anything they please with themselves and their property. . . . The French notion of liberty is fulfilled [as long] as the people have the wherewithal to fill their stomachs and indulge their sensuality.[41] Beneath the Parisian fashionable life lurked the ruins of revolutionary ideals. In these accounts, ballet, with its “sumptuous and exhausting lifestyle,” was emblematic of the ruin to which such a life of self-indulgence would inevitably lead.[42] Ballet was a foreign other, a symbol of a decadent and degenerate European culture and political system, and a menace to republican values. But if ballet’s sensuality and excessive “indulgence” made it morally suspect in the antebellum US, by the mid-1860s such lavishness had become the major selling point for a new form, the ballet-spectacle. Most famously represented by the 1866 The Black Crook with its “bewildering forest of female legs” and “barbaric splendor,” ballet-spectacles combined elements from melodrama, farce, and parody, and featured fantastical plots, spectacular special effects, and numerous grand ballets with large casts of European ballerinas.[43] The popularity of these productions generated an outpouring of warnings about their dangers, many of them focused on the female dancer as a site of moral and social transgression. Ballet dancers contrived “to reach men through the senses; to stir their blood with material agencies as the Maria Bonfantis and Sohlkes, and Morlacchis do. Charming exemplars they for American ladies—for the pure daughters of a proud country.”[44] The real cause for alarm was that these amusements indicated a growing preoccupation with pleasure as an end in itself. As a writer for the Brooklyn Eagle parsed, it was not the popularity of ballet per se that was the problem; it was that “the function of a ballet-girl in a modern burlesque or spectacle has nothing to do with either graceful or pantomimic action. She is hired to look pretty, and to appear in little clothing.” The worry that ballet went for the senses, rather than the mind, had long troubled its critics, particularly the religiously-oriented. But after the Civil War, ballet’s pleasurable ends increasingly pointed to larger socio-economic concerns; in particular, “the enjoyment of wealth by a class to whom labor, whether of hand or brain, is alike strange. Money which brings with it no obvious duties . . . can hardly fail to be a disastrous inheritance.”[45] Whereas ballet triggered fears of the corrupting influences of foreign culture throughout the bulk of the nineteenth century, postwar it became central to a new domestic threat: the rise of a culture of consumption and the growth of a new bourgeois class. William Leach has identified the decades after the Civil War as the key period in the development of a “culture of consumer capitalism,” marked by “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness, the cult of the new, the democratization of desire, and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.”[46] Urbanization and industrialization eroded the familial and agricultural culture that had characterized America to that point, bringing not only rapid economic and lifestyle changes, but also creating a much more fluid socioeconomic system and an expanding class of nouveau riche in the metropolis, variously known as the “fashionables” or the “shoddy aristocracy.” This new class had gotten their fortunes quickly, probably in a business venture, but completely lacked the “good breeding and intelligence” that suited their new social class.[47] The shoddies were the most flagrant example of a society that worshipped money, and was “content with nothing less than . . . an ever-changing life of amusements.”[48] Certain spaces in the city that were built to accommodate this new upper-middle class, including the park, the shopping mall, the theatre, and the ballet-spectacle—spaces, in other words, in which the fashionable life of newness, leisure, pleasure, and social display was lived—became geographical symbols of the debauchery of this new class in popular literature.[49] Such was the case in a new genre of urban nonfiction formed after the Civil War. These works retained the “wicked city motif” found in their dime novel antecedents, yet they purported to be true accounts of city life, even guides to urban spaces. On the surface, it seems that these urban exposés were primarily addressed to upper class concerns over the disruption posed by the shoddies to the socioeconomic order; yet their wide readership also suggests they were highly popular. Nonetheless, there was a clear relationship between the genres, as the nonfiction works carried forward the core themes of popular urban fiction, including the concern that the metropolis was generating both an aristocracy and an underclass whose degenerate lifestyles were endangering American values.[50] Most of these urban nonfiction works were organized around social types and/or social spaces. A repeated structural motif was the grouping of classes of women to symbolize various forms of urban vice. As Mona Domosh notes, as the primary class of consumers, women often served as targets for fears about the rise of consumer capitalism in post-Civil War discourses. The “desiring” woman became the symbol of the lack of control and tendency for excess responsible for the moral decay of the city.[51] In the urban nonfictional exposés, certain types of women who disrupted conventional social and gender boundaries stood for the physical and moral danger of the city streets: the prostitute, the working woman, and, most importantly for my purposes, the “New York Woman.” The New York Woman served as a metaphor for the vices of “fashionable society,” as illustrated in two urban nonfiction books published in the 1860s: Marie Louise Hankins’s Women of New York and George Ellington’s The Women of New York or the Underworld of the Great City. She dressed stylishly, even extravagantly, performed an elaborate daily toilette to make herself beautiful, and devoted her time to shopping and going to parties, the theatre, the opera, and the ballet, all to the neglect of her children. Amongst the New York Woman’s trespasses was her artifice: through dress, make-up, facial enameling, false hair, false teeth, and devices such as padded calves and ankles, she could appear to be what she was not. Such external artifice pointed to internal deceit; the New York Woman could appear respectable on the outside, but be of wicked heart. “Did we speak of the falsity of women as regards their heart and their inner life,” wrote Ellington, “we would not only tire the reader, but make him lose all faith in human nature, at least as far as women are concerned.”[52] A particular dilemma was the New York Woman’s ability to pass for a higher social class than the one to which she belonged. The New York Woman was also self-indulgent. Obsessed with money and luxury, she gave into her own desires and was seemingly incapable of restraint. The urban exposés traced two possible “routes from personal indulgence to societal destruction: one path followed the course of overconsumption; the other route followed the course of sexual deviance.”[53] In the first of these, her New York Woman’s extravagance led to the downfall of others around her: the men who struggled to support her resorted to illegal ways of getting money or, frustrated by her indulgences, to infidelity; or her servants found themselves buying things they could not afford in a vain attempt to keep up with her expectations of social status. “There is no influence so powerful as that of example; and when one woman steps beyond the bounds of propriety in any direction, she is sure to be followed by a dozen other weak ones,” avowed Ellington, until finally, “the whole of society becomes demoralized and corrupted.”[54] In the second path to social degredation, women turned to various modes of prostitution in order to fulfill their extravagant need for goods, either in gift or payment form. The ballet-girl was a special subtype of the New York Woman in these books. She shared the same faults: she was overindulgent, and her appearance was the result of a great deal of embellishment. “The coryphée is not one to let a chance slip that promises any pleasure,” noted Ellington. “The majority of these girls need and must have excitement. Without it they could not exist. . . . Seemingly, they live but for the pleasures of the day.”[55] The ballet dancer’s grace was a façade that required not only make-up and hair care, but also great physical pain. Accounts of the arduous, violent nature of ballet training were ubiquitous in mid-nineteenth century exposés. Not unlike the fashionable metropolitan woman, who would undergo foot binding to make her feet smaller for the latest footwear, the ballet dancer submitted her body to abnormal suffering in order to create her illusion of perfection. She could not be trusted either. “When ‘made up’ on the stage, with aid of ribbons, gause [sic], false curls, a gay costume, and pearl power and vinegar rouge,” cautioned Hankins, “she will appear to be not more than sixteen, and as beautiful as an angel; but […] by day light, in her plain clothes, she might be taken for thirty-five—perhaps forty!”[56] Moreover, her lifestyle all too often led to sexual deviance or to her own destruction. Ellington’s summation is characteristic: “Many have risen to the goal of their ambition, many have given up and returned to their former occupations, while many have sunk low into that dark abyss from which there is no resurrection, without hope and without mercy, betrayed by those who flatter but to ruin.”[57] On the one hand, authors saw the ballet-girl as a victim of this dangerous urban world, even though her temperament made her particularly susceptible to its temptations of materialism and indulgence. This was especially true if she were American: numerous dime novels and newspaper short stories followed the adventures of good American girls, who, being forced into the ballet world (usually because they suffered financial distress, and lacked a mother’s moral guidance), had no choice but to navigate its moral and physical dangers.[58] As Ellington put it, American ballet-girls tended to be much more chaste, especially when compared to the “peculiar ideas of morality” of the French dancers.[59] But on the other hand, the ballet-girl was a symptom of a much bigger socio-economic epidemic. She personified the destruction of simple American values in the one of the city’s most dangerous places: the ballet theatre. The theatre, and especially the ballet theatre, figured prominently in this literature as one of the primary signifiers for the transforming class structure of the city under the influence of the new bourgeoisie. The ballet was one of the places the shoddies could be found flaunting their extravagance, “throw[ing] bouquets to the bare-legged dancers;” even worse, ballet was one of the disrespectable professions, along with “mineral waters” and prostitution, on which the shoddies depended for quick money.[60] In Hankins’ tale, the ballet-girl, whom she calls Helen, came from this shoddy class, forced into dancing to keep her family from starvation when her father quickly made a fortune in some unnamed business, then just as quickly lost it. Helen’s life was miserable: “with an aching heart, and a brain too often burning with the insults which she has received from those who take advantage of her exposed and unprotected situation, poor Helen Bray, like many of her sisters, comes upon the stage to dance and smile, and entertain the public world.”[61] For these authors, ballet served as a locus for the shoddies and their transgressions in multiple ways; it was the site of their creation, existence, and also their downfall. The ballet-girl thus functioned in mid-nineteenth century sensationalist urban literature very much in the way that Peter Buckley has noted of the prostitute. As a “fallen” woman, she served the narrative function of being authorized: to move among the dangerous classes of the city and to recognize—where the novelist and the reader might not—the evil intentions of the fashionably dressed. Because she [was] situated in the places of social and sexual promiscuity, where the extremes of social class converge, she provoke[d] the story of the city. [She allowed] the narration of the unnarratable.[62] The same might be said about the ballet-girl. In both the fictional mysteries-of-the-city and the nonfiction urban exposés, she was able to simultaneously reference the feminized hedonism of “fashionable” society, and the encroachment of European decadence on American society and values. Connoting an influence that was unavoidably “foreign” and potentially deviant, the ballet dancer ushered in the class conflicts and contradictions of the industrial city in all of its most dangerous, “unnarratable,” connotations. Alexander Saxton argues that what united the dime novel industry was the reliance on class struggle as a structural trope, across a diversity of subject matter. Most importantly for my purposes here, the Western narrative was “conceptualized in dime novels in terms of conflicts between fraternal egalitarianism on one hand and social hierarchy and deference on the other.”[63] The widespread support for territorial expansion in the mass press was buttressed by the belief that western lands held the fix for the socio-economic problems of the city.[64] Following this argument, Indian killing was de rigeur for the western hero because western expansion held the promise of a concept of civilization not racked by class conflict, “a western expanding white republic.”[65] Saxton views the western hero as the progeny of the prewar Free Soil hero, the literary representative of the ideals of social mobility and white fraternity that lay at the foundation of Republican ideology. Key characteristics of the western hero included lower-class roots, a background in Indian killing, and the ability to cross class divisions, usually by winning the favor of an upper-class woman’s family and marrying her.[66] Saxton’s exemplary model of such a character is Buntline’s first depiction of Cody in his 1869 Buffalo Bill: The King of the Border Men, the work that soon led both author and subject to their theatrical debut in The Scouts of the Prairie. As Bill, in Buntline’s story, leaves his modest vernacular beginnings to, first, fight the Indians who work for white ruffians, and finally, marry a banker’s daughter, he dramatizes American social advancement. Importantly for my purposes, romantic partnership is crucial to the western hero’s liberation from class boundaries. “It is not so much that lower-class origin has been denied,” explains Saxton, “but that equal access to privileges of the upper class, including acquisition of wealth and marriageability, has been triumphantly vindicated.”[67] From this perspective, one might speculate that, in the eyes of the working-class audience, as Buffalo Bill and Dove Eye embrace at the end of The Scouts of the Prairie against the backdrop of a speeding locomotive, symbol of the westward push of industrialization, perhaps the corruptions of a foreign, elitist culture that the Italian ballerina signified were at least as much in need of containment by the western hero than the alterity represented by the Indian Dove Eye. Not only the savagery of the Native American, but also the vices and cruelties of industrial conflict, were quelled under Cody’s stabilizing hand. When read intertextually with the narrative of the ballet-girl in popular literature, the spectre of a European “other” who gestured Eastward to the class and cultural reorganization of the metropolis emerges in The Scouts of the Prairie, the earliest prototype of the Wild West spectacles. In addition to affirming Dove Eye’s civilized side, Morlacchi’s ballet-dancing body pointed to social and economic worries about class, gender, and race in capitalist civilization. Several issues linger: how was Morlacchi’s dancing positioned in the play, and did the relationship between text and dance ultimately embrace these various levels of meaning or attempt to resolve them somehow? How would audiences in non-urban geographical locations have perceived ballet dancing in Scouts? What role did the racism aimed at immigrants during the period play in Morlacchi’s—and ballet’s—positioning in the frontier play?[68] These questions remain difficult to answer, given the extant textual and critical resources through which we might rebuild the way in which a high “foreign” art intersected with this dime novel drama.[69] Such problems emerge, however, when we see the incorporation of ballet dancing, and the associations it carried, as a specific dramaturgical choice in The Scouts of the Prairie, one that went far, far beyond mere spectacle to gesture towards the class and cultural divisions at the heart of the question of “civilization” itself. Andrea Harris is assistant professor of dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current book, Making Ballet American, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her essays have appeared in Dance Chronicle, Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance, Discourses in Dance, and Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange, and she is the editor of Before, Between, and Beyond, the most recent collection of dance historian Sally Banes’s works. Dr. Harris has also taught at Texas Christian University, the University of Oklahoma, and the Universidad de las Américas. Her performance credits include the Martha Graham Dance Company and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. [1] Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 87, 86. On the Wild West as American mythology, see also Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). [2] Sandra K. Sagala’s monograph is the most comprehensive source on these theatrical productions: see Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). See also Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50-67. Neither author considers Morlacchi’s dancing in the role of Dove Eye or explores the historical context of ballet in the image or the plays. [3] Qtd. in Chris Enss, Buffalo Gals: Women of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2006), 4. [4] Qtd. in Barbara Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Marie Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi (New York: Dance Horizons, 1984), 121. [5] Morlacchi’s company was in financial trouble at the time, but there is no direct evidence that she took the role in Scouts out of financial desperation. The year after Scouts premiered, Morlacchi married Omohundro. She appeared in two subsequent Cody melodramas, playing an Indian maiden in The Scouts of the Plains and an Irish girl in Life on the Border, in between which she returned to the opera house for productions of Ahmed and her own production of La Bayadère. Morlacchi and Omohundro split from Cody in 1876 to create their own western combination plays, in several of which Morlacchi played an Indian maiden role. After Omohundro died in 1880, Morlacchi retired from the stage, and spent the following years teaching ballet lessons to the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she and Omohundro owned a home. All biographical information drawn from Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo, 111-167. For John M. Burke, see Chris Dixon, “Introduction: The Mysterious Major Burke,” in John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace. Introduction ed. Chris Dixon. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Online at Cody Studies, http://www.codystudies.org/?tag=john-m-burke (accessed 5 September 2014). [6] Early studies that mention the plot include James Monaghan, “The Stage Career of Buffalo Bill,” The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 31, no. 4 (December 1938): 414-416; and William S.E. Coleman, “Buffalo Bill on Stage,” Players, 47, no. 2 (1971): 80-91. Craig Francis Nieuwenhuyse’s unpublished dissertation is the most detailed study of The Scouts of the Prairie, and his attempted reconstruction of the plot the most thorough. See Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage: Buffalo Bill Cody’s First Celebration of the Conquest of the American Frontier” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1981), see especially 43-74 for the plot. Sagala also includes a detailed account of the narrative (Buffalo Bill on Stage, 21-23). [7] Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 December 1872, 4. The role of Hazel Eye was initially played by Eloe Carfano, but the secondary sources are not clear about her identity. Barbara Barker, Morlacchi’s biographer, says that Carfano was a member of Morlacchi’s ballet company (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo, 153); Sandra K. Sagala describes her as a “Cuban actress” who joined the Scouts’ company on tour (Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage, 27). Both could be true; as Sagala notes, the reviews are confusing, and it may be that reviewers could not always tell the two women apart. However, Barker’s evidence that Carfano danced with Morlacchi in Scouts is based on the after-the-fact recollection of Omohundro’s brother that “both women danced on the tips of their toes” in the play (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo, 156). I have found no reviews that mention Carfano’s dancing, only Morlacchi’s. [8] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 54. Nieuwenhuyse’s source for the following quotations regarding the plot is the Troop C Ledger, Buffalo Bill Historical Center. See note 9 for details about this Ledger. [9] “The Scouts at Pike’s Opera House” (Cincinnati), Clipping, n.d n.p, William F. Cody Collection, “Stage Play Notices and Reviews 1872-1880: Black Book,” in Buffalo Bill Cody Scrapbooks 1875-1903, Manuscript 6, William F. Cody, roll 1. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY. This is a microfilm of the Troop C Ledger, held at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which contains numerous newspaper clippings cut so as to fit as many as possible on a page. Most of these clippings do not include dates or page numbers, and in some the name of the publication and/or its location has been omitted as well. Hereafter: BBHC Ledger. [10] “Amusements,” New York Times, 1 April 1873, 4. [11] Barker suggests a dance may have been incorporated into Dove Eye’s prayer scene; see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo, 156. [12] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 72. [13] Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 54; Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 111. [14] Rebecca Jaroff, “Opposing Forces: (Re)Playing Pocahontas and the Politics of Indian Removal on the Antebellum Stage,” Comparative Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006/2007): 486. [15] Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 99. [16] “The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” (Utica), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p. [17] “Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [18] Joellen Meglin, “‘Sauvages,’ Sex Role and Semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet 1736-1837, Part Two: The Nineteenth Century,” Dance Chronicle 23, no. 3 (2000): 291. [19] Real Native Americans were added to the cast after the premiere, where they were mixed with non-Native “extras.” Costumes, weaponry, songs, and dances included in the play all worked to signify the display of an authentic Native culture onstage. Nieuwenhuyse notes that critics had trouble seeing the difference between the Native and non-Native performers, and that, ultimately, reviewers emphasized the overall brutality of the Indians through stereotypes that reinforced government’s eradication policies. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 29, 43, 79-80, 130-31. [20] Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). [21] Boston Daily Advertiser, 4 March 1873, issue 54, column G. The reviewer’s reference to “Madmoiselle” Morlacchi points to the fact that, although predominately Italian, dancers in the ballet-spectacles were typically billed as “French” to cater to an emergent bourgeois class who saw Paris as the apex of cultural refinement, see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo, 6. [22] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 50. [23] Qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage, 64. [24] Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 128. Also see Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 12-14; Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage, 16, 64. [25] “The Scouts of the Prairie” (Niblo’s Garden, New York City), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [26] BBHC Ledger, no title, n.d., n.p. Reviews note that, while the packed houses at The Scouts of the Prairie were predominantly male, the audience was a mixture of upper and lower class patrons. See also “From the Prairie: Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack and Ned Buntline at the Academy of Music,” which describes how “men seemed to be arranged in close layers from the orchestra railing clear away up to the remotest corners of the gallery.” BBHC, n.d., n.p. My account of Morlacchi’s dancing in the play draws on the account of her biographer Barbara Barker, who describes that Morlacchi’s choreographic style adhered to the pantomimic, dramatic style of the ballet d’action tradition in which she was trained. [27] The dime novel industry included story papers, dime novels, and pamphlets like the cheap library. Michael Denning states that the continuities and repetitions between these formats justifies embracing them all under the term “dime novels,” which also distinguishes this genre from publications aimed at a middle-class readership. I am following his usage of the term. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 10-12. On the composition of the dime novel audience, see Denning, Mechanic Accents 27-30, and also Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 328. [28] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82-83. This is not to say that Dove Eye did not have antecedents in Buntline’s novels, which invites further research. [29] Buntline’s first frontier story was Stella Delorme; of The Comanche’s Dream: A Wild and Fanciful Story of Savage Chivalry, which launched a series of Western dime novels. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82. Buntline’s oeuvre also included international adventure romances, Naval stories, and urban melodramas. For a well-developed examination of Buntline’s career, see Chapter 5 of Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860. (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984). [30] Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 196. [31] Buntline switched party affiliations often, but was a committed member of the nativist cause from at least 1848 to the late 1850s, a member of the Order of United Americans and their offspring, the Know-Nothing Party. He also played a leading role in the American Committee, which helped instigate the 1849 Astor Place theatre riot, an event directly related to the class oppositions grafted onto the growing division between “high” and “low” culture. Later, as a celebrity author, Buntline was recruited to campaign for the Republican Party in 1876, 1880, and 1884. Splitting with the Republican Party in 1884, when he refused to support candidate James G. Blaine, he announced himself as an Independent Republican, and then fell out of favor with the Party for his earlier affiliation with the Know-Nothings. See Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952), 162-181, 192-217, 264, 272, 279-80. While it goes beyond the scope of my analysis of Morlacchi’s role in The Scouts of the Prairie, it also bears mention that Buntline’s nativist politics are also evident in the fact that, although the Indians in the play bear the brunt of the punishment, the real villains are the Mormon and immigrant renegades who mastermind the Indian attacks on the scouts. For a fuller account of mid-nineteenth century Republicanism than I can provide here, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); on nativism, see Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: the Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996). [32] Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 143. [33] For instance, the working-class heroine is threatened by the wealthy foreigner who pursues her that he will have her reputation ruined like Clara Norris (an actress of the day) “or any other of the stock company of the theatre of vice in the city.” Elsewhere, the theatre stands as a metaphor for the dark side of the city: the domain of the city prostitute is referred to as “the theatre of nightly infamy.” Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: a story of real life (New York, 1848), 159, 9. Electronic version available by Sabin Americana. Gale, Cengage Learning, http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/servlet/Sabin?af=RN&ae=CY103135748&srchtp=a&ste=14, (accessed 15 August 2013). [34] Ned Buntline, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge, a tale of the New-York Drama (New York: Hilton, 1865). [35] Ibid., 29. [36] Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo, 3. [37] Christopher Martin, “Naked Females and Splay-Footed Sprawlers: Ballerinas on the Stage in Jacksonian America,” Theatre Survey 51, no. 1 (May 2010): 95-114. [38] Qtd. in ibid., 100. [39] Christian Register, 8 December 1827, 6, 49. [40] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” Brooklyn Eagle, 22 February 1870, 6. [41] “Foreign Correspondence,” Brooklyn Eagle, 9 January 1858, 2. [42] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” 6. [43] Qtd. in George Freedley, “The Black Crook and the White Fawn,” in Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 77, 70. [44] Junius Henry Browne, “The Ballet as a Social Evil,” Northern Monthly, II (2 April 1868). Qtd. in Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo, 18. [45] “The Social Morality of the Day,” The Brooklyn Eagle, 8 June 1871, 1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online, http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client.asp?Skin=Beagle (accessed 14 November 2012). [46] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 3. [47] George Ellington, The Women of New York: Or, the Under-World of the Great City: Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Etc. (New York: New York Book Co., 1869), 117. [48] Ibid., 24. [49] On the construction of social spaces, including theatres, for the growing middle-class, see Mona Domosh, “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, no. 5 (2001): 577-579. On the way in which the rise of the ballet-spectacle intertwined with and helped promote the dominance of business-class theatrical production in the post-Civil War years, see Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 231-257 (especially 242-243 on ballet-spectacles, or “musical extravaganzas”). [50] Stuart M. Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York City,” Journal of Urban History 11 (November 1984): 11. See Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis,” 35, for the sales of these books, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. As Blumin noted in 1984, the postwar urban nonfiction is an understudied genre; I found little additional scholarship on this literature, with the exception of Mona Domosh’s “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography.” Drawing on Blumin’s work, Denning notes that the relationship between these nonfictional urban exposés and mysteries-of-the-city novels is evidenced in the fact that some authors attempted to work in both genres; Denning, 228, no.8. [51] Domosh, “The Women of New York,” 575. [52] Ellington, The Women of New York, 90. [53] Domosh, “The Women of New York,”586. [54] Ellington, 121. [55] Ibid., 515. [56] Marie Louise Hankins, Women of New York (New York: M.L. Hankins & Co., 1861), 157-58. [57] Ellington, 514. [58] See, for example, “The Ballet Dancer,” Brooklyn Eagle, 20 August 1853, 1. [59] Ellington, 513, 511. [60] Ibid., 117, 119. [61] Hankins, Women of New York, 159-160. [62] Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860. (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), 442-443. Buckley’s subject is the character of the prostitute in Ned Buntline’s 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York. [63] Saxton, Rise and Fall, 330. Arguing that dime-novel thematic material often supported Republican party ideology, and that the industry maintained close ties to that party, Saxton places the western hero in popular fiction after 1850 within the lineage of the earlier “Free Soil hero,” who “by transcending the limits of region and class, could bid for national spokesmanship” (187). See Saxton, 183-203; 321-347. [64] Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 229-230. [65] Alexander Saxton, “The Racial Trajectory of the Western Hero,” Amerasia 11, no. 2 (1984): 70. Saxton locates one source of the western hero in Jacksonian democracy, in which class divisions and upper-class dominance were broken down through appeals to egalitarian ideals within white civilization and racial hostility against enemies outside of it; see 68-70. Also Saxton, Rise and Fall, 183-201. [66] On the Free Soil hero, see Saxton, Rise and Fall, 195ff; on the western hero as the inheritor of those values, see 321-344. [67] Saxton, Rise and Fall, 337-338. [68] Matthew Frye Jacobson has documented that, with swelling immigration in the nineteenth century, “white” became no longer a singular, monolithic category, but rather plural, subject to shades and variations. Celtic, German, and Italian immigrants in particular were perceived as “savage,” or racially in-between, and thus unfit for citizenship. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Some criticism of the Italian dancers who brought ballet to American shores suggests that they were at times viewed through such racialist lenses, not readily seen as “white” in the public eye. For instance, in her role as Dove Eye, Morlacchi was referred to as the scouts’ “dusky-faced friend” (“The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” [Utica]), and as “tawny but not tawdry” [“Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p.]. And when a Omaha reviewer described Morlacchi as “a mulatto dancer,” Cody shot back that such a claim was “simply contemptible,” and corrected that “[her] skin is as white, and blood as pure as your own—if not purer” (qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage, 26). The racialist conflicts associated with Italian ballerinas in the nineteenth-century US warrant greater exploration. [69] I explore the historiographic problems associated with this research more fully in Andrea Harris, “The Phantom Dancer, or, the Case of the Mysterious Toe Shoe in the Frontier Prop Closet,” in “A Tyranny of Documents: The Performing Arts Historian as Film Noir Detective,” ed. Stephen Johnson, special issue, Performing Arts Resources 28 (2011): 151-59. "Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama" by Andrea Harris 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.

Nicole Hodges Persley and 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 Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF This special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre was initially envisioned as a celebration of the inimitable Errol Hill’s contributions to Black Theatre in American history. Hill's centennial asks us to reflect on the long history of American performance and the impact of Black lives on the American theater. Errol Hill did not revise American theater history by making it more “inclusive.” He challenged the systemic racism of American theater by providing evidence of a thriving Black arts practice that helped to shape the foundations of American theatrical traditions from musical theater to dance. However, when colleagues from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Association, and the Black Theatre Network began developing this issue, we were all reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We did not have the theater to help us process this international trauma and loss. Theaters around the world were shuttered indefinitely due to pandemic lockdowns and quarantines. ATHE’s 2020 conference was supposed to take place in Detroit, Michigan, one of the country’s most densely populated Black cities. Instead that summer found us mourning and grappling with death and darkness via Zoom. Facing our limitations, fragilities, anger, and discontents, we attempted to make sense of what we were experiencing as a collective of theater-makers while paying close attention to the racially specific atrocities the pandemic and perpetual climate of anti-blackness did to our Black and Brown colleagues and friends. While we formulated this issue, we watched the ongoing international public protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. The daily theatrical loop of trauma and death streaming onto our phones, tablets, televisions, and Zoom screens felt unbearable. By August of 2020, an unconscionable number of Americans had lost their lives to COVID-19 with those numbers disproportionately representing deaths in Black and Brown communities. At the same time, international audiences witnessed the unrelenting barrage of anti-Black deaths including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain. As every day seemed to bring a deluge of fresh pain or disaster, colleagues from across ATDS, BTA, and BTN came together to support a group of scholars whose work documents Black Theatre’s histories of resistance, pride, courage, and triumph. Working on this special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre celebrating "Milestones in Black Theatre" has opened up opportunities to reimagine the parameters of the field. It has also highlighted the inadequacy of one journal issue to represent all of the extraordinary accomplishments and developments in Black Theatre Studies. Rather than curating a more traditional journal format with four or five articles, we deliberately broke open the structure to encourage short thought pieces, manifestos, explorations of new work, interviews, roundtable discussions, and reimaginings of familiar material. We also sought to represent a broad swath of scholars in Black Theatre -- both well-established voices and those newer to the conversation. Additionally, we developed a Spotify playlist to accompany the issue (available at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6GVG9zV2bK1JC9Xn1kzhS6?si=9ea0067b0eb1409d). This playlist invites readers into a sonic landscape as an alternate methodology and archive. It asks how we can think through milestones and approaches in new and unfamiliar ways? We hope that it will inspire you to add songs or to curate your own lists around your research. We launch the issue with a series of interviews from award-winning scholars and leaders, including Harry Elam, David Krasner, E. Patrick Johnson, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young. Their numerous contributions to Black Theatre Studies adorn many of our bookshelves and grace our syllabi. Each of these scholars in turn hailed a host of new voices—marking the rise of successive generations in the field and those are included in a section entitled “Afterviews.” A cluster of articles from Elizabeth Cizmar, Baron Kelly, Khalid Long, and Nathaniel Nesmith offers new insights into histories of Black artists, including Glenda Dickerson, Earle Hyman, Elaine Jackson, Ernie McLintock, Frederick O’Neal. A pair of short essays by Michelle Cowin Gibbs and Eric Glover presents contrasting interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s The Mule Bone. Two manifesto-style pieces from Omiyemi Green and Lisa Thompson confront assumptions about career trajectories in Black Theatre and the academy, Black Theatre pedagogy, and the particular challenges Black women have faced in the field. Another cluster of essays by Bernth Lindfors, Olga Sanchez Saltveit, and Isaiah Wooden prompts readers to expand their theoretical and methodological lenses, including rethinking familiar documentary sources, boundaries between Black and Latinx theater, and how scholars can mine the archive for previously undiscovered treasures. We close the articles section with a roundtable discussion that reflects on the role of the artist-scholar in the current moment. It looks back on the legacy of earlier artist-scholars, including Errol Hill, and it also asks how contemporary artist-scholars imagine their legacies. We invite readers to envision new possibilities that will not be measured only against what we have now. The issue closes with a special selection of book reviews focusing on new directions in Black Theatre, compiled by JADT Book Review Editor Maya Roth, as well as a list of the Errol Hill Award-winning books and articles over the past twenty-three years. The Errol Hill Award, launched in 1997, recognizes, “outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article” (astr.org). We hope that this special issue will prompt debate and will also invite those just beginning their work in Black Theatre into the field. We also hope that it will serve as a useful benchmark for the historical moment in which we find ourselves. Nicole Hodges Persley, Associate Professor, University of Kansas Heather S. Nathans, Professor, 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.

Kristin Moriah Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Kristin Moriah By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left. Malik Gaines. New York: NYU Press, 2017; Pp. 248. It begins with a bold proposition. In Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, scholar-practitioner Malik Gaines suggests that performance is a radical act and that black performances can amend “dominant discourses that manage representation and constrain the lives they organize” (1). Gaines analyzes this phenomenon “against the archives of three complicit registers, each of which engages a history of radicalism”: blackness; the sixties; and the transnational route between the United States, West Africa, and Europe (2-4). This configuration also permits Gaines to consider the “ties between visuality and power’s organization” (7). Thus, Gaines’s book uses interdisciplinary means to assess a range of stunning black cultural artifacts. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left adds to the field of black performance studies by providing crucial context for some of the most significant acts of black performance in the mid-twentieth century and by firmly rooting black performance studies within the even broader field of black diasporic studies. In the first chapter, Gaines considers the political nature of jazz singer Nina Simone’s onstage performances in the 1960s. In chapter two, he probes the plays of Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo and illustrates the complexities involved in the production of dramatic work meant to express a singular African identity. Gaines then directs his attention towards Günther Kaufmann and finds that the black German actor “problematizes the representation of national identity” on screen (96). In the final chapter, he illustrates the ways black drag queen Sylvester bolstered the Cockettes’ transgressive performances. In each of these contexts, with their strong transnational connective tissue, Gaines finds that black performance troubles hegemonic discourses surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood. Transnational black performance signifies black diaspora even as it disrupts audience expectations and political rhetoric. The geographic locations that comprise Gaines’s investigation include the United States, Ghana, and West Germany. Individually, these sites represent central nodes in studies of black diasporic cultural circulation, including those that take the current African migration crisis into consideration. Their triangulation here is significant. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left unites these various strains of black studies and makes strong claims for why they should be brought to the forefront simultaneously. In doing so, Gaines maintains that the interplay between these three sites demonstrates the way the theorization and performance of blackness in the United States acted as a touchstone for black diasporic subjects and white audiences the world over. In order to ground his project within the broader field of performance studies, Gaines responds to Afro-pessimist critiques of Marxian analyses à la Frank Wilderson. Gaines’s investigation of Nina Simone’s radical performance work can be considered alongside other recent contributions to the field of black studies, including Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. And yet, few critics besides Gaines have attempted to tease out the Brechtian implications of Nina Simone’s stagecraft. While the relationship between African Americans and Ghanaians during the 1960s might be well known, thanks to the work of scholars like Kevin Gaines, the work of Ghanaian playwrights like Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo remain relatively unexamined. Furthermore, Gaines investigates the hypervisibility of blackness in West Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann’s work with famed director Werner Fassbinder. Gaines’s afterword also takes contemporary Venice into consideration through his critique of the 2015 Venice Biennale and reminder that even in rarefied spaces, performance is always political. The result of these transnational case studies is nothing less than a reframing of the terms by which we understand the 1960s, the Nixon era, and our current political reality. Within this complex schema, the chapter entitled “The Cockettes, Sylvester, and Performance as Life” initially appears to be an outlier. A predominately white performance group who were active in the 1970s, the Cockettes push the boundaries of Gaines’s study regarding both time span and subject matter. But the chapter works precisely because it is excessive. The Cockettes’ inclusion allows Gaines to underscore the temporal excesses of the 1960s as well as the ubiquity of blackness on the American stage, even in its most marginalized outcroppings. The performative interventions of black drag queen Sylvester provide ample food for thought here. Gaines delineates the contrapuntal position of Sylvester against the political nuances of the San Francisco drag scene, with its origins in Brechtian forms of street theatre. Given the growing popularity of television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and increasing mainstream interest in drag performance, this chapter is perhaps a much-needed reminder of the black presence in politicized drag work. Gaines brings liminal performances of blackness like Sylvester’s into the critical fold while paying particular attention to the work of black feminist critics. His methodology involves a consciously political citational practice. For instance, Gaines claims that his first chapter contributes to the “emerging field of Nina Simone Studies” (22) and references critics like Daphne Brooks. Saidiyah Hartman’s Lose Your Mother helps to frame the second chapter. Tina Campt’s Other Germans is a notable influence on chapter three. In this way, Gaines’s work provides an essential model for advanced students and scholars in the field. Gaines is especially concerned with how radical black performance challenges the limits of visuality or turns the certainty that often attends visuality on its head. As such, music and the political potential of sound in the abstract to express blackness in radical ways become focal points. He argues that “music has served as a cultural and formal context that supports the kinds of multiplicitous expressions” (193) he sees in 1960s performance. So, for instance, Gaines insists on Nina Simone’s “quadruple consciousness, a dexterous deployment of authorship, presence, and voice that exceeded the prohibitions of race and gender while performing those terms” (23). Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left will appeal to scholars who recognize the impact of sound on performance, or Sound Studies writ large, as well as musicality at its baseline. Malik Gaines’s position as both a practitioner and a scholar lend a unique depth to this study, applying black performance theories and techniques to twentieth-century cultural objects across a transnational framework. His text reveals a striking sensitivity to the subtle frequencies on which black performance operates and is an important addition to the expanding black performance studies canon. Kristin Moriah Grinnell College The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 30, Number 2 (Spring 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.

Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF by Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023)ISNN 2376-4236©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center How can a traditional practice for Jewish text study inform the dramaturgical analysis of a new work development process? This article is a conversation between Jared Rubin Sprowls and Becca Levy about the playwright/dramaturg relationship in rehearsing a staged reading of Fringe Sects at Arizona State University in the spring of 2022. We were eager to gather in physical space with artists to re-engage with the liveness of our work, a process that had largely been put on hold since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. What began as a peer-reviewed research paper naturally grew into a dramaturgical adaptation of chevruta , a centuries old Rabbinic approach to interpreting Jewish texts. The style of this paper mimics our process of multiple voices in conversation. In chevruta, dialogue is necessary as one voice can’t capture the depth of a text; we can only approach understanding through discussion and interpretation. Through this lens, we push against prioritizing finality (a deadline, production, or publication) which dictates a linear process. Rather, we hold space to return again, offering a process that spans a lifetime as both the people and art deepen and unfold. We share authorship below, identifying the writer above each section. Though our names signify what we initially wrote, through revision, our voices continue to overlap, always in conversation. As we consider how this lens is valuable for new work development, both Jewish and non-Jewish, we invite you to engage in our reflection of Fringe Sects’ script development as a fellow chevruta partner: our voice, your voice, and the text. Jared In March 2020, I was finally ready to write my “Jewish play” based on a Buzzfeed article a friend sent to me a year prior: “Finding Kink in God: Inside The World Of Brooklyn Dominatrixes And Their Orthodox Jewish Clients.” [1] This article complicated the stereotype of Jewish sexuality I saw being portrayed on stage and screen: Jews as less sexual and less desirable. Expanding what a Jewish “man,” “woman,” or “relationship” looked like felt important to my own understanding of Jewish queerness and an inquiry I could share with my community. COVID interrupted that plan as Jewish sexuality onstage was no longer an urgent exploration, instead it was the last thing on my mind. What we thought would be a few weeks of mandated isolation became months. As Passover approached, I felt detached from my Jewish identity without the ability to invite friends over for Seder. The holiday traditions, rooted in community, didn’t feel the same with only me and my two roommates skimming through the Haggadah. In August 2021, I moved to Tempe, Arizona to pursue an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Fear of isolation continued, and I wondered what I’d do for the upcoming High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah felt like an opportunity for a new chapter in the desert, but I wondered if anyone would be there to join me. Becca That’s where our Research Methods course comes in; it was my first semester of grad school as well, beginning the MFA program in Theatre for Youth and Community at ASU. I had also just moved to Tempe from Chicago, and much to my delight and surprise the old song “Wherever you go there’s always someone Jewish” [2] proved to be true. I overheard Jared talking about Jewish dominatrixes and had to learn more. Jared As I discussed revisions to my research question, I vividly remember Becca leaning over to join the conversation. Another Jewish woman to discuss Jewish womanhood and femininity? Baruch Hashem! On that day, I was paired with Clara, whose Hebrew necklace had sparked conversation a class prior. Marissa would soon ask what we were doing for Rosh Hashanah. She too had overheard the musings of Jewish study and wanted to join. We had all worried that we’d be the only Jew in the program and were relieved to have found each other so quickly. Becca Jared and I requested to be paired for the final round of peer review. What was scheduled to be a brief meeting about our papers over coffee became a multi-hour conversation relating our artistry to our values and our values to our Judaism. We intuitively worked as chevruta: a non-hierarchical dyadic practice of Jewish text study rooted in traditional methods going back centuries. A chevruta partnership is a meaningful and holy relationship through which we understand text, and our relationship to text, more fully. The word chevruta comes from the Hebrew root chet, vet, reish, chaver , meaning “friend,” emphasizing that this relationship is between more than peers or colleagues. In fact, it’s not just a relationship between two voices, but three: two people and the text. Scholarly discourse around Fringe Sects was a catalyst for our partnership, while genuine friendship became central to our ongoing collaboration. Jared was researching about Jewish gender and sexuality while more deeply connecting with Jewish ways of being through his writing. Jared Where do the stereotypes, roles, and ideas of Jewish women come from? Who perpetuates them within our community and how does that differ from what we see in the media? Becca In my initial notes, I wrote about the importance of discoveries, using this play to reveal Jewish challenges and provide space for healing while weaving the Jewish with the universal– Jared Questions and themes that simultaneously drew me into Becca’s research. Becca What is the relationship between creativity, identity, and values in Jewish artmaking spaces? Grad school was the opportunity to further explore our embodied knowledge through research and practice. Jared Research and practice exist over coffee as much as they exist in conferences and classrooms. I got to know Becca through her research, and I better understood her research by getting to know Becca. Becca We spent the next semester together in a graduate Dramaturgy Workshop course. One of our first readings was from Geoffrey Proehl’s Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility ; I sent Jared a text, “Ok so I finally started the reading this morning and tbh I think a dramaturgical sensibility is just simply how Jews read Torah” [3] [4] . I quickly recognized in Proehl’s description of dramaturgical practice a kinship with Jewish ways of thinking, conversing, and analyzing. Jared “Isn’t there a Jewish thing about rehearing the Torah and the purpose of that? Helping me connect dramaturgy and Judaism again” [5] , I texted Becca as we continued to quip that “dramaturgy is Jewish.” It became our special segment in class where we reflected on how teachings from Jewish synagogue, camp, and school prepared us to analyze text as dramaturgs. Later that semester, I assembled a team for a staged reading of Fringe Sects at ASU: Marissa as director, Becca as dramaturg, and Clara, Matt (the only other Jew in our MFA program) and Sam (a non-Jewish MFA peer) as actors. The energy of the rehearsal room was immediately alive – Becca Is the milk a reference to milk and honey? Jared I hadn’t even thought of that. Becca What about the Binding of Isaac? Jared That sounds like BDSM. Becca Our playful yet serious conversations around script development were contagious, or perhaps Jared had just gathered the perfect group for this week-long rehearsal process. We were more than Jewish artists chosen for a Jewish play; we were friends. In our first few months of grad school, we had already spent High Holidays, birthdays, and Chanukah together, discussed art that was important to us, and reflected on the ways our Judaism connected us even when it manifested differently. In fact, the different shades of Judaism were what we celebrated most: the variety of latke recipes, family and community traditions, or the way we pronounced “bimah.” Questioning, connecting, and respecting the multitude of text interpretations based on our diverse lived experiences were the foundation upon which the script could develop so significantly in such a short amount of time. Reflecting upon the process, it is clear that this ensemble intuitively worked from a place of shared values. Jared It was interpretive. It was direct. It was Jewish. Becca Jared and I always bring these values into our creative practice. Through this process we affirmed that we practice those values creatively in specifically Jewish ways. Text messages between Jared and Becca during Fringe Sects development. Jared Although I had been in a new work development space with other Jewish artists, I had never felt that a room was guided by a Jewish way of reading text in the way this process was. Sam’s active participation proved that anyone can engage with text in this way. Not only did this way of working benefit the script, but it was life-giving. I was no longer an isolated writer but an artist in the community. Becca Going deeper into the etymology of chevruta, the Hebrew chaver (friend) derives from the Aramaic, chibor , meaning “to bind together.” In this process, chevruta partners’ understanding of text becomes bound together in discussion, creating something entirely new with what is on the page. Below is an example of a text study where a peer and I engaged with the very first Torah portion. The first translation you’ll read is a more standard version and the second is a collaborative translation discovered in shared study. While working with the text, I was drawn to the word “ ruach ” which translates to “wind” or “spirit” and my partner noticed “ pnei ” which can mean “surface” or “face.” We excitedly investigated more translations and read the text anew. Together, we uncovered a translation that neither of us would have found on our own. Hebrew words with multiple meanings are illustrated below in corresponding colors. I invite you to notice what is the same, what is different, and how these changes influence your understanding of the text. When God created heaven and earth , the earth was chaos and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God fluttering over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) When The Universe began to create sky and land , the land was without form and void. Behold darkness over the face of the abyss and the spirit of Creation floating over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) [6] Stereotypical depictions of dramaturgy seem so isolating– an image of a lonely scholar with their head in their laptop or a book comes to mind; it’s not so different from the rabbi locked in their study or b’nai mitzvah student up in their room, practicing their Torah portion alone. But these are all misrepresentations of reality. To be Jewish is to congregate. To make theatre is to congregate. In the process of working together we bond with one another and the work binds to the point where it’s sometimes hard to know where one person’s idea ends and another’s begins. Jared and I intuitively did this work with our research papers, with everything we read in Dramaturgy Workshop, and with our collaboration on Fringe Sects . Jared Below is a visual representation of our chevruta-inspired conversations analyzing a paragraph from the opening monologue of the play, Rabbi Moshe’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, which we’ve retroactively formatted in the style of rabbinic commentary of Talmud. Visual representation of chevruta-inspired conversation between Becca and Jared on Fringe Sects script text. Becca Rabbi Adina Allen writes, “Like the parchment wound around the Torah handles, our reading of this story is not circular, but spiral. We move along the same axis, but drop in and down, unearthing new meanings in the cracks of our old stories” [7] . This concept of time provides repetition while acknowledging that with repetition comes a new depth of experience in the present. During our collaboration on Fringe Sects , Jared and I trusted each other to continue to drop in and down in the reading and re-reading, writing, and re-writing, talking and re-talking of the script. We built trust and a shared language through cultural understanding, shared values, and unearthing new meanings while the script developed. The play is set during The Ten Days of Awe, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we’re tasked with Tshuvah. Tshuvah means to “return:” to return to right relationship with one another, the world around us, and ourselves. We return to something old or familiar – an ancient practice, text, or question. We seek to find something new, not in hopes of the perfect answer or action, but to embrace the multiplicity of interpretations and meaning-making as part of the process. Jared Even in the process of writing this article, we return again. Remembering text messages we forgot we had sent, making notes for our next stage of development. Becca (I still want Jared to add the shehecheyanu into that scene). Jared (I will). Becca These conversations ground us because there’s always something new to uncover. Jared If chevruta is three voices, our process contains even more: playwright, dramaturg, director, cast, characters, script, research, prayer, Torah, and Talmud. If Jewish text, ancient and unchanging, contains such multitudes, we must listen to all possibilities as a new work finds its voice. To give a script agency is to understand that it will never actually be finished… Becca …but it is always where it’s supposed to be. Jared Jewish values tell us that we too are not finished and that growth is a lifelong process. Becca As the spiral continues to deepen, may we delight in moments of synchronicity and express gratitude for moments of divergence. Jared & Becca As this article concludes, we invite you to bring yourself into our chevruta practice. In doing so you join us in community and together we begin again. References About The Authors Becca Levy is an arts educator and theatre artist who facilitates educational programs and theatrical productions that center community, celebrate culture, and foster creativity for people of all ages. Becca worked as a teaching artist, arts program manager, and stage manager in Chicago after earning her BFA in Stage Management from Western Michigan University. Currently studying for an MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community at Arizona State University, her praxis explores the relationship between creativity and values, drawing from many years of work and play in Jewish arts programming and theatre teaching artistry. www.beccaglevy.com Jared Rubin Sprowls is a Chicago-based playwright currently in Tempe, Arizona pursuing an MFA in Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University. His work has been produced Off-Broadway through the Araca Project, as well as at Northwestern University and the Skokie Theatre. He is a 2018 O’Neill NPC Semi-finalist and has been a part of Available Light’s Next Stage Initiative, the New Coordinates’ Writers’ Room 6.0, and Jackalope Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. He is a project-based staff member with Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training. He holds a B.A. with Honors in Theatre from Northwestern 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

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

EXPOSURE: A group show of performance works exploring the body. PERFORMANCE BY: Ilan Bachrach Kristel Baldoz Blaze Ferrer Hannah Kallenbach Julia Mounsey Alexander Paris Matt Romein Alex Tatarsky Peter Mills Weiss Kristin Worrall At The Collapsable Hole 155 Bank Street New York, NY 10014 Seating extremely limited. Tickets are first come first served. The Collapsable Hole box office opens at 6pm. Please arrive early to secure your ticket and enjoy free refreshments. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Exposure Radiohole Theater, Performance Art English 90 minutes 7:00PM EST Saturday, October 7, 2023 The Collapsable Hole, Bank Street, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All EXPOSURE: A group show of performance works exploring the body. PERFORMANCE BY: Paris Alexander Kristel Baldoz Blaze Ferrer Hannah Kallenbach Dante Migone-Ojeda Julia Mounsey Matt Romein Alex Tatarsky Peter Mills Weiss Kristin Worrall HOSTED BY: Fantasy Grandma VISUAL ART BY: Robert Bunkin & Jenny Tango At The Collapsable Hole 155 Bank Street New York, NY 10014 Tickets are first come first served. The Collapsable Hole box office opens at 6pm. Please arrive early to secure your ticket and enjoy free refreshments. Radiohole is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Radiohole's work is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Content / Trigger Description: Please email radiohole@gmail.com for information about content and access. https://www.radiohole.com/ https://thehole.site/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Etudes can be considered part tribunal of evidence — guided and constrained by the statutory powers of the “Interrogator” — and part ritualistic psychodynamic investigation of a sovereign polity toward emotional and restorative justice involving a collective of accused citizenry. This new multimedia performance in development by Carl Hancock Rux, with dramaturgy by Jocelyn Clarke, creates a philosophical convening of characters engaged in a recalling of crimes against humanity and its effect on their personal, historical and psychological development - as they endeavor a world of racial healing and sustainable equity as emotional justice, and a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work. This emotional work means unlearning the language and varying rituals of whiteness - a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Etudes Carl Hancock Rux, Mabou Mines Theater, Multimedia, Performance Art English 20 minutes 7:30PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Etudes can be considered part tribunal of evidence — guided and constrained by the statutory powers of the “Interrogator” — and part ritualistic psychodynamic investigation of a sovereign polity toward emotional and restorative justice involving a collective of accused citizenry. This new multimedia performance in development by Carl Hancock Rux, with dramaturgy by Jocelyn Clarke, creates a philosophical convening of characters engaged in a recalling of crimes against humanity and its effect on their personal, historical and psychological development - as they endeavor a world of racial healing and sustainable equity as emotional justice, and a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work. This emotional work means unlearning the language and varying rituals of whiteness - a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. Development support for this piece has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and Venturous Theater Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation. Content / Trigger Description: Carl Hancock Rux (writer/performer) is an American poet, award-winning playwright, novelist, essayist, recording artist, actor, theater director, radio journalist, published author, and a frequent collaborator in the fields of film, modern dance, and contemporary art. The New York Times heralded Rux as "a breathlessly inventive multimedia artist." Rux is the author of several books including the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta, the novel, Asphalt, and the Obie Award-winning play, Talk. His music has been released internationally on several labels including Sony/550, Thirsty Ear, and Giant Step. Rux is also Associate Artistic Director/Curator-in-Residence at Harlem Stage. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Doris Duke Award for New Works, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Prize, the Bessie Award, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and a 2019 Global Change Maker award by WeMakeChange.org. Rux is also an associate artist with Compagnia de Colombari (an experimental theater company founded by Karin Coonrod); a Multidisciplinary Editor to the Mass Review at UMass Amherst; Yale University Hayden Fellow; an Associate & Advisory Artist at the Billie Holiday Theater and an Associate Artist with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts where, most recently, he has created several multidisciplinary works; Inaugural Performing & Associate Artist at Joe's Pub at the Joseph Papp Public Theater; a member of the New York Historic Landmarks Preservation Center; Faculty Emeritus at the California Institute of the Arts and Distinguished Faculty Member at Hollins University. Rux's archives are housed at the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, and the Film and Video/Theater and Dance Library of the California Institute of the Arts. Jocelyn Clarke (dramaturg) is a freelance dramaturg and writer. He is currently Theatre Adviser to the Arts Council of Ireland and dramaturg at the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage in D.C. He has taught dramaturgy at the John Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, Columbia University and Trinity College Dublin. He was the Commissioning and Literary Manager of the Abbey Theatre for four years, and lead theatre critic with The Sunday Tribune for nine years. He is an associate artist with The Civilians in New York, and he is a member of the artistic staff of the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab. He has worked as a dramaturg on several productions by The Blue Raincoat Theatre in Sligo, and has written five adaptations for the company – ALICE IN WONDERLAND, ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, THE THIRD POLICEMAN, AT SWIM TWO BIRDS and THE POOR MOUTH. He has written six plays for Anne Bogart and the SITI Company – BOB, ALICE’S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND, ROOM, SCORE, ANTIGONE, and TROJAN WOMEN (AFTER EURIPIDES). His productions for children and young people include an adaptation of Neil Gaiman and David McKean’s graphic novel THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR A GOLDFISH, THE LITTLE DEER, THE CRIMSON FLY & THE SWAN CHILDREN for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and FINN for Mabou Mines in New York. Mabou Mines is an artist-driven experimental theater collective generating original works and re-imagined adaptations of classics. Work is created through multi-disciplinary, technologically inventive collaborations among its members and a wide world of contemporary filmmakers, composers, writers, musicians, choreographers, puppeteers and visual artists. Mabou Mines fosters the next generation of artists through mentorship and residencies. The company was born out of the influences and inspirations of Europe’s seminal avant-garde theater collectives. Before arriving in New York in 1970, the would-be ensemble of Mabou Mines spent five years in Europe observing and studying the working methods of the Berliner Ensemble, the politics of the exiled Living Theater and the demands of physical training with Jerzy Grotowski. Since that time, Mabou Mines has created more than 120 works, including “The Lost Ones,” “Mabou Mines Lear, “ “Peter and Wendy,” “Mabou Mines DollHouse,” and “La Divina Caricatura” and “Lucia’s Chapters,” and has been honored with more than 100 major awards, among them 20 OBIEs, including for General Excellence & Sustained Achievement, MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, France’s Chevalier Des Artes et Lettres, The Edwin Booth Award, Edinburgh’s Golden Herald Angel Awards, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Elliot Norton Award, three USA Fellowships and many, many more. The current co-Artistic Directors include Karen Kandel, Mallory Catlett, Carl Hancock Rux and Sharon Ann Fogarty. carlhancockrux.com, @carlhancockrux, maboumines.org, facebook.com/mabouminescompany, @maboumines Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 18, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Dan Venning Report from London (December 2022) Philippa Wehle Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 Ivan Medenica “Regietheater:” two cases Anton Pujol The Grec Festival 2023 Kalina Stefanova The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Marvin Carlson Report from Germany Ion M. Tomuș Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

By Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka | An innovative collection of plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. < Back Decadent Histories: Four Plays by Amelia Hertz Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka Download PDF Translated and Edited by Jadwiga Kosicka Born in 1878, Polish-Jewish playwright Amelia Hertz wrote in the early twentieth century innovative plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. She created a tightly controlled theatre of cruelty-set in decadent periods of ancient history–that confront extreme situations and pose “no exit” ethical and existential dilemmas. Hertz died in the notorious Pawiak Gestapo prison in Warsaw in 1942, a victim of the Nazis. Ysolde of the White Hands, Fleur-de-Lys, The Destruction of Tyre, and A Great King, which make up this volume of Decadent Histories, deal with fin-de-siècle subjects rife with perverse sexuality and violence: the Tristan myth in revisionist guise from a female perspective; the serial child-murderer Gilles de Rais and his young daughter who develops a taste for murder herself; the Prophet Ezekiel as he visits the ruins of Tyre; and the decline of Byzantium under Justinian and his general Belisarius during a time of conspiracies. More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu

Watch The Making of Pinocchio by Cade & MacAskill at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. A true tale of love and transition told through the story of Pinocchio. In this hybrid of theatre and film, shot and edited all in one take, you are invited to go behind the scenes of Cade & MacAskill’s creative process and their relationship, and question what it takes to tell your truth. Artists and lovers Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill have been creating The Making of Pinocchio since 2018, alongside and in response to Ivor’s gender transition. In this digital edition of the work, their tender and complex autobiographical experience meets the magical story of the lying puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’. With an ingenious scenography designed by Tim Spooner, layered with sound by Yas Clarke, lights by Jo Palmer and cinematography from Kirstin McMahon, the show employs split-screen, forced perspective and intimate close ups to constantly shift between between fantasy and authenticity, humour and intimacy, on stage and on screen. The Making of Pinocchio joyfully embraces the importance of imagination in queer worldmaking and the idea of transness as a state of possibility that can trouble fixed perspectives and inspire change. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Making of Pinocchio At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Cade & MacAskill Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 17th. About The Film Country Scotland Language English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2021 A true tale of love and transition told through the story of Pinocchio. In this hybrid of theatre and film, shot and edited all in one take, you are invited to go behind the scenes of Cade & MacAskill’s creative process and their relationship, and question what it takes to tell your truth. Artists and lovers Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill have been creating The Making of Pinocchio since 2018, alongside and in response to Ivor’s gender transition. In this digital edition of the work, their tender and complex autobiographical experience meets the magical story of the lying puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’. With an ingenious scenography designed by Tim Spooner, layered with sound by Yas Clarke, lights by Jo Palmer and cinematography from Kirstin McMahon, the show employs split-screen, forced perspective and intimate close ups to constantly shift between between fantasy and authenticity, humour and intimacy, on stage and on screen. The Making of Pinocchio joyfully embraces the importance of imagination in queer worldmaking and the idea of transness as a state of possibility that can trouble fixed perspectives and inspire change. Commissioned by Fierce Festival, Kampnagel, Tramway & Viernulvier with support from Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Battersea Arts Centre, LIFT and Take Me Somewhere. Produced by Artsadmin. Funded by Creative Scotland, Arts Council England and Rudolf Augstein Stiftung with development support from The Work Room/Diane Torr Bursary, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, National Theatre of Scotland, Live Art Development Agency, Gessnerallee, Mousonturm, Forest Fringe, West Kowloon Cultural District & LGBT Health & Wellbeing Scotland. Created by Rosana Cade & Ivor MacAskill Performed by Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill, Jo Hellier & Moa Johansson, Tim Spooner & Ray Gammon Set, Prop & Costume Designer: Tim Spooner Sound Designer: Yas Clarke Sound/AV Technician and show operator: Riwa Saab Cameras: Jo Hellier & Moa Johansson Lighting Designer: Jo Palmer Relighter: Meghan Hodgson, Marty Langthorne Cinematographer: Kirstin McMahon & Jo Hellier Produced by Dr. Nora Laraki & Nene Camara for Artsadmin Creation produced by Mary Osborn for Artsadmin Production Manager: Sorcha Stott-Strzala Assistant Stage Manager: Ray Gammon Outside Eye: Nic Green Movement advisor: Eleanor Perry Captioning: Collective Text, Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill & Jamie Rea Caption Design: Yas Clarke & Daniel Hughes About The Artist(s) The duo holds the audience with a brand of mischievous humour that’s provocative and reassuring in equal measure.’ Exeunt Cade & MacAskill are Rosana Cade (they/them) and Ivor MacAskill (he/him): renowned queer artists and facilitators based in Glasgow, Scotland. Their work, together and individually, straddles the worlds of experimental contemporary theatre, live art, queer cabaret, film, children’s performance, site specific, and socially engaged practices. Their collaboration is born from a shared love of subversive humour, experimentation with persona and text, playful theatricality, and the joy they find in improvising together. They also share a passion for LGBTQIA+ rights and culture. They create strange, rich aesthetic worlds on stage, with unique sonic elements embedded into their work due to ongoing collaboration with sound artist and designer Yas Clarke. In 2017 they were commissioned by Fierce - Birmingham, The Marlborough - Brighton, and The Yard - London, to create Moot Moot which premiered early 2018. This was then selected as part of the British Council Showcase and the Made in Scotland Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2019, where it enjoyed a sell-out run at Summerhall, and they began to tour this show across Europe before the pandemic hit. Since 2018 they have been working on ‘The Making of Pinocchio’, which was supported though residencies at Gessnerallee in Zurich and Mousonturm in Frankfurt, as well as The Diane Torr Award bursary. They also regularly perform across club, music and performance contexts as their experimental concept band ‘Double Pussy Clit Fuck’. Footage from these gigs has inspired the creation of two new video works during the Covid Pandemic: ‘Taps Aff’, and ‘Presenting Our Selves’. The latter was commissioned by The Place - London for Splayed festival 2020, and selected as part of Scottish Queer International Film festival 2021. They are both experienced facilitators and trained volunteers with LGBT Youth (Glasgow). They are currently in the process of setting up a co-operative to open a new LGBTQIA+ second-hand shop / community space in Glasgow. Get in touch with the artist(s) nora@artsadmin.co.uk and follow them on social media Artists: @cademacaskill (Twitter and Instagram)Producer: @artsadm (Twitter and Instagram), @Artsadmin (Facebook)Fierce Festival @fiercefestivalKampnagel @kampnagel_hamburg (Instagram) @kampnagel (Twitter)Tramway @GlasgowTramwayVIERNULVIER @viernulvier.gent (Instagram) @VIERNULVIERGent (Twitter)Attenborough Centre of the Arts @AttenboroughCtrBattersea Arts Centre @Battersea_ArtsLIFT @LIFTFestival Website: https://www.cademacaskill.com/ https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/project/the-making-of-pinocchio/ Social media handles Twitter and Instagram: Commissioners and supporters: Take Me Somewhere @TMsomewhere Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here.

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder By Published on May 6, 2023 Download Article as PDF by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center On a mild day in June 2020, four actors, each in their own car, paraded through the small, rural college town of Sewanee, Tennessee. Similar to the pageant wagons of medieval times, the goal was to bring theatre to the people all while offering entertainment, enlightenment, and an opportunity for fellowship. The production: The Front Porch Plays, an evening of socially-distanced, Covid-safe, micro-theatre. [caption id="attachment_4980" align="aligncenter" width="606"] Actor Virginia Craighill performs for community members.[/caption] Made popular in Spain, micro-theatre aims to create intimate theatrical experiences by performing short-form theatre to small audiences. Developed in response to the financial crisis in Spain, micro-theatre became a way to produce new theatre at a time when the arts were underfunded. Productions are produced quickly, with minimal financial investment, making them affordable for artists who want to create theatre that is accessible. The Front Porch Plays was also created in response to a crisis: the Covid pandemic. Theatre has always been a communal event: it is both created and consumed together. As it became clear that the country’s three-week social experiment in isolation in the spring of 2020 was going to extend through the summer I began to explore ways to tell stories which allowed for human interaction while also maintaining social distancing. Inspired by the innovative work being done by arts organizations forced to pivot away from their traditional programming, The Front Porch Plays was born. My interest in site-specific theatre makes me look at my surroundings through a different lens. I see possibility in unlikely places. I’ve hosted new work in kitchens, art galleries, and even a freight elevator. However, because of the pandemic indoor spaces were off-limits. Social distancing would require more space. Luckily, our town, which sits on the Cumberland Plateau provided the perfect setting. Like so many theatre artists, I found myself feeling an enormous sense of loss as our new reality became apparent. A world-premiere production of a new play, two years in the making, was shut down eight days into rehearsal while other projects I had planned were put on hold. In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote monologues for two theatre companies that were pivoting to online programming. These events offered me the opportunity to write while contributing to the theatre community that had been decimated. With those two pieces as my foundation, I began writing additional monologues. My hope was to create a short collection of monologues that worked in conversation with one another. Monologues can be deceptive in their simplicity; however, a well-written monologue not only tells a story, but it has a clear objective and is active. Each character I created wanted something very specific: a mother who wanted to pass down her cast iron skillet; a teenager who wanted the freedom to watch a comet she would only see once in her lifetime; a man who wanted to connect with his neighbor. While none of the monologues explicitly mentioned the pandemic, the subtext of each piece informed the audience that these were people unable to move freely in the world, who were trying to make connections with others despite barriers. Once I had several monologues to choose from, I settled on four that I knew I could cast from within my community. The goal was to make the event long enough to feel fulfilling while keeping it short enough to perform multiple times a night for multiple groups of people. We began by rehearsing over Zoom and then gathered outdoors to run the show. To help with transitions we added a guitar player. The monologues, when presented together, ran approximately 12 minutes in total. Because we are a small town, I was able to create a route each night that required only a three to five-minute drive between each stop. We limited ourselves to five performances each night which meant that with performance and travel time, I was only asking for 90 minutes of commitment from the actors. The show was billed as “socially distanced micro-theatre from the safety of your front porch.” Hosts were asked to limit guests to ten. This made it easier to social distance, but in the spirit of micro-theatre, it also created a more intimate experience. Word spread quickly as community members, eager for something to look forward to, signed up. Guests waited; some gathered on their front porches, others in lawn chairs in their yards, and they cheered when we arrived. The project was so popular that we added a second weekend of performances. [caption id="attachment_4981" align="aligncenter" width="606"] Community members waiting for the arrival of the Front Porch Plays. The audience was asked to social-distance and limit their group to 10 people.[/caption] The response from the community was overwhelming. One audience member wrote, "We would like to thank you so much for your efforts in providing a really special experience this past weekend! It was such fun, and really perfection! We continue to marvel at how the community comes together and shares their many gifts with others!” Another responded by saying, "This was such a gift. It was a reminder of the outside world, a way to enter another world, and a way to be (safely) in community." Once I knew the project was possible, I created a “how to” guide to walk people through the entire process and offered it to theatres royalty-free as long as their performances were free of charge. The project was quickly picked up by the Nomad Theatre, based in Indiana. Rather than charging admission, they chose to accept donations. On their first day of performances, they raised more than $1300 which was then split between organizations that support Black and LGBTQ+ communities. According to producer Connie Blick, “Each and every one of us felt alive again, being able to be creative and share our talents in front of an audience.” Theatre artists have always responded in times of crisis. It is the way we make sense of the world around us. At a time when we were otherwise isolated from one another, theatre once again offered a way to examine the human condition while creating connection and community. [caption id="attachment_4979" align="aligncenter" width="455"] Actor Jim Crawford performs his monologue for community members in Sewanee, TN.[/caption] Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder is currently the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her work has been produced, developed, and commissioned by the Royal Court, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre, New Conservatory Theatre, Arden Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Geva Theatre, Sloan Foundation, and Pioneer Theatre, among others. Elyzabeth is a graduate of NYU and an alum of Youngblood. www.wilderwriting.net 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:

Rooted in the history and embodied wisdom of doulas and midwives, "axes, herbs and satchels" is a celebration of traditional knowledge held in the Black birth worker community and a potent examination of maternal mortality. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE axes, herbs and satchels Melissa Moschitto/The Anthropologists Theater English 30 minutes 7:30PM EST Thursday, October 19, 2023 The Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Rooted in the history and embodied wisdom of doulas and midwives, "axes, herbs and satchels" is a celebration of traditional knowledge held in the Black birth worker community and a potent examination of maternal mortality. Early development of this play was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Content / Trigger Description: Please be advised that this showing contains descriptions, depictions, and language surrounding maternal mortality, racism toward the Black birthing body, infant mortality, descriptions of birth and various medical procedures. If you need to step out, please be aware of your exits and take care of your health. The Anthropologists is dedicated to the collaborative creation of investigative theatre that inspires action. Fusing research, expressive movement, and rigorous dramaturgy, we create dynamic plays rooted in social inquiry. We use theatre to engage with challenging questions, to re-contextualize the present and reimagine our collective future. Founded in 2008. www.theanthropologists.org Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF Headshot of Michael Feingold from 1973. Photo: William Baker. Courtesy Feingold Archive. Art is of the artist, and the artist has to find and create it his own way, but art is for the audience, and to refuse to be relevant, to refuse to communicate, to refuse to make the attempt, on any grounds, is to be less of an artist. Art cannot exist for the past, for there is no past; and because we have serious doubts that there will be a future, it dare not exist for the future. To make art fully meaningful for the present is to absorb into it both the past and the future, to make them, in the minds of the audience, the now-serving continuum that they make in reality. —Michael Feingold, “Do We Need Greek Drama?” yale/theatre , Spring 1968 Introduction The 1968 journal precursor to Theater magazine, yale/theatre, asked whether modern audiences needed Greek theatre. Michael Feingold’s fellow editor, Ren Frutkin, wrote that they wanted to gather the “activities of the Yale School of Drama: the theatre, thought, discussion, dream, art, people through essays, plays, poems, reviews and graphics” in this new publication. The canon of Greek plays was relevant to their first issue because Greek theatre “resonates with people in the process of changing their way of thinking about themselves.” These young theatre students—with their provocative lower case journal title—were graduate drama students during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy. A changing world was around them as LBJ gave way to Nixon, and Michael Feingold, literary criticism major, was ready to tell the world that its theatre needed to reflect the past and the present in meaningful ways to impact an unknown future; “ancient civilizations are metaphors,” wrote Feingold, “like works of art, in the image of contemporary civilization.” Michael Feingold (1945-2022) wore a variety of hats in the theatre, though primarily known as a theatre critic for the radical Village Voice from 1971-2013 . Few know that he was an original editor at yale/theatre and the first literary manager (or dramaturg) of the Yale Repertory Theatre, as well as the Guthrie Theater and American Place Theatre. He was the General Editor of a set of groundbreaking experimental theatre publication known as the Winter Repertory . He spent summers nurturing playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy and August Wilson at O’Neill Playwrighting Conferences. He wrote and published poetry, both original and translated. He translated Romance and Germanic Language plays into English including Brecht/Weill, Copi, Goldoni. His works were performed on Broadway and off-Broadway, in California, Norway, and Singapore. He was a director, a playwright, an adaptor, and while he had a caustic personal style, he knew theatre history, and would make sure everyone knew it. When Michael died in 2022, he left a large rental apartment full of books, albums, DVDS and audio-visual material, 18th through 20th century theatre memorabilia, art, and theatrical posters from Yale to Lincoln Center of shows he was involved in. In total, 109 bankers boxes of papers including correspondence, childhood photographs and actor headshots, scripts sent to him in press packets or authors seeking advice, as well as his own personal work at Columbia and Yale, the Winter Repertory, and his own reviews, which are currently neither digitized nor available to the public. This is the “Feingold Project,” as it is called by the team put together by preliminary estate executor, Daniel Diego Pardo, his husband, playwright Brian Quirk, and project archivist Tanya Elder. Pardo gathered a crew who had worked with or knew Michael, packed his belongings and transferred them to office space in Tin Pan Alley (an appropriate location, Feingold would say) where his collection was inventoried, and Pardo and Quirk began the impossible task of finding homes for what Feingold called, “his accumulations” in a New York Stage Review article from 2012 titled “Of Merch and Memorabilia.” The Feingold Project continues its search to place Michael’s rich collection of personal papers into an archive. In April 2024, Feingold’s long-time friend and collaborator, Jim Nicola—recently retired as beloved Artistic Director of the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW)—spoke with Pardo and Elder regarding Feingold’s papers, his place in theatre history and scholarship (including the rich world of LGBTQ+ artists) in the American theatre for American audiences. They met at the Feingold Project offices, where Nicola was able to view some of the archival materials in the collection and reminisced about their own work together on Two Blind Beggars at the old WPA Theatre. Tanya Elder: When I first looked at Michael Feingold’s vast archive of posters, programs, correspondence, books, and art, one of the things I remember from when I studied experimental theatre at NYU is the journal yale/theatre , which was the precursor to the Theater magazine. yale/theatre had biting material about theatre and politics. And I think Yale is where Michael got a lot of his groundwork for life. It was the height of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Jim Nicola: When was he at Yale? Elder: He graduated with a BA from Columbia [English/Comparative Literature] from 1962-1966. And then he attended Yale from 1966 to 1972 for an MFA. Daniel Diego Pardo: He was there when critic and writer Robert Brustein was in his first year. He met Brustein at Columbia. When Brustein got a job at Yale, he brought Michael there. Elder: There are letters in the archive between Brustein and Michael. Michael writes “Can you get me in?” and Brustein writes back: “Read the newspaper tomorrow and you'll find out your answer.” Pardo: And they inaugurated Yale Rep. Michael was its first literary manager. Nicola: Yes, when it was still a relatively new form. Elder : We have the program and poster from the Yale production of The Frogs (1974). On the third page, you'll see cast members Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang, and the rest of the cast. Pardo: It is signed by the entire cast, including Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove, and Michael had a bootleg recording of the production as well. Elder: We spoke to the Sondheim Foundation and are waiting to hear back... Pardo: The production took place in a swimming pool! And you can hear the water on the recording. Elder: This began his relationship with actor Alvin Epstein. Pardo: [ Reading names on program.] Alvin. Carmen de Lavallade. Steve Lawson. Jeremy Geidt. Jeremy Dempsey. Jonathan Marks. These are incredible people! Pardo: We are hoping that the archive will find a home soon. But it’s a complicated process. Elder: The second thing I want to point out is that Michael was one of the most pivotal people in experimental theatre in New York. He was there at the beginning. He was the first person to publish Mad Dog Blues by Sam Shephard and other plays for his Winter Repertory series (Feingold, Winter Repertory 1970-1973), which included six other volumes from different playwrights including Tom Eyen, Rochelle Owens, Robert Patrick, María Irene Fornés, Amiri Baraka, Jim Jacobs, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Warren Casey. Nicola: Wow. Elder: One of the volumes was supposed to be Jean-Claude van Itallie’s India Journal which didn’t end up happening, but we have the copy that has both van Itallie’s notes and Michael's notes about publishing it. Michael was the first to publish Grease . Pardo: He wrote the foreword for Grease . I believe it might be the off-Broadway version. We have one Grease hardcover version with Jim Jacob’s autograph in it. Elder: One of the most incredible things about Michael is that he kept everything . Pardo: Yes, even if it was a random piece of paper with his production notes, or a program from an Off-Off-Broadway play that he saw. The archive is a little like a time capsule of history from the Off- and Off-Off Broadway Movement. Elder: He kept the flyers of every performance he went to, including obscure downtown theatre. There's a lot of stuff with David Greenspan, for example. Nicola: The Beggar's Opera ! Do you have any of the shows that he and I did together? Pardo: It's probably in here somewhere. Elder: He… Pardo: …saved everything. Nicola: He did a translation of an Offenbach one-act operetta called Two Blind Beggars . Elder: We have it. Nicola: I directed it. He brought it to me. We did it at the old WPA on Bowery on a double bill with Trial by Jury . Elder: We have everything that he ever wrote and everything he ever saw. Nicola: [ Pointing to headshot of Michael taped to wall. ] Oh, look at that wonderful picture! What year would that be? Pardo: 1973. That was just after his time at Yale. Nicola: I remember him then. Pardo: Remember this? It’s the Grove New American Theatre: An Anthology (Feingold, Grove New American Theater 1992) edited by Michael Feingold. It includes Mysteries and What’s So Funny by David Gordon; Sincerity Forever by Mac Wellman; The American Plan by Richard Greenberg; Theory of Total Blame by Karen Finley; Das Vedanya Mamma by Ethyl Eichelberger; and Dead Mother or Shirley Not All In Vain by David Greenspan. It was published in 1993. He was such an advocate of experimental theatre. Elder: He excoriated the theatre and politics, as he felt the theatre should impact the audience and use their collective memory to elevate the audience to react…. and he felt that these plays were necessary as the basis of good theatre that was politically active. Nicola: This is incredible. Elder: Here are the first four volumes of yale/theatre beginning in Spring 1968 with the question, “Do We Need Greek Theatre?”. The second was entitled “Crisis 1968: Politics and Imagination,” the Spring 1969 edition was dedicated to the Living Theatre, who appeared at Yale when they returned to the United States after a self-imposed and tax-related exile in Europe, and the fourth, “New Playwrights.” We have the full run of the journal, which included about eleven issues with two editions containing individual short plays. Michael was on the editorial board, with Ren Frutkin and Joseph Cazelet in the first volume, and David Copelin for the third volume with various editors. The publication ran to 1975. I believe Michael was involved until about 1972. Pardo: In 1972, he was already established in New York as a critic at the Village Voice . Elder: Yes. And he wrote for more than just the Village Voice . He also wrote for Mirabella , Plays and Players Magazine, if you remember that. Nicola: Yes, I have a stack of Plays and Players . Elder: The problem with publications like this is that many libraries already have the publications themselves, the same goes for a stack of Plays and Players . It’s difficult to move some of that stuff in the archive. But we have so much of it. However, Michael retained the source materials for yale/theatre and the Winter Repertory . Original copyedited material, correspondence, photographs for both publications. Nicola: This is incredible. I grew up just outside of Hartford. And I graduated from high school in ‘68. So, I lived the founding with Robert Brustein arriving at Yale. It was something I was excited about. It is my impression that Brustein and Michael created the notion of a dramaturg in American theatre practice. Elder: That is the job of an archive—to figure out where this stuff is going to go and get an overview of the impact it had then and now. Pardo: With this archive, a PhD student in theatre and performance could delve into it. This would be a beginning or a kind of a springboard into where and what was happening back then. Nicola: Was his MFA in Drama Criticism? Elder: It was in Literary Criticism. Nicola: Yes, because they didn’t have a “dramaturgical” focus yet at that time. It ultimately became “Criticism and Dramaturgy,” I believe. Elder: In this volume of essays editor David Copelin mentions at midnight on the day of the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the second yale/theatre volume on “1968: Crisis and Imagination” that “a group of drama school students was to attend the dress rehearsal of Sam Shepard’s Icarus's Mother at a New Haven playhouse.” And Michael also mentions in his essay in the issue that New Haven was burning. Pardo: What I would want as an outsider to the archive is a frame of entrance. When did Dramaturgy start to officially come into American theatre practice? And when did they start hiring Dramaturgs? There was a while there when it was called “literary manager.” Elder: This is what Michael was called in the early days. Pardo: He was the literary manager at the Guthrie. Nicola: In so many ways, he was a pioneer. Elder: Someone could search out Michael’s Yale-era papers to really think about that development. He did have many opinions, and he wrote about them very strongly, even at Yale. Nicola: He was inspired by the Russian and German theaters. Pardo: That could very well be a PhD thesis. Nicola: It could be a hook to so much to discover about that period. Growing up in Hartford in the 1960s, and being an adolescent then, I witnessed the birth of the Hartford Stage, Yale Rep, of Long Wharf, of the now defunct Stage West in Springfield. Goodspeed. The O’Neill. All of that within ten years. Michael was at the center of it. But he was also one of the observers and articulators of it all. Elder: Here are some of his papers from his undergraduate days at Columbia that kind of formed him. He got A’s on all of them. It’s his first year of college. He’s a sophomore here, or freshman. Pardo: [ Reading a title of one of Michael’s papers. ] “The Development of Tragic Characters in Richard the Third and Richard the Second: Hero and Anti-hero.” He is doing deep thinking at such a young age. Elder: He talks about Richard the Third a lot. I just found another play that he wrote as well. This was at Columbia. It’s called Marie Lafarge , a play in one act. “Good books, good old fashioned movie writing. But can you get Garbo?” That was the teacher’s comment on it. Nicola: ( Laughing. ) He writes all of these in longhand. It’s hard to imagine now. Pardo: Yeah, he was probably a senior at that point and getting ready to go to Yale. Nicola: Oh, there’s comments here. Carbon copy and a typewriter. Oh my God. Yes! Elder: We have materials by other playwrights as well that he worked on. Here is the play More War in Store with Peace as Chief of Police , a play by Lonnie Carter. I think Lonnie Carter also went to Yale. Nicola: Yes. Elder: His Yale graduate professional newsletters included some of his first reviews. Nicola: This reads like he’s speaking to today. Elder: He also has a ton of programs from Yale. There is a series of letters that he wrote about theatre and education which, I think, ended up in one of the yale/theatre issues. Nicola: This brings me back to my youth. Pardo: With your experience, how would you stimulate someone’s imagination that this is valuable for our life today? You know, not just as part of the history, but … Nicola: Just exactly the experience I had right now. This is a metaphor. Historical metaphor for what we are living right now. Pardo: Because he lived through Vietnam. Nicola: He commented on it. He was a part of it. Elder: His introduction to “Crisis 1968: Theatre and Imagination” in yale/theatre basically speaks to us now. How American theatre tries to reinvent itself every twenty years when we go through a political crisis. Pardo: And there's always a political crisis. I mean, historically, during his lifetime, there was the AIDS crisis, which killed a lot of theatre artists and Michael’s friends, but also the whole issue with the National Endowment of the Arts. Nicola: Yeah, that was a huge storm. That we still are feeling the effects of Jesse Helms. Elder: “Death, Or the Theatre” is one of the things that he wrote about, and he argues that when you lose a theatre artist too young, it’s not like losing a regular person or a film or television star. A theatre artist is only really there on the stage. There’s not a lot of video of them. So it feels like more is lost with no way to access what they did. But this archive points to some of that. Pardo: Yes, you also miss out on the growth of the artist if they die young. Michael wrote about this tragic reality. Elder: He also wrote two articles in a series called “Art and Sanity,” where he specifically talks about Jesse Helms, and around the time when Mac Wellman’s play Seven Blowjobs was going on. Pardo: He was also trying to bring attention to actual theatrical works. For example, he would write about the productions to encourage people to go. Nicola: What strikes me about Michael as we are talking is that he was present at, and a participant in, the forging of 20th century American theatre. Elder: People don't really know about the things he did outside of critical reviews. Pardo: He was very much engaged. And the theatre today would not be what it is had he not been around. [ Tanya shows political buttons from the collection .] Look at this button, it’s hilarious! “Vote the Motherfuckers Out.” Nicola: “Take a Playwright to Lunch.” Oh. That's good. “Carol Bellamy”. Wow, Carol Bellamy! Elder: Mind blowing from back in the day, right? She got nowhere near the Mayordom. Pardo: “I Read Banned Books.” Nicola: My god. We’re still having this fight about banned books. What strikes me when you look at the totality of who he is, or was , he was a participant in the creation of the structure and the aesthetics of modern American theatre—art theatre as opposed to commercial theatre. The forging of the not-for-profit theatre. The real theatre, in my opinion. And then he moved along to be more of a spectator and observer and marker or recorder of its progress. Elder: Yes, he was a cultural historian and commentator as well as a critic. Nicola: He was somebody who was engaged, who had a full knowledge of the field. I think his work still speaks to what we are going through now because we’re in a similar period of collapse. Pardo: Especially with funding. I mean, it’s ridiculous that an Off-Broadway theatre production is almost the same ticket price as a Broadway show. And Broadway is always going to win because they do big musicals. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it’s commercial theatre. Nicola: That’s America. That’s who we are. And that’s another element that I’ve always thought was powerful about the not-for-profit theatre: it's going against capitalism. It's rejecting those ideals and proposing an alternative idea. A way of being and being together collectively. But that’s who I think he really was, even if unconsciously. Using his gifts, to speak to another generation or to further generations as they start to contend with what is what, not only what is an art form, but what life is and what it means. Theatre is such a communal event. You can't do it by yourself. Pardo: It's true, it's a community. In drama school, you work together and you rely on each other. The director makes compromises, as does an actor, and a designer. You work together to present something. Elder: But that sometimes it failed, too. Nicola: Of course. Everything has moments of failure. Anything human does. Elder: Instances where he failed in this collection is highlighted when he was supposed to be the translator of Kiss of the Spider Woman . Starting about 1981 to 1986, there are letters from Manuel Puig saying, “Michael, where’s my translation? This movie is hinging on this [Broadway translation].” But that was also at a time when his mother was passing away. Also, there were a couple of years, maybe a decade, where he took on a little too much and couldn’t satisfy everyone, possibly even himself. He never really said why he didn’t do things. Pardo: And what about the gay plays? Elder: When it comes to gay and lesbian material, he wrote some original materials, translated others, nurtured performers. But he’s connected with Caffe Cino, and with tons of playwrights who were gay, straight, and otherwise, particularly Robert Patrick, John-Claude von Itallie, and Joe Chaikin. Michael’s translation of Grand Finale by Copi was published in Gay Plays: An International Anthology in 1989. Pardo: And he also loved the Ridiculous Theatre. Elder: And Robert Patrick, the playwright. He worked a lot with Patrick at the beginning. There’s an autographed copy of Patrick’s Truly Gay News . There is a folder for the Gay American Arts Festival in 1981. Here is Flatbush Tosca . He had a lot of correspondence back and forth with Harvey Fierstein as well. And here’s an interview he did with Sam Shepard on The Chairs in 1985. Pardo: It’s for WBAI radio. Is this Shepard and Joseph Chaikin in this recording? Elder: We should get this digitized. Nicola: Yeah, absolutely. The Gay American Festival was incredible. Everybody from the gay literary world is in here. John Rechy, who wrote the novel City of Night and the non-fiction book The Sexual Outlaw . Jonathan Ned Katz. Harvey Fierstein. “An Evening with Harvey.” A Gay Publishing Roundtable with Felice Picano, Joan Larkin, two major poets. And Michael Denny. And lesbian poets Susan Jordan, Joan Larkin, and Audre Lorde. Incredible. Pardo: He was very well connected. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. Elder: Here are the first or some of the first copies of Christopher Street Magazine. I’m not quite sure if he wrote for these, or if they were sent to him. Pardo: Does Christopher Street still exist as a publication? Nicola: No. Nor does Christopher Street as we knew it either. Pardo: Well-put, Jim. Richard Hauer, a poem. “Superwoman and the Wheelchair.” Elder: He had a lot of correspondence with Stanley Kaufmann as well. And we have Robert Patrick's Truly Gay News. Nicola: A gay humor magazine from 1967. And signed! Renee Richards autobiography, remember? “Renee Richards autobiography would definitely be titled ‘Better Off.’” “Rex Reed has a crack in his ass from sitting on the fence.” That’s hilarious. Elder: Here is Robert Patrick's Cheep Theatricks published in the Winter Repertory . The Winter Repertory was a series of seven published books of plays with Michael as general editor of the series, starting in 1971 with Kenneth Bernard’s Night Club and Other Plays. And here’s Maria Irene Fornes. Promenade , written with Al Carmines. So much of the New York experimental theatre is represented in this archive. He's got a few things in the archive from Al Carmines. Nicola: This is the history of American playwriting. Elder: The last thing I'll show you from the Winter Repertory is Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays by Sam Shepard. Here are photographs that were used in the publication taken by Gerard Malanga. Malanga was a Warhol photographer as well. And there's O-Lan Jones in here someplace, too, Shepherd's wife. O-Lan and Patti Smith in the same volume. One thing that blew me away is that Patti Smith, for this volume, wrote in her own way a history of her friendship with Sam Shepard. And she signed it, and she said “don’t edit it,” and then they edited it, since it needed a comma. So don’t tell Patti! Pardo: It’s here somewhere as part of the archive. Elder: When I was going through his stuff, I was shocked about the depth and range of his life. Everything I learned in the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU came rushing back. Nicola: Quite a journey that Michael took that parallels the American theatre journey from 1960 to 2022 when he died. Elder: He was a nerdy theatre kid. So he’s got programs in here dating back to the 50s. Nicola: It's a generational perspective. Really informed. And I keep going back to it that he was both a participant and an observer/commentator. And not many people are that. It was part of what made him special, in my opinion, when he was working at the New York Theatre Workshop. Because other cultures that I’ve visited and got to visit, it was a surprise to me that people who were critics were also working artists or dramaturgs employed by theatrical institutions. He was both the critic at the Village Voice observing the work of Off- and Off-Off Broadway, and he was also part of that world as a playwright. And the rest of American culture is separated, like the people who are critical are often not “in” the community. They’re separated. But in German and French theatre, they’re part of the community. And it’s much healthier. I think he really displayed that dual role in his life, and his work and sets a good example for the future. Nicola: There is a paper from college where he quotes from Shaw... Pardo: It's a paper that he wrote when he was an undergraduate. Nicola: Yes [ Reading from paper .] “I stand for the future and the past. For the posterity that has no vote and the tradition that never had any. I stand for the great abstractions for conscience and virtue, for the eternal against the expedient, for the revolutionary appetite, against the day’s gluttony, for intellectual integrity, for humanity, for the rescue of industry from commercialism and of science, from professionalism. For everything that you desire as sincerely as I am.” That’s from The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw. Pardo: And this is early on, 1962. He’s so young, a new kid on the block. And he puts this quote from Shaw on the cover of this report. It tells you a lot of who he is at 18 or 19 years old. Nicola: And that didn't change. Elder: Around 1998, he wrote “Death, or the Theatre” for the Village Voice . I think this encapsulates his entire vision of what the theatre could be. The introduction is biting. But it’s not something that he hasn't written before. He’s very pessimistic, too. Pardo: At this point in time, we were dealing with AIDS and with the NEA mess. Elder: He didn’t really talk a lot about Judaism. He had a bar mitzvah. He grew up in the conservative tradition that he turned his back on, but I think a lot of it informed his politics and life. I work at the American Jewish Historical Society, so I don’t want to forget that he also grew up in that Judaic idea of fairness. Pardo: In his 1991 Miss Saigon review, he says something about blowing up the New York Times . “Every generation gets the theatre they deserve. And we get Miss Saigon .” Elder: His dad emigrated from Lithuania. His mom was born in Philadelphia. I don't know exactly when he emigrated, but I read somewhere that some of his family did perish in the Holocaust. He doesn’t really talk about it in his work to my knowledge, though he did write an unpublished script called The Hitler Play . Nicola: You know, I glanced at the Obie Awards in the collection. And that seems to me that he had a huge influence on what it became then. And it's not anything like that anymore. Elder: Yes, there is a connection between home grown theatres in New York City. HERE Arts Center is represented in the archive. So is New York Theatre Workshop, Theatre for the New Audience, and La MaMa. People who went in and out of downtown theatre flowed in and out, and it's incredible because you never really think of a critic talking to theatre people about actually crafting their work. Pardo: That's what a dramaturg does, isn’t it? I think this is why, every year, he went as the dramaturg at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Center. It’s how you learn to craft a play. Nicola: This is breaking down those walls. Pardo: When they accepted August Wilson, he had sent in a play that was hundreds of pages long. But when Michael read it, he said something like, “this is an incredible thing. This guy has such an imagination. We must accept this guy and we'll cut it down. We'll turn it and make it into a presentable play.” Nicola: Was that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ? I think it was. And then O’Neill developed three or four plays of his. Elder: It seems like people don’t really understand that Michael was more than a critic. I was surprised to learn that he was also a translator and an adapter. He was also a lyricist. He was a dramaturg, a literary manager. He had his hand in so many different aspects of crafting theatre. Pardo: One example of this is his work with The Kurt Weill Foundation. They found a song that had never been translated into English. And they had Michael do it. He also worked with the Cole Porter Foundation, and so many others. He also worked with the Cole Porter Foundation to re-write the book of Porter's Aladdin musical. Michael went through the lengthy process of creating a brand new Aladdin musical just before Disney released their version, not by Cole Porter. Alas, bad timing. Nicola: He did Happy End , right? Pardo: Yes. That was his first Brecht/Weill translation. It had Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd. It started at Yale and then it moved to Broadway. Elder: He also had like 10,000 albums and 8000 books. Pardo: He has a Threepenny Opera t-shirt autographed by Sting. Nicola: This archive, while the remnants of one person’s life, is actually the story of the American theatre of half a century, or more. This overlaps with my own rumination on the time, the life, that I’ve had in the theatre in America. The big, underlying thought that I wasn’t able to hold on to until now, now that I’m finished. Only now can I see a clear beginning, middle, and end to my professional life. What Michael’s accumulation is revealing to me is that this thing we have all been engaged in on the deepest possible foundational level has been trying to persuade this culture that the role of the artist has value. And you can see in those early years and the materials from Yale with people like Christopher Durang, Meryl Streep, Robert Brustein—you can see they were pushing this. The role, the value of the artist, not just their output. It’s the process of making art. It’s the thing. It's the enterprise, the commitment. Pardo: The remnants of a brilliant mind.... This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References About The Authors James C. Nicola was the Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop from 1988 to 2022. Prior to that, he was first a National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellow and then Producing Associate at Arena Stage (with Zelda Fichandler). He was a Casting Coordinator at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. He worked as a director or assistant Off-Off Broadway, and in London at the Royal Court Theatre and The Young Vic Theatre. He is a graduate of Tufts University, and was awarded a Special Tony Award and a Lifetime Achievement Obie Award. Tanya Elder is the Senior Archivist of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). She studied theater and archival management at New York University and helped organize the records of the HERE Arts Center, the Mark Amitin papers, and worked with the American Theater Archive Project (ATAP). At the AJHS, she re-processed and wrote on the Raphael Lemkin papers. She has also published essays in In Our Own Voices: The Changing Face of Librarianship . Diego Daniel Pardo is an actor who has worked in professional theatre, film, and television. He is also a professional dialect coach. He holds a Master’s Degree in Speech Pathology from CUNY (Lehman) and is an alumni of the Juilliard School Drama Division. He is the preliminary executor for the estate of Michael Feingold. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from London (December 2022) By Dan Venning Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF My last theatre-going trips to London were in 2018 and 2019, before the COVID pandemic swept across the globe, shuttered theatres, and transformed theatre-going after the world began to reopen. In the reports I wrote for European Stages after those trips, I identified several major trends that ran through many of the productions I saw. In 2018, numerous productions engaged, in one way or another, with the global #MeToo movement, acknowledging the assaults and microaggressions faced by women and AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) people. At the end of 2019, only a few months before the pandemic struck, Britain was gearing up for a national snap election that was, in some respects, a sort of second referendum on Brexit. In this particular moment, many of the productions I saw dealt with Britain’s place (often as a former imperial power) in global politics, or the marginalized people within British society. In December 2022, I once again spent nearly a month in London, taking twenty students from Union College in Schenectady, NY to see shows across the city. As in my previous trip, I selected shows eclectically to show my students just some of the many sorts of theatrical productions available in London: West End musicals ( Cabaret ), works at the National ( Hex and Othello ), shows in Shakespeare’s Globe’s indoor candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ( Hakawatis and Henry V ), new works ( My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court, The Doctor and Orlando on the West End), and long-running mainstays ( The Woman in Black and Heathers ). In addition to the productions I saw with my students, I separately attended As You Like It at the new @sohoplace theatre; my first West End panto, Mother Goose ; the long-running & Juliet on the West End in advance of its Broadway transfer; and A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida, which had sold tickets so quickly that I could not book for my large student group. While my previous London reports consisted of similarly diverse shows, in this iteration, I found few thematic links running through the content or staging of these works. If there was a link between these shows, it was the truism that artists and audiences are rediscovering how to engage with theatre in the post-COVID landscape. Indeed, COVID continued (and continues) to affect how theatre is made and seen. About half of the audience members were masked at every performance (I was always masked). Several members of my term abroad contracted COVID while in London and had to quarantine for five days and miss performances. I had booked tickets to Tammy Faye at the Almeida, a new musical (with music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears, and book by James Graham, featuring superstar Andrew Rannels among others, based on the life of evangelist Tammy Faye Messner), but several performances, including ours, were cancelled due to illnesses in the cast. I booked another show to make up for the cancellation: the solo piece One Night Stand with E.V. Crowe and friends at the Royal Court… and then that was also cancelled due to illness (thankfully Orlando , which I booked at that point, was not cancelled!). And yet throughout the theatres, there was palpable joy—even in the grimmest productions—that artists and audiences were once again able to come together in the same space. Because I found few concrete links beyond the ways COVID continues to inflect theatre-going, I discuss the productions irrespective of the order in which I saw them, but in ways that allow me to draw links between particular shows. Both the first ( Cabaret , 1 December 2022) and final ( A Streetcar Named Desire , 23 December 2022) productions I saw were directed by Rebecca Frecknall, Associate Director for the Almeida Theatre. Frecknall is an unabashedly feminist director who reimagines classic dramatic works—often American—for the contemporary stage and her work desperately needs to be seen on major stages in the United States. Her Summer and Smoke in 2018 was haunting in its simplicity and Patsy Ferran justifiably won the Olivier for her luminous performance; unfortunately Frecknall’s 2019 The Duchess of Malfi featuring Lydia Wilson was less so, sapping the play of its disturbing power in a bland, ultramodern staging that seemed to focus more on the men than the titular Dutchess. I’m glad to say that both of her productions I saw in 2022 were stellar. Cabaret was staged at the Playhouse Theatre on the West End, which was rechristened The Kit Kat Club. Audience members entered through the stage door and wound their way through the basement halls of the theatre, as if we were entering the venue depicted in the show. Stickers were placed over our cell phone lenses to prevent photographs and everyone was given a shot of vodka. Cast members of various genders dressed in vaguely BDSM sexual garb made eyes with us and danced provocatively. Three separate bars were set up in each lobby level and a half hour before curtain an elaborately staged dance number by the “boys and girls” of the Kit Kat Club was executed on the bar of the main lobby (Julia Cheng’s choreography was impressive throughout the show, but particularly here). The show had swept the 2022 Olivier Awards but by the time I saw it all the stars who had won acting awards had rotated out. The Emcee was played by understudy Matthew Gent at this performance and Sally Bowles by swing/alternate Emily Benjamin (both of whom would take over the roles as main cast in 2023), yet this cast was spectacular. Of particular note were Michelle Bishop as Frӓulein Kost (and the Kit Kat girl Fritzie), Vivien Parry as Frӓulein Schneider, and Benjamin as Sally Bowles. Parry seemed to channel the spirit of Lotte Lenya with her rendition of “So What” and Bishop, under Frecknall’s direction, brought genuine pathos to the role of Kost. As a prostitute at the bottom of the social hierarchy, we could understand how Kost would embrace Naziism to find anyone she could denigrate in response to the way society had rejected her. At the end of the show, Benjamin’s rendition of “Cabaret” was among the strongest musical numbers I’ve seen live, surpassing, to my mind, recordings of Liza Minelli: the upbeat lyrics paired with her personal despair had much of the audience in tears. Sid Sagar as Cliff Bradshaw was less successful, but this may be because he seemed to have been directed to be emotionless throughout, preventing any sort of audience empathy with the character who was the analogue of Christopher Isherwood, the queer author of the stories on which the musical is based. Tom Scutt’s stage was almost in the round and his costumes implicated the audience in the rise of fascism that Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff’s show depicts. The Emcee rose from the stage gleefully with a tiny party hat for “Wilkommen” as everyone reveled together in the celebration we were attending; by “Money” he was dressed in a neo-fascist demonic outfit, and at the end of the show he and the boys and girls of the Kit Kat Club wore simple, sexless brown outfits, evoking Hitler’s brownshirts a century ago in the 1920s. Yet in the final moments as they marched in a circle carrying suitcases, Isabella Byrd’s lighting turned the set to a stark gray, making them look like photos of men and women with suitcases on their way to trains to concentration camps. Collaboration would save no one. Thankfully, Frecknall’s production (with original star Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee) is transferring to Broadway in 2024, when the August Wilson Theatre will temporarily become the Kit Kat Club. Cabaret . Photo: Marc Brenner. Of all the shows I saw in London, Frecknall’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire was the strongest—easily the best Tennessee Williams I have ever seen—despite the fact that it was in previews with the actor playing Blanche holding her script throughout. The production sold out within hours of tickets going on sale, but Lydia Wilson, who had been cast as Blanche, dropped out of the production for health reasons two weeks before performances began. The first week of performances were cancelled and Wilson was replaced by Patsy Ferran, who had been such a revelation as Alma in Summer and Smoke four years earlier. On the preview I attended, after barely two weeks of rehearsal, Ferran carried her script, occasionally glancing quickly at it at the beginning of each scene, but never looking at it again. Also at the performance I attended on 23 December, Frecknall herself stepped into the role of Eunice (without a script). Seeing her onstage in her own production was a marvelous experience. Madeleine Girling’s set was a nearly bare square with a few scattered props (and periodic rain effects) and Frecknall’s production raced through the words at the beginning of Williams’s script at lightning pace so that the action could effectively open with Blanche’s arrival in New Orleans. Yet this production was less about the conflict between Blanche and Stanley than about toxic masculinity and patriarchal abuse. Blanche was certainly traumatized, but never for a moment portrayed as “crazy,” and Stanley’s violence towards her throughout the play had little to do with any hatred for her per se. Instead, Stanley wanted complete control over his victimized wife Stella—and his clearest path to getting this, as for any abuser, was to isolate Stella from anyone with whom she could find mutual love or care, particularly her sister. The actor who played Stanley, Paul Mescal, was not a hulking brute but appeared to be an attractive, soulful, young husband with a somewhat silly mullet. Yet in spite of this physical attractiveness, Mescal played Stanley as a profoundly ugly man on the inside: consumed with jealousy, self-pity, and white male rage, taking out his anger most clearly on his abused wife, her sister, and his supposed “friend” Mitch. In this color-conscious production, Stella was played by the British-Indian-Singaporean actor Anjana Vasan (so she and Blanche were clearly not full biological siblings, but loved one another no less) and Mitch by Black actor Dwane Walcott. Walcott’s scenes with Blanche and Stanley took on particular resonances—as Stanley viciously notes that Mitch will never achieve his own career successes, or when Blanche asks Mitch if he has been on the titular streetcar and Mitch does not respond. One of many revelations was that Frecknall’s production made it seem as if Mitch must have always been written for a Black actor. Her feminist version of A Streetcar Named Desire (which won an Olivier for Best Revival, and for which Vasan and Mescal also took home Oliviers), even in previews and with Ferran holding her book-in-hand, will make it hard for me to read or see Williams’s play in the same light again. A Streetcar Named Desire . Photo: Marc Brenner. Nearly as successful were two new adaptations of older works: Robert Icke’s The Doctor and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s My Neighbour Totoro . Icke, the former Associate Director for the Almeida (the position Frecknall now holds) created this production at that theatre before it transferred to the West End where I saw it on 8 December 2022. Like his earlier revelatory adaptations Oresteia and Hamlet , The Doctor has since been presented at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The Doctor is Icke’s loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi , a work about anti-Semitism in early twentieth-century Europe. While holding fast to most of the events in Schnitzler’s plot—which hinges on a leading doctor’s refusal to admit a priest to deliver last rights to a young girl dying of a botched abortion and the ways in which that Jewish doctor is punished by society—Icke’s adaptation is strikingly contemporary, engaging with identity and perception in today’s world. His script notes that “Actors’ identities should be carefully considered in the casting of the play. In all sections except for [an onstage debate], each actor’s identity should be directly dissonant with their character’s in at least one way […] the acting should hold the mystery until the play reveals it. The idea is that the audience are made to re-consider characters (and events) as they learn more about who the characters are” (viii). For example, when a priest (who we later learn is Black) enters in Act I, the stage direction reads “ The FATHER is played by a white actor .” Hardiman, a particularly chauvinistic white male doctor, was played by the female Afro-Jamaican actor Naomi Wirthner. The central character, Dr. Ruth Wolff, was played by Juliet Stevenson, an actress who does not “look Jewish” at all. Wolff claims to see only talent and facts, never race or sex, and the audience is forced to engage with what actually not seeing these palpable facts about identity would feel like. In one particularly affecting moment, Ruth’s neighbor Sami, played by cis woman actor Matilda Tucker, is revealed to be a trans girl who appears masculine to most people who can see her within the world of the play. We periodically see flashbacks to Ruth’s conversations with her deceased partner Charlie, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, the disease Ruth seeks to cure. Charlie was played by the Black woman actor Juliet Garricks, but Icke never lets us learn Charlie's “actual” gender or race within the world of the play. Hildegard Bechtler’s simple and evocative set and costumes (the set was simply a slowly rotating white room) contributed to all these effects. Icke’s challenging production forced audiences to engage with what they can, cannot, or will not see. The Doctor . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The RSC’s My Neighbour Totoro (7 December 2022) was another stellar adaptation. It won Olivier awards for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play as well as for Phelim McDermott’s direction, Joe Hisaishi’s music as orchestrated and arranged by Will Stuart, Jessica Hung and Han Yun’s lighting design, Tony Gayle’s sound design, Tom Pye’s set design, and Kimie Nakano’s costume design. Also certainly deserving of an award—although an Olivier category does not exist—were Bail Twist’s puppet designs, which were created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, Significant Object, and Twist’s own Tandem Otter Productions. The production was a faithful adaptation by Tom Morton-Smith of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 Studio Ghibli animated film My Neighbor Totoro , about two sisters who move with their father to the rural Japanese countryside in 1955 so that they can be closer to their mother who is in a specialized hospital. In the countryside, the sisters—Mei, aged four, and Satsuki, aged ten—discover mythical creatures from Japanese folklore, including soot spirits, “Totoros” (kind and intelligent furry forest creatures varying in size from tiny to immense), and a giant cat that is also a bus in which the creatures ride. The sisters see tiny sprouts grow into giant trees overnight. Miyazaki’s masterful animated film is a paean to childhood, Japanese folk culture, and imagination, made even more powerful through Hisaishi’s unforgettable score. A cartoon, with all its impossible magic and music, was brought to life onstage through astounding performances by an entirely Asian cast, including twenty puppeteers in Bunraku-style black outfits, singer Ai Ninomiya, and the award-winning designers. Adult actors Mei Mac (Mei), Ami Okumura Jones (Satsuki), and Nino Furuhata (Kanta, a young neighbor boy) empathetically played young children in a way that contributed to the affective power of the production. During the curtain call, the puppeteers swiftly demonstrated how they had manipulated some of the puppets, from the hand-and-rod chickens to the immense King Totoro and Cat-Bus. Notably, production press photos never show the Totoros; they have to be seen to be believed (the production is being revived in 2023 in London and I have no doubt it will tour worldwide considering its success there). My Neighbour Totoro . Photo: Manuel Harlan. Coincidentally, another production I attended was also an adaptation of a film released in 1988: Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s Heathers , based on the cult film written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann (13 December 2022). The musical adaptation of Heathers has similarly achieved cult status with young musical theatre aficionados, despite never having been staged on Broadway. It opened off-Broadway in 2014 at New World Stages, then premiered in the UK (with a few rewritten songs) at the off-West End venue The Other Palace in 2018, transferred to the West End later that year, transferred back to The Other Palace after the pandemic in 2021, and closed in 2023. All of these productions were directed by Andy Fickman. Heathers is set in Westerberg High School in the 1980s and centers on Veronica, a girl who manages to gain acceptance from the popular clique of Heather Chandler, Heather McNamara, and Heather Duke, at the cost of her friendship with the unpopular Martha Dunnstock. Veronica begins a relationship with a new boy at school, the soulful outsider J.D., who reveals himself as a full-fledged sociopath, poisoning the lead Heather and murdering two jocks who try to sexually assault Veronica. Veronica goes along at first—penning a fake suicide note from Heather Chandler that takes the school by storm and later helping to stage the killings of Ram and Kurt as a murder-suicide as if the two were closeted gay lovers. But when J.D. decides to blow up the entire school, Veronica finally takes the initiative and stops his murderous rampage. At the off-West End Other Palace, Fickman’s production as designed by David Shields lacked any technical spectacle but the energetic performances by young actors Erin Caldwell (Veronica), Nathanael Landskroner (J.D.) and Maddison Firth (Heather Chandler) brought the mostly young audience to their feet. O’Keefe and Murphy’s songs from the show are superb, particularly Veronica’s joyously sexual “Dead Girl Walking,” Kurt and Ram’s Dads’ “My Dead Gay Son,” J.D.’s “Our Love is God,” the Heathers’ show stopping poppy “Candy Store,” and the eleven o’clock number “Seventeen,” an ode to high school life. While Heathers had a significant run on- and off- the West End, it pales in comparison to The Woman in Black , which opened in London in 1989 (only one year after the original films of Heathers and My Neighbor Totoro were released), closing in March 2023 after running thirty-three years on the West End. Scores of actors have played the roles of Arthur Kipps and the young unnamed Actor who endeavors to bring Kipps to life (as well as the uncredited ghost role) and playwright Stephen Mallatratt died in 2004 less than halfway through the show’s immensely long run (Dame Susan Hill, from whose 1983 novel Mallatratt adapted the play, is still alive and still writing). I was especially glad to see the show on 6 December 2022 only months before it ended its historic run. It has made its way into numerous British school curriculums and part of the audience was filled with teenagers in school uniforms who had been bussed in to see the show on the West End. Robin Herford’s production, simply designed by Michael Holt, takes place “in this Theatre in the early 1950s” and begins when Arthur Kipps (Julian Forsyth, when I saw it) attempts, poorly, to tell his haunted ghost story for the stage. With a few simple props, the young Actor (Matthew Spencer) takes on the role of the young Kipps, while Kipps himself plays every other character (save the ghost) from his past. Through the power of the imagination, affecting performances, one uncredited woman actor, and a few carefully placed jump scares facilitated by Kevin Sleep’s lighting design and Sebastian Frost’s sound design, the audience is transported from a bare stage into a small seaside town and its haunted house on the moors. Rumors abound of ghosts in London’s theatres—including the murdered actor William Terriss at the Adelphi and the 18 th Century “Man in Gray” at Drury Lane—and if such ghosts do exist, I expect the Fortune Theatre will be a stage haunted by The Woman in Black for some time to come. The Woman in Black . Photo: Mark Douet. In contrast to the simplistic power of imagination celebrated in that show, Hex at the National Theatre (5 December 2022) demonstrated the ways in which spectacle—and powerful performances—cannot save a thoroughly misconceived production. Staged in the National’s massive Olivier Theatre, with its marvelous gigantic drum revolve stage, Hex , a musical adaptation of the Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, is obviously a pet project for Rufus Norris, the artistic director and chief executive of the National. Norris, who directed the production, also wrote the lyrics and developed the concept along with Katrina Lindsay. The convoluted book for Hex is by Tanya Ronder and music is by Jim Fortune. Lindsay’s set and costume designs are spectacular, including a castle that descends from the upstage wall, three flying fairies who deliver their performances while suspended midair, and numerous other delightfully staged creations, including bumblingly misogynistic princes who wish to wake the sleeping beauty, a chorus of poisonous thorns, and many more fantastical effects. The plot centers on the “low” Fairy (the marvelous singer Lisa Lambe), who loses her powers after accidentally “hexing” the young princess Rose (Rosie Graham) and putting her into a sleep until she can find a true love’s kiss. Fairy wants to regain her powers and join the effervescent “High Fairies” (Kate Parr, Olivia Saunders, and Rumi Sutton), so seeks a prince to undo the curse; she finds him in Bert (Michael Elcock), the half-human son of Queenie (another superb singer, Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), an ogress who has turned vegetarian in order to resist her urges to consume human flesh. After a convoluted plot that also involves generations of stewards named Smith and Smith-Smith (Michael Matus), Fairy sneakily preventing Queenie from eating her grandchildren (Rose and Bert’s children Duncan and Dyllis), and much more, Fairy succeeds and is elevated to “high fairy” status—renouncing her lifelong goal only seconds later to rejoin her earthbound friends. Tone shifts abound—the show was billed for ages eight and up, but in addition to fairy-tale hijinks it includes a baby-eating ogress, graphic descriptions of animal slaughter, and a “comic” song from the princes about sexual coercion. Even worse is the music: Fortune’s tunes and Norris’s lyrics are sometimes earworms precisely because of their banality (Bert cannot stop singing about his name in “Prince Bert,” impressively and athletically choreographed by Jade Hackett; Rose and Bert’s romantic duet “Hello” consists mainly of the words “Hi, Hi, Hello”). Of the twenty-eight songs, eight are reprises (with one song reprised twice). Hex aspired to be a creative retelling of fairy tales along the lines of Sondheim’s Into the Woods , instead it demonstrated what happens when an artistic director of a major theatre is too enamored of his own project. Hex . Photo: Johan Persson. The other production I saw at the National, Clint Dyer’s staging of Othello (16 December 2022), was far more successful. Othello is a deeply troubling play, written by a white man over four hundred years ago but engaging with the charged issues of racism and spousal abuse and murder. Probably my favorite analyses of this play come from the Black British actor Hugh Quarshie (see “Is Othello a Racist Play on YouTube).and Ayanna Thompson’s new intersectional feminist introduction to Arden revised edition (2016)both of which acknowledge the ways in which the play remains strikingly painful today, especially for Black or woman/AFAB readers and audiences. Dyer’s production, in the National’s smaller proscenium Lyttelton Theatre, with a set designed by Chloe Lamford that looked like some sort of public forum, began with a stagehand sweeping the stage as images were projected on the upstage wall showing the long and troubling production history of this play. In Dyer’s production, almost every character, from ensemble members to Cassio (Rory Fleck Byrne), Bianca (Kirsty J Curtis), Montano (Garteth Kennerley), or the Duke of Venice (Martin Marquez) was also credited as “System”—in other words, these people were part of a system of oppression that would lead to Othello and Desdemona’s deaths. Only three characters were not also listed as “System”: Othello (Giles Terera), the Black man oppressed by systemic racism, Desdemona (Rosy McEwen), his white wife who rejects the system to love a Black man, and Iago (Paul Hilton, who was as superb in this as he had been in the benevolent roles of Walter and Morgan in The Inheritance ), who manipulated the system to destroy Othello and Desdemona. Notably, during the trial in Act I, Iago sat to the side alongside Roderigo/System (Jack Bardoe), making a noose out of a long rope. Iago and Roderigo assumed that the trial would be perfunctory and Othello would be executed—and they might have been right, had the Turkish invasion of Cyprus not required Othello’s military leadership. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the production was how Dyer conceived of the role of Emilia/System (Tanya Franks): throughout the production, one of her arms was in a cast and she had a massive black eye. She was obviously being abused by her husband Iago, yet no one commented or even subtly acknowledged this fact. Dyer effectively communicated that systems encourage horrific cruelties (towards women by men, towards Black people by white society) and react violently not to abuse but instead to those who dare to oppose these oppressions. Othello . Photo: Myah Jeffers. Another successful and contemporary staging of a Shakespearean play was Josie Rourke’s gorgeous intersectional production of As You Like It (15 December 2022), the second play to be staged at the new @sohoplace theatre, an ultramodern complex that is London’s first purpose-built West End theatre to open in fifty years. Staged in the round, Robert Jones’s set consisted mainly of a large piano center stage where Michael Bruce played underscoring for the action and accompaniment to the songs (Bruce also composed all the music) throughout the show. When the characters entered Arden, leaves fell from above, covering the stage in an autumnal tapestry. At that point, Jones and Poppy Hall’s Elizabethan-style costumes gave way to more contemporary, rustic attire. Particularly noteworthy was the casting: Leah Harvey (a Black nonbinary female-presenting actor who uses they/them pronouns) played Rosalind—and Harvey was not the only nonbinary actor in the cast: Cal Watson (they/them) played Le Beau and the second de Bois brother. Several of the actors and their characters were deaf, including Rose Ayling-Ellis, who played Celia, and Gabriella Leon, who played Audrey. These identities mattered in the play: Celia and Audrey communicated using a mixture of British Sign Language (BSL) and sign-mime, and most of the characters communicated with them in this way. But the vicious Duke Frederick (Tom Edden) refused to communicate with his daughter in sign, forcing her to lip read and to speak orally to him. Duke Frederick also used his daughter’s disability against her: turning his back to her as he spoke in anger, so that she could not read his lips and understand what he was saying. The play’s scenes of reconciliation and love at the end were particularly moving because of these intersectional identities. Instead of returning in “women’s weeds,” Harvey’s Rosalind simply walked offstage and back on, and then Alfred Enoch’s Orlando recognized them. Ben Wiggins’s Oliver demonstrated his reformation by struggling to learn BSL so that he could communicate with Celia, with whom he had fallen in love. In fact, the American actor Martha Plimpton, always excellent in Shakespeare, despite a solid performance as a female Jacques, with the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, was one of the least compelling parts of the production. Rourke’s staging demonstrated that Shakespeare’s fictionalized Forest of Arden can allow us to imagine and visualize a world where everyone can be celebrated, no matter their race, gender identity or expression, or disabilities. As You Like It . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The same day I saw Othello at the National in the evening (16 December 2022), I had also attended a matinee of Henry V at the nearby Shakespeare’s Globe, meaning that I saw three Shakespearean productions in London within two days. Unfortunately, Holly Race Roughan’s staging of Henry V was the least inspiring of any of the productions I saw during my time in London, including the misconceived Hex . Roughan had a clear concept: that war and power could corrupt even the most well-intentioned leader and that brutally violent men can come to be revered as heroes. Over the course of the play, her Henry (Oliver Johnstone) transformed from an optimistic, well-intentioned ruler to a dangerous psychopath, raging at his people, ordering executions without a second thought, and killing the Dauphin at Agincourt in retribution for the insult that helped spark his war. Henry’s scene with Katherine had not a single spark of romance, but was the culmination of his violence as he demanded her hand in an overtly political marriage, and then the play ended with the scene (usually much earlier in the play; Act 3, scene 4) between Katherine and Alice (Eleanor Henderson) as Katherine began to learn English in preparation for her forced marriage. Perplexingly, this was followed by an epilogue where the actress who had played Katherine, Joséphine Callies, transformed into a modern immigrant, responding to a British naturalization exam; perhaps a comment, albeit unrelated to the earlier action of this production, on the fact that England, which had once had imperialist dreams of conquering foreign lands, after Brexit now places major barriers against Europeans who wish to become British citizens. While Roughan’s concept was clear, everyone spoke Shakespeare’s verse excellently, and the production was one of the best lit I’ve seen in the indoor Wanamaker Playhouse (designer Moi Tran’s metallic upstage wall reflected the candlelight that serves to light productions at this indoor recreation of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars playhouse), little else made sense. Except for Johnstone as Henry, the nine remaining cast members played all the other roles in the play, often with only the smallest costume or accent change meant to indicate a change in character. However, sometimes this convention wasn’t followed: an actor removing a coat might mean a change in character, or simply that character removing their coat. Even for a Shakespeare scholar, it was often unclear to whom Henry was speaking; I could tell that my fellow audience members were totally befuddled. This is the sort of misconceived production that sadly leads modern audiences to feel that they “just don’t understand” (or like) Shakespeare. Henry V . Photo: Johan Persson. Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights , a new play by Shakespeare’s Globe writer-in-residence Hannah Khalil, which I had seen two days earlier at the Wanamaker (14 December 2022) was far more successful. A testament to women’s empowerment, storytelling, and collaborative creation, the play follows five women (Wahida the Dancer, played by Houda Echouafini; Fatah the Young, played by Alaa Habib; Zuya the Warrior, played by Laura Hanna; Akila the Writer, played by Nadi Kemp-Sayfi; and Naha the Wise, played by Roann Hassani McCloskey) who are imprisoned and awaiting their marriage to, sexual assault by, and subsequent execution at the orders of the unseen King, who is currently married to (the also unseen) Scheherazade. In contrast to the original version of the tale, it is not Scheherazade but these women who come up with the stories that Scheherazade will tell her husband, saving all their lives. The play includes riffs on classic stories from the 1001 Nights along with new tales, as if they are stories from these women’s lives, or ones told to them by their mothers, sisters, cousins, or female friends. At one point, they argue about a story that Zuya tells, which metaphorically depicts male violence and women cleverly overcoming it: Akila realizes that it will enrage the King and might lead to everyone’s death, and that this is not the moment to share that particular tale. The women argue about self-censoring, but ultimately agree with Akila that “there is a power in words. Stories. They must be told in the right way and at the right time” (61). The five very different women, placed in the same dire situation, forge close relationships, and earn their freedom, but, as they leave after 1001 nights, they vow to find some way to free Scheherazade (who had shared their stories) from her vicious husband. The moving play, presented with an Arab cast, was aided by the material conditions of the Wanamaker playhouse, where the candlelight (actors had to hold light sources at the same time as playing their roles) enhanced the sense that Rosa Maggiora’s set was indeed a dank prison room, one of the many sorts of cages (metaphorical or literal) throughout history from which women have had to escape. Hakawatis . Photo: Ellie Kurttz. Like Hakawatis, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court (8 December 2022) was a new feminist Arab play—but in every other respect the works could not have been more different. Written by Jasmine Naziha Jones, who also performed the central character, Darlee, a second-generation British-Iraqi girl from age eight to twenty, the play, which is dedicated to Jones’s father, delves into the relationship between Darlee and her Iraqi Dad as the girl comes of age during wars between the West and Iraq. The expressionist play was staged by Milli Bhatia on a set of stairs designed by Moi Tran—similar in some respects to Chloe Lamford’s set for Othello —and also featured a chorus of “Quareens”—“spiritual companions from another dimension,” two female and one male, helping Darlee “reconcile her childhood memories with Dad’s story” as an immigrant (2). Part clown show and part fictionalized reconstruction of a traumatic childhood, the show built up to two monologues: Darlee’s railing against a so-called democratic Western society that has never fully accepted her and Dad’s lament for his family who died in the Iraq war after he came to the UK. The play—and Jones’s performance as a fictionalized version of her younger self—was deeply painful but felt only half-formed, perhaps as do any of our half-remembered recollections of childhood. Baghdaddy . Photo: Helen Murray. Orlando (17 December 2022), as adapted by Neil Bartlett from Virginia Woolf’s novel and staged by Michael Grandage at the Garrick Theatre on the West End, featuring the nonbinary actor Emma Corrin as its titular immortal gender-defying character, was another sort of coming-of-age story. Of course, Orlando comes into his/her/their own over the course of centuries (and also it’s no coincidence that Orlando shares the same name as one of the romantic leads in the gender-bending As You Like It ). Excepting Corrin and Deborah Findlay, who played Mrs Grimditch, a very long-serving confidant to Orlando and the audience, the remaining cast (consisting of one man and eight women or nonbinary performers) all played both a chorus of Virginia Woolfs and Orlando’s many, many loves. When Orlando appears, the audience briefly sees him frontally naked (Corrin wore a prosthetic penis for this moment) and when Orlando transforms into a woman, she is once again naked (although this time only seen from the waist up). The play was a celebration of transformation and potentiality, ending by acknowledging that Orlando might thrive in the world today (or an approaching future, signified by an intensely bright door at the top of Peter McKintosh’s set that Orlando passed through at the end of the play) in a more accepting world that Woolf herself, who committed suicide in 1941, could only dimly imagine. The play was especially moving to my students on the mini-term, several of whom are trans and/or nonbinary; one said she was going to get a tattoo of that bright door that signified the possibilities of the future if we are willing to “try courage” (78). Orlando . Photo: Marc Brenner. Less successful in its feminism but still a delightful spectacle onstage was the jukebox musical & Juliet (20 December 2022), directed by Luke Sheppard with a book by David West Read and featuring over two decades of pop songs written by Max Martin. It’s hard to believe that Martin wrote so many of the best-known hits for artists including Bon Jovi, The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, The Weeknd, and more. The show bills itself as a feminist revision of Romeo and Juliet , in which Anne Hathaway, in a frame story, accuses Shakespeare of not giving his doomed heroine enough of a voice or agency and imagines a new ending in which Juliet doesn’t kill herself after awakening to find Romeo poisoned. Taking off from that premise, Juliet (still played, when I saw it years after it opened on the West End, by Olivier-winning Miriam-Teak Lee) goes on an adventure across Europe, along with her friends including the trans character May (now played by nonbinary actor Joe Foster). The show is raucously self-aware (a jukebox sat visibly near the center of Soutra Gilmour’s set and the spectacularly lit titles that descended from the flyspace at the opening, interval, and close resembled nothing more than a West End/Broadway marquee) and builds to Juliet’s rendition of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which indeed stopped the show for at least a minute of applause after Lee’s performance of the song. The show has since transferred to Broadway, where Justin David Sullivan, the nonbinary actor who played May, declined to be considered for Tonys since the awards continue to require actors be nominated in binary gender categories for men and women. Thankfully, the production has fixed its original gaffe of casting a cis man as a trans character (Arun Blair-Mangat originated the role of May on the West End), but the supposed feminism continues to ring a bit hollow even as Anne, Juliet, and her friends sing about women’s empowerment. Perhaps this is because all of the authors and the director of the show were men: as noted in Hamilton (another musical created almost entirely by men that was intended to reimagine the past more inclusively), “who tells your story” matters and it’s too bad that the producers of & Juliet didn’t find a woman to write the book or direct. Just as much frothy fun, but with a lot less pretense, were two holiday shows I saw towards the end of my trip. Who’s Holiday! at the tiny Southwark Playhouse (19 December 2022) was a solo holiday drag show which was the final work to which I brought my students. Written in 2017 by Matthew Lombardo in the comic verse of Dr. Seuss, the play imagines Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! all grown up, bleached blonde, hard drinking, foul mouthed in rhyme, having escaped a relationship with the Grinch, and planning a Christmas celebration despite constant cancellations from her friends. The play is thoroughly dirty and definitely not for the young children who might still read Dr. Seuss. But, as directed by Kirk Jameson, it is perfect for camp as performed by Miz Cracker, an American drag queen who gained fame on the television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race , and in the end Who’s Holiday! still celebrates the joy and spirit of Christmas every bit as much as its less transgressive source material. Who’s Holiday!. Photo: Mark Senior. My first West End panto was equally delightful, if far more spectacular. Jonathan Harvey’s Mother Goose , directed by Cal McCrystal at the Duke of York’s Theatre (20 December 2022), the same theatre where I had seen The Doctor a few weeks earlier, featured stand-up comedian John Bishop as Vic Goose and the legendary Sir Ian McKellen in drag as Mother Goose (the panto Dame), using wit and constant references to contemporary British politics to facing down holiday financial struggles from exorbitant energy bills. Their struggles are abated by the arrival of a goose (Anna-Jane Casey) who starts laying golden eggs and gives Mother Goose the chance to achieve her dreams of stardom. The songs, dances, and audience participation were all delightful—when one nearby audience member heard that Mother Goose was my first panto, she let me know she had been to hundreds and that this was among the very best she’d ever seen. Yet no one was enjoying themselves more than Sir Ian, obviously gleeful at the chance to ham it up in the sort of work he had adored in his youth. As he delivered key lines from Gandalf in Lord of the Rings or Portia’s “The quality of mercy” speech in the tenor of Mother Goose, his wry smile was infectious and had the audience grinning just as much as he was. On our feet at the end, we were all celebrating the holiday spirit together again, in the theatre. Mother Goose . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The holiday spirit that suffused Mother Goose and Who’s Holiday! in some ways ran through all these productions, even the darkest like Othello, Henry V, The Doctor , and A Streetcar Named Desire , since we were, once again, able to be in London’s excellent theatres together. COVID will remain part of our world for some time to come: many audience members remain masked, theatres have to cancel performances and hire more understudies (or even have the director go on for a role in a pinch!), and more. This is probably a good thing: it has led to conversations about how the arts can be safer and more equitable for everyone. I expect to return to London at the end of 2025 and I am excited to discover what will suffuse the city’s theatrical scene then, when it will have been half a decade since the height of the pandemic. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dan Venning is an associate professor in the department of Theatre & Dance at Union College (Schenectady, NY), where he also teaches in the English department and the interdisciplinary programs in American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies. He has published numerous chapters in scholarly edited collections, book reviews, and performance reviews in a broad range of scholarly journals, including several overviews of theatre in London for European Stages . He is currently working on a book about Shakespearean performance and nation-building. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Report from London (December 2022) Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael P. Jaros Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Michael P. Jaros By Published on December 10, 2020 Download Article as PDF References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

LESLIE CUYJET + KAREN KANDEL presents Going Beige at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Going Beige LESLIE CUYJET + KAREN KANDEL 5:30-6:20 pm Friday, October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Performing artists Leslie Cuyjet and Karen Kandel sit down for the first time to speak about their experiences, forming the start of a collaboration of a potential project. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Photo: Maria Baranova Karen Kandel is a cultural worker, mentor, performer, writer, and a co-Artistic Director of NYC based theater company, Mabou Mines. Leslie Cuyjet is a performer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. More information at lesliecuyjet.com Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Laurence Senelick Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Laurence Senelick By Published on November 4, 2022 Download Article as PDF References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution:

Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.