Search Results

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

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

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

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

Eileen Curley Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Eileen Curley By Published on December 11, 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.

MORIAH EVANS presents Sharing at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Sharing MORIAH EVANS 7-7:50 pm Friday, October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP An assemblage, a mashup of recent performance practices—it might be described as painstaking, indulgent, myopic, esoteric, spiritual, psychosocial, activist, inert. No matter what it is—all the activities shared exist as tactics of refusal and offer an otherwise. Performed by Malcolm-x Betts, Maggie Cloud, Moriah Evans, Lizzie Feidelson, Lydia Okrent, and Anh Vo Photo: David Watson 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). Moriah Evans positions choreography as an expansive social process. Drawing on somatic choreographic practices and feminist critiques of dance and visual culture, her works expand dance beyond the visible, to explore different ways of sensing both ourselves and our relationships to one another. Malcolm-x Betts is a New York based visual and dance artist whose work is rooted in investigating embodiment for liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body. Maggie Cloud is a Brooklyn based performer and acupuncturist. Lizzie Feidelson is a writer and performer. Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer. Their work fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. 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.

[CANCELLED] HOLLAND ANDREWS + YUNIYA EDI KWON presents [CANCELLED] How does it feel to look at nothing (excerpt) at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 [CANCELLED] How does it feel to look at nothing (excerpt) [CANCELLED] HOLLAND ANDREWS + YUNIYA EDI KWON 4-4:50 pm Friday, October 18, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Please note this event has been cancelled. An embodied affirmation of trans futures amidst the disintegrative reality of trans life, How does it feel to look at nothing is an experimental opera and pre-origin story of a Deity of Namelessness. Co-created, co-directed, and performed by Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon, the work is currently in development and will premiere in Fall 2026. For PRELUDE, Andrews and kwon perform excerpts from the work-in-progress. 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). Holland Andrews (b. 1988) is a vocalist, composer, music producer, and performer whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes. Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics, frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing. Andrews harnesses these instruments’ innate qualities of power and elegance to serve as a cohesive vessel for these themes. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range including contemporary opera, American experimentalism, musical theater, and jazz, while also cultivating their unique vocal style which integrates these influences with language disintegration, vocal distortion, and environmental ambiance. In 2024, Andrews was selected as one of 71 artists for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial Even Better Than The Real Thing . For the biennial, Andrews composed two sound installations for the museum, the 5-channel Air I Breathe: Radio for its main stairwell, Hyperacusis (Version One, Sleeping Bag) for its large freight elevator, as well as a new composition for live solo performance, titled Speaker . In addition to creating solo work, Andrews composes and performs for dance, theater, and film, and their work is toured nationally and internationally with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Dorothee Munyaneza, Will Rawls, Sonya Tayeh, Jenn Freeman, and poet Demian Dinéyazhi. Andrews has gained recognition from publications such as The Wire, The New York Times, Vogue, Le Monde, and BBC Radio. Holland Andrews is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Andrews is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardee in Music/Sound (2023) and a United States Artists Fellow (2024). yuniya edi kwon (b. 1989) is a composer-performer, violinist, vocalist, and interdisciplinary performance maker based in Lenapehoking, or New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation & transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer space & lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. As a composer and improviser, she is inspired by Korean folk timbres & inflections, textures & movement from natural environments, and American experimentalism as shaped by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Her work as a performance and movement artist embodies an expressive release and reclamation of colonialism’s spiritual imprints, connecting to both Japanese Butoh and a lineage of queer trans practitioners of Korean shamanic ritual. In addition to an evolving, interdisciplinary solo practice, she performs and collaborates with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Senga Nengudi, Du Yun, Tomeka Reid, International Contemporary Ensemble, Kenneth Tam, and Degenerate Art Ensemble. Her work has been presented by Dia Art Foundation, Performa Biennial, National Sawdust, Harlem Stage, Asia Society New York, Roulette Intermedium, New York Live Arts, Bang on a Can, and Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award in Music/Sound, an Arts Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, a Johnson Fellow at Americans for the Arts, and a United States Artists Ford Fellow. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

By Daria Deflorian, Antonio Tagliarini, Maria Galante, Michele Santeramo, Allison Eikerenkoetter, Jane House, Frank Hentschker | This collection features an anthology of three contemporary plays from Italy. < Back New Plays from Italy Vol 2: Three Plays Daria Deflorian, Antonio Tagliarini, Maria Galante, Michele Santeramo, Allison Eikerenkoetter, Jane House, Frank Hentschker Download PDF This collection features an anthology of three contemporary plays from Italy. We Decided to Go Because We Don’t Want to Be a Burden to You by Daria Deflorian & Antonio Tagliarini. Edited by Frank Hentschker. Translated by Maria Galante. “We realized that we are a weight to the state, doctors, pharmacists and society. So we decided we’ll be off, to spare you further worry. You’ll save our four pensions and you’ll live better.” The play takes place in a suburban apartment where the women have just takentheir “sleeping” pills. A reflection on suicide not as an existential act, but as an extreme political act. Is there an altruistic suicide? The Healer by Michele Santeramo Edited by Frank Hentschker. Translated by Allison Eikerenkoetter. A drunken nearly blind old healer, with an intellectual son waiting to surpass him, attempts to heal an injured boxer, a pregnant woman, and a childless couple by bringing them together, making them relate in strange circumstances on a set where doors open and close on mysterious waiting rooms. The Neighbors by Fausto Paravidino Edited by Frank Hentschker. Translated by Jane House. He is alone in the apartment. He hears some footsteps coming from the landing. Trying not to make a sound, he looks through the spyhole. He tells Greta when she comes home that he saw the neighbors. How were they? He cannot tell, seeing is not understanding, but he is scared. Why? Who knows? This is a play about our fears, real and imagined, about ourselves and the other, about neighbors near and far, about war. More Information & Order Details To order this publication, please contact us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu or find it on Amazon.

By Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz | The first-ever English translation of three of Ibn Dāniyāl’s saucy puppet plays. < Back Theatre from Medieval Cairo: The Ibn Dāniyāl Trilogy (Egypt) Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz Download PDF Irreverent readings from three of Ibn Dāniyāl’s saucy puppet plays, brought to you in their first-ever English translation by Safi Mahfouz (UNRWA University, Jordan, Fulbright postdoctoral Segal Center Visiting Scholar) and renowned theatre historian Marvin Carlson (The Graduate Center, CUNY). Discovered by German orientalist Georg Jacob (1862-1937), these texts are among the earliest secular plays known to humankind. With their English translations now forthcoming from Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, Mahfouz and Carlson, together with Noor Theatre, offer us a glimpse into Dāniyāl’s spicy Cairo underworld of pimps, prostitutes, and dirty dealing, as well as the practice of street performance in medieval Cairo. Cover Image: Manuscript Illumination. Folio from a copy of Al-Jaziri’s Treatise Automata, Mameluk Dynasty, (1206 AD). 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 Festival of the Body on the Road H! by Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. 2021-2022 Festival of the Body on the Road H! - Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Yokohama / Tokyo Road Dance Tour H stands for 'human', 'hope', 'homeless', and 'hurt'. Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! presented their works at eight venues, mostly public spaces, in Yokohama and Tokyo, hoping that the increasing number of people living in poverty and suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic will regain their abundant physical and mental health, and hope. In addition to the new dance performance “The Day of Nihilism”, the programme included film screenings, talks, workshops and exhibitions. * Some music has been replaced in the distribution. -------- Newcomer “H” Sokerissa!, led by Aoki Yuuki, is a unique dance company featuring actual homeless people. The members are naturally far from graceful as their backs have become stiff from years of sleeping on the streets. Still, those who consider dance to be fast, strong and skillful as in dance classes will have their notions overturned by the overwhelming presence of the dancers. What was once a body abandoned on the streets shrines through an earnest physicality unlike anywhere else. This video is an edited version of a street performance tour in Tokyo and Yokohama. It is distinguished by uncontrollable elements like the night view of the port and the rain-drenched park. Talks offered along the way by Aoki and the performers will help viewers understand this unique group. Dancing is not just the providence of the young and beautiful. The mission of contemporary dance is to rediscover the possibilities that are abandoned as dance techniques become more sophisticated. One essence of this is recorded in this video. (Written by NORIKOSHI Takao) -------- The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Festival of the Body on the Road H! At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Dance, Documentary This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Japan Language Japanese (with English / Chinese / French / Spanish / Japanese subtitles) Running Time 68 minutes Year of Release 2023 2021-2022 Festival of the Body on the Road H! - Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Yokohama / Tokyo Road Dance Tour H stands for 'human', 'hope', 'homeless', and 'hurt'. Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! presented their works at eight venues, mostly public spaces, in Yokohama and Tokyo, hoping that the increasing number of people living in poverty and suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic will regain their abundant physical and mental health, and hope. In addition to the new dance performance “The Day of Nihilism”, the programme included film screenings, talks, workshops and exhibitions. * Some music has been replaced in the distribution. -------- Newcomer “H” Sokerissa!, led by Aoki Yuuki, is a unique dance company featuring actual homeless people. The members are naturally far from graceful as their backs have become stiff from years of sleeping on the streets. Still, those who consider dance to be fast, strong and skillful as in dance classes will have their notions overturned by the overwhelming presence of the dancers. What was once a body abandoned on the streets shrines through an earnest physicality unlike anywhere else. This video is an edited version of a street performance tour in Tokyo and Yokohama. It is distinguished by uncontrollable elements like the night view of the port and the rain-drenched park. Talks offered along the way by Aoki and the performers will help viewers understand this unique group. Dancing is not just the providence of the young and beautiful. The mission of contemporary dance is to rediscover the possibilities that are abandoned as dance techniques become more sophisticated. One essence of this is recorded in this video. (Written by NORIKOSHI Takao) -------- ＜Performance Credits＞ Directed by AOKI Yuuki Performers：KOISO Matsuyoshi, HIRAKAWA Shuichiro, ITO Haruo, WATANABE Yoshiharu, NISHI Tokuchika, YAMASHITA Koji, HAMAOKA Teppei, AOKI Yuuki Collaborated with TERAO Saho, WATANABE Atsushi（I’m here project）, NISHIHARA Nao, TAGUCHI Randy Scenic Design by NISHIHARA Nao, AOKI Yuuki Sound Design by CODA Noriaki Lighting Design by OVER Cage（RYU） Stage Managers : KAWAGUCHI Makoto（Le Rayon Vert）, MITSU Hisashi Technical Cooperation: MITSU Hisashi, ROSHI (Sunagumi), MORI Noriyuki Photo by OKAMOTO Chihiro, OGIWARA Rakutaro Video Documentation and Editing : LAND FES Producer : KUREMIYA Yurika Organized by AOKIKAKU ＜Film Credits＞ Presented by: The Japan Foundation (JF) In cooperation with EPAD ＜Subtitling Credits＞ Multilingual subtitling： Supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Goverment of Japan through the Japan Arts Council Chinese Translation (Simplified): Shu LIN Chinese Translation (Traditional): SWSG English Translation: YAMAGATA Mirei French Translation: Edouard Brena Spanish Translation: David TARANCO About The Artist(s) Newcomer H Sokerissa! is a dance group consisting of members with experience living on the streets. Dancer/choreographer Aoki Yuuki began recruiting participants in 2005 and held the group’s first performance in 2007. To date, more than 40 people who have previously lived on the streets have joined a total of nearly 150 performances. The group participated in 2016 in Celebra's "With One Voice", the official cultural program of the Rio Olympics. It won the Konica Minolta Social Design Award 2016 Grand Prix. A documentary film called Dancing Homeless that followed their activities won acclaim nationwide. Get in touch with the artist(s) aokikaku2021@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://sokerissa.net/ , https://www.facebook.com/SOKERISSA , https://www.instagram.com/sokerissayuukiaoki/ 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.

Book Reviews Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre and Ecology Book Reviews By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF Maya Roth, Editor The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl By Amy Muse Reviewed by John Bray A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor Edited by Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs Reviewed by Amy B. Huang Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook Reviewed by Collin Vorbeck The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography By Arnold Aronson Reviewed by Michael Valdez Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 32, Number 2 (Spring 2020) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jared Strange Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Jared Strange By Published on May 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center For most Americans, the mere mention of “the DMV” summons nightmares of bureaucratic deadlock. For residents of the DC-Maryland-Virginia metropolitan area such as myself, it means something like home—though living a few Metro stops away from the seat of the federal government means deadlock is never far from mind. Apart from residing in the shadow of the Capitol, our DMV is characterized by a curiously disconnected sense of place. For my part, much of that has to do with the University of Maryland, my institutional home in a DC pseudo-suburb otherwise known for housing the local IKEA. Some of it has to do with the peculiarities of the District, which has outgrown its exclusively federal designation and stubbornly progressed through stages of self-rule, though not to the point where it is always clear who is in charge. As in most places, the pandemic affected this DMV in unique ways, and as in most places, theatre artists responded in turn. One of the signature issues artists faced was how to meet people where they are—a troublesome prospect in the DMV even before the advent of the pandemic. In the autumn of 2019, a group of artists came together at the urging of playwrights Jennifer Barclay and Tim J. Lord to address that challenge by leveraging the area’s significant but disparate new play development faculties. The new collective, later to be known as District Dramatists, gathered under auspicious signs at the REACH, a sparkling new space at the Kennedy Center. Optimism ran high, though the challenge of serving artists through decentralized leadership without overburdening volunteers quickly proved an obstacle. The arrival of lockdown, coupled with the furlough of our Kennedy Center advocates, brought that obstacle into especially stark relief, and ended our experiment prematurely. The dissolution of District Dramatists foreshadowed aspects of new play development, and our very artform itself, that would demand consideration over the coming years: the dynamics of space in the time of social distancing and the material needs of artists in a time of social reckoning. Unsurprisingly, the opportunities and limitations of digital space were a significant factor in navigating the first two years of the pandemic. The University of Maryland became a trailblazer in this regard when it transitioned an in-person production of Qui Nguyen’s DD-centric play She Kills Monsters to the Zoom room under the guidance of media specialist and digital champion Jared Mezzocchi and co-director Lisa Nathans. The move quickly established and tested the rules of Zoom theatre. Over time, many artists adopted similar models, producing everything from daring new works such as FakeFriends’ Circle Jerk to small companies such as Theatre in Quarantine. The DMV also became a hive for new play development programming that sought to recreate the rehearsal space in the Zoom room, often with mixed results. In my own developmental work with Rorschach Theatre Company and UMD’s Fearless New Play Festival, I found myself contending with both the actual expectations of the Zoom rehearsal space and the imagined expectations of the “real” rehearsal space. Crucially, the shift online did suggest positive adaptations for “post-COVID” development, which has so far included making readings on Zoom, solely or in a hybrid format, something like the norm, and allowing artists to participate in initial developmental work from afar. To what degree these accessible arrangements will become standard remains to be seen. While online spaces should continue to bolster new play development through mixed modes of production, other projects speak to the enduring power of the physical. After having its original season stymied, Rorschach Theatre Company, under the leadership of co-artistic directors Randy Baker and Jenny McConnell Frederick, joined with associate artists to develop an immersive, site-specific, mail-in project titled Psychogeographies. Now in its third iteration, Psychogeographies tells epic stories of science-fiction and fantasy through boxes of letters and artifacts mailed out to subscribers monthly. Subscribers are then invited to explore the contents of each box at a corresponding location in the DMV. Each story beat draws inspiration from the location, evoking both its geographical particulars and the power dynamics that have shaped and reshaped that geography over time. The story concludes with a live, immersive performance at a venue in DC, echoing Rorschach’s long-running commitment to exploring the way space informs narrative and experience. While criss-crossing the DMV via bike, train, and car for the project’s second installment, Chemical Exile, I became especially mindful of how embracing location as the primary connective thread of a narrative resonates both with the histories of each site and the renewed appreciation for public spaces that emerged during the early days of the pandemic, when there was hardly anywhere else to go. It helped that Chemical Exile, co-developed with associate artists Kylos Brannon, Doug Robinson, Shayla Roland, and Jonelle Walker, centered on a scientist who returns to the United States to find her material world an eerie mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The resulting sense of disorientation chimed with my efforts to grasp the region’s unique terrain and refined my attention to the ways many residents—particularly Black residents, like the play’s heroine—have had to grapple with the forces of gentrification transforming their homes into places that are strange and even hostile. As I alluded in my review of the piece for Washington City Paper, one of the challenges of “bingeing” Chemical Exile in one day—which, to be very clear, is not what Rorschach recommends—is that it made my transition from a self-driven, exploratory process into a delimited immersive performance especially jarring. Even in a space as beautifully rendered by Rorschach’s cadre of set designers (Nadir Bey, Sarah Beth Hall, and Grace Trudeau), I found myself longing for the freedom to explore the tension between the real world and the play’s world on my own. Thankfully, even as the District returns to something like the old “normal,” Baker and Frederick remain committed to producing new iterations of the project and introducing new audiences to the area’s psychogeography. For all the technological innovations and spatial rearrangements that the pandemic has forced new playmakers to adopt, one of the most significant pushes has been to empower audience members and theatre-makers who are often excluded from the head table. For my part, that push is most evident in education. When the pandemic set in, my chief side-gig at The National Theatre in DC shifted online, leading to an expansive website project aimed at documenting the institution’s history, a significant portion of which has been taken up by hosting pre-Broadway tryouts for future classics such as Fiddler on the Roof and M. Butterfly, and integrating them with DC-area high school curricula. More significant, however, was my time as a teaching artist with Young Playwrights’ Theater, an organization that specializes in in-school and after-school playwriting classes for students of all ages, including adults. One of my assignments was at Chelsea School, a small campus stuffed into a commercial building near the Mall at Prince George’s Plaza in Hyattsville, Maryland. The school specializes in helping students with language and learning difficulties, many of whom benefit from a suite of Google tools that include screen-readers and other language-processing technologies. In recognition of their needs, Young Playwrights’ Theater brought me on with license to riff on their usual curricula alongside my Chelsea co-teacher, who just so happened to be the school’s director. I initially took my freedom to experiment as an exciting opportunity to decenter the individual writing in our course and adopt something closer to a devised or writers’ room model. Instead of beginning with Freytag’s pyramid, I urged the students to build worlds based on the stories that moved them, taking note of everything from themes to characters to settings. Instead of drafting dialogue, I encouraged them to fill a Google Slides document with notes, images, ideas, or anything that would evoke what their collective imagination conjured. I wanted to prove that they already knew what made a good story and that we could create one of our own if we worked together. The actual writing would come later in the form of individual monologues set in the world of their design. As it happened, the plan for what we would produce changed over the course of the semester to eventually become a play that was conceived by the group, drafted by me, and presented semi-privately in the classroom. Nearly all those changes were programmatically driven; for example, the initial plan to rotate in new groups was discarded, meaning I effectively had to extend my curriculum by half a semester. Even with that shift in mind, progress was slow-going and sometimes frustrating, though that had more to do with larger issues than with the students. The two groups, one made up of middle-school girls and one of the high-school boys, were like any random sample of teenagers: active and engaged somedays, moody and distant others; some of them eager to bring the text to their feet, others petrified of making a fool of themselves. It was only later that I learned their teachers had brought me and a litany of other arts partners into their classrooms because the effects of pandemic pivots, staff departures, and the usual pressures of adolescent life had simply worn everybody out. My role as a teaching artist had less to do with generating new scripts or even helping the students advance their language facilities (a task I was not suited for on my own) and more to do with helping them release some of the steam that had built up during the past two years of their young lives spent tossing and turning on the waves of unrest. What I had treated as a pedagogical sandbox was really a chance to engage with one of the core values of storytelling: imagining other worlds that help us handle this one. Bearing that in mind, I think we can be happy with the results, even if I still came away with a long list of things to try differently next time. For example, I would take greater initiative to educate myself about pedagogical approaches suited to the environment, rather than referring solely to my already over-worked co-teacher. I also would not be so quick to shove the building blocks of dramatic action and character development to the back; if anything, understanding that a story depends much more on what a character does than what they say could be especially helpful to students for whom language is often a barrier. While my experience at Chelsea was immensely informative, it was also a prime reminder that meeting people where they are often has less to do with “producing” art than connecting with someone else’s reality. In that sense, it highlighted all the ways in which space can, and should, shape new play development. The screen-reading technology that helps some students process text is like the Zoom technology that kept professional read-throughs together: it’s a way to help bridge the gap of access and expand the reach of our room. Chelsea itself, shunted into an office floor above a clinic and a gym, illustrates how young people who are already on the fringes can be pushed even further from the center by physical and institutional architecture. My very presence, summoned by an exhausted administration’s cry for help, proves that no matter the method, what so often dictates the development of new stories is what the participants bring with them. Art does not arise out of a vacuum: it arises out of human beings meeting each other where they are. For all the ways that our new technologies and our old streets have changed new play development, that fact is effectively the same. Jared Strange, Ph.D., MFA, is the Education Programs Manager at The National Theatre, as well as a writer, dramaturg, educator, and scholar based in Washington, DC. His scholarship and reviews can be found in Theatre Research International, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Comparative Drama, Theatre Journal, American Theatre magazine, 3Views on Theater, Washington City Paper, and DC Theater Arts. His plays have been workshopped and produced at the MeetFactory in Prague, DC Source Festival, Rorschach Theatre Company, WildWind Performance Lab, Bath Fringe Festival, Dayton Playhouse FutureFest, and the William Inge Theatre Festival. As a dramaturg, Jared specializes in new play development, audience engagement, and education. 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.

A play with music that follows a group of immigrant women working at a Chinatown garment factory. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Sweatshop Melody Nancy Ma Theater English 30 min 4:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All A play with music that follows a group of immigrant women working at a Chinatown garment factory. Content / Trigger Description: Nancy Ma is a Chinese American actor, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She recently directed her first documentary short, 有一天你不在 One Day You Are Not Here, about intergenerational care through her relationship with her father. Her solo show about growing up in Chinatown, Home, has been performed at schools and festivals around the country. As an actor, Nancy has been seen in Memorial (Pan Asian Rep), The Joy Luck Club (Sierra Madre Playhouse), Three Little Girls Down a Well (The Public), Hacks (HBO), Barry (HBO). Nancy’s writing has been supported by The New Harmony Project, Asian American Arts Alliance, The Latino Theater Company, Fresh Ground Pepper, WhoHaHa. Nancy currently facilitates storytelling with The Moth and Young Storytellers. Her work and her life focus on finding the funny, intimate and redemptive in forgotten places. www.littlemoisttugboat.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Angela L. Robinson Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Angela L. Robinson By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Given the ubiquity of “aloha” in Pacific tourism and marketing, Hollywood feature films, and Hawai’i state politics, what precisely does the concept offer for Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) now? Stephanie Nohelani Teves’s Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance crucially intervenes into the discourses, practices, and performances of aloha that appropriate the concept from its Hawaiian cultural context to the detriment of Kanaka Maoli. Drawing from Native Pacific cultural studies, American Indian studies, performance studies, and queer and feminist theory, Teves’s multidisciplinary text examines the complex negotiation and resignification of aloha within a range of contemporary Hawaiian performances, from Hip Hop musician Krystilez and drag queen Coco Chandelier to ghost tours and online commenting forums. The varied performances that Teves examines point to how Kanaka Maoli experience aloha as both a constraining, disciplinary force and a connection to Indigenous identity and community. Teves tracks these contradictions of aloha throughout chapter one, such as its actual codification into law through the 1986 Aloha Spirit Law. She ultimately argues that Hawaiian performance articulates aloha as a strategy to disarticulate it from its most commodified forms and to enact defiant indigeneity. According to Teves, defiant indigeneity is performance that challenges, deconstructs, and resists colonial settler state politics, while also affirming the ongoing defiance, existence, and survivance of Indigenous peoples. Akin to José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, defiant indigeneity “pushes forward this possibility of something else that creates and reconfigures Kanaka Maoli life through performance” (84). As a theory and method, defiant indigeneity allows for a capacious understanding of Indigenous performance and performativity as world-making. For Kanaka Maoli, Teves contends, aloha has become the essence of Hawaiian Indigeneity, circumscribing what is expected and valued by non-Natives. This normative version of aloha is at once Hawai’i’s welcoming gift to tourists and non-Natives and a strict regulatory measure of specific forms of Hawaiian cultural expression. In the next two chapters, Teves focuses on how Hawaiian performance refuses, subverts, and queers the prescriptive nature of aloha and its subsequent policing of authentic Indigeneity. In her close readings of work from Hawaiian Hip Hop artist Krystilez and drag performer Coco Chandelier, Teves draws from theories of performativity, such as Judith Butler’s gender performativity and E. Patrick Johnson’s racial performativity, to outline a specifically Indigenous performativity. She argues, “As the process by which indigenous bodies generate social meaning, Indigenous performativity centers Indigenous articulations of culture, outsider perceptions of such, and the constant interplay between them” (52). For example, in her readings of a photograph of Coco Chandelier at the 2006 Diva of Polynesia Pageant and the photo’s Facebook comments, Teves observes how the photograph operationalizes both a sense of Kanaka Maoli pride and a queered aloha “in drag.” In their refusal to submit to hypercommodified notions of Hawaiianness and aloha, both Krystilez and Coco Chandelier create new ways of performing Indigeneity through countercultural spaces that at once draw from Hawaiian cultural knowledge and critique notions of a pure, authentic Indigeneity. Moving away from the fringe performance spaces of chapters two and three, Teves uses the fourth chapter to analyze the narrative and afterlife of Princess Ka’iulani through mainstream media productions, such as the 2009 film Princess Kaiulani and the 2015 revival of the 1987 play Ka’iulani written by Dennis Caroll, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Robert Nelson, and Ryan Page. Focusing on the 1898 illegal overthrow and annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the legacy of heir to the throne Princess Ka’iulani, these texts underscore the power of cultural memory. Cultural memory provides the opportunity for Kanaka Maoli to mourn history and loss, restage resistance to the ongoing occupation of Hawai’i, and connect to their ancestors and to the kingdom. To this end, cultural memory provides Kanaka Maoli with a linkage to Hawaiian nationhood, past, present, and future. A primary concern of Defiant Indigeneity is how Kanaka Maoli at times wield authenticity as a weapon to disconnect and exclude in their debates around Hawaiian nationhood. For example, in chapter five, Teves argues against the “inauthentic” moniker often applied to those in the diaspora, those who are queer, and those who simply know the experience of un-belonging. Through a close reading of Kristiana Kahakauwila’s short story, “The Old Paniolo Way,” Teves illustrates how connections to Indigeneity can and should look different, take alternative paths, and occur in unexpected places. Teves expands upon the connections made possible through cultural memory in the previous chapter, and she concretizes them through present relations between Kanaka Maoli in order to advance alternate forms of Hawaiian belonging and membership that can hold the various contradictions and complexities of Indigeneity. In her conclusion, Teves examines the 2014 U.S. Department of Interior public meetings in Hawai'i. While the meetings were intended as a forum to discuss Hawaiian governance and nation-building, Teves remarks on the ways the meetings exacerbated the contentious divide between pro-federal recognition Kanaka Maoli and pro-independence nationalist Kanaka Maoli. Thus, Teves contends that what Hawaiian performance offers to these debates is not only a warning of how aloha can silence, erase, and marginalize, but more importantly, an understanding of how Kanaka Maoli can re-center and reaffirm aloha as a relationship with and between each other and the land. Calling for an expansive understanding of belonging, community, and nationhood, Teves writes, “Our belonging as a people cannot be contained within a document, and our sovereignty and nationhood are about relationships with each other, the plant and animal worlds, and the land and water that surround us” (165). For the past two decades, Indigenous Studies scholars, such as Mishuana Goeman and Vilsoni Hereniko, have highlighted the importance of performance for thinking through Indigenous identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Defiant Indigeneity effectively supplements that genealogy while also breaking ground as one of the first texts to engage in a theoretical dialogue between Native Studies and performance studies. As such, Defiant Indigeneity is itself performative—a bold enactment of defiant indigeneity. Teves’s dynamic voice, nuanced readings, and careful attention to her community highlight a deep commitment to the world-making potentiality of insurgent aloha. After all, as Teves argues, “We [Kanaka Maoli] need aloha—not the wasteful forms of aloha spread through tourism, but the kind of aloha that is sustainable and has actually allowed us to survive” (21). Defiant Indigeneity is a critical addition to Native Studies and performance studies, and a powerful testament to Kanaka Maoli survivance. Angela L. Robinson University of California, Los Angeles The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan By Published on November 19, 2015 Download Article as PDF Arthur Miller is one of the most influential contemporary American playwrights after Eugene O’Neill. In the 1940s and 1950s, he rose to fame with All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other social problem plays. Since 1949, Death of a Salesman has been performed continually on Broadway and in many countries all over the world. Miller and his plays came to China when China reopened its door to the world after Mao’s reign, especially with the conclusion of “The Great Cultural Revolution” (“GCR”)[1] and when China was no longer producing powerful social plays. Chinese drama had fallen into crisis in both playwriting and performance, for it seemed to grow rigid and stagnant after so many years of restriction. In fact, these restrictions had been proposed by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, and only a few so-called model plays were allowed to be performed during the GCR. Thus, the translations and performances of Miller’s dramas in China during the 1970s provided an enormous inspiration for and influence on Chinese playwrights, who later created many plays in a style that mixed realism and modernism. When referring to literary reception and historical relationship, Hans-Georg Gadamer says, “The literal meaning of scripture, however, is not clearly available in every place and at every moment. …all the details of a text were to be understood from the context and from the scopus, the unified sense at which the whole aims.”[2] Yue Daiyun, a well-known comparative literary critic at Beijing University, explains, “Literary influence is a sort of permeation, a sort of organic involvement presented in artistic works”[3], and “The emergence of the influence is often associated with social changes as well as the internal requirement within literary development. …Influence is usually a complex process of enlightenment, promotion or reinforcement, agreement, digestion, transformation, and artistic expression. This process tends to start when a certain writer is able to ‘tease’ another writer’s heart.”[4] Arthur Miller’s social problem plays are similar to those of Henrik Ibsen’s. Miller emphasizes the moral force and social critical function through drama in order to reflect the modern human being’s living conditions in a post-industrial and commercial society. Chinese spoken dramas, developed at the same time as social protest plays, bear a similar tradition with Miller’s drama, in the aspects of social criticism and human concerns. When China reopened its door after Mao’s era, Miller visited China, and his plays were soon introduced into China. Chinese audiences were attracted to Miller’s social tragedies as well as his modern dramatic devices. Since then, many of Miller’s plays have been translated into Chinese, performed, widely reviewed, and studied. In addition, influenced by Miller, many young Chinese playwrights and directors began to explore the modernist styles, powerful social criticism and keen insight into human life. The First Journey to China Arthur Miller’s first visit to China was in the autumn of 1978, immediately before the establishment of Sino-US diplomatic relationship. He was the first contemporary American dramatist to visit China, thus beginning the face-to-face interactions of the dramatists between the two countries. During his visit, Miller visited many Chinese dramatists, directors, actors, and other theatrical figures, watched Chinese spoken dramas, Beijing operas and Kunqu operas and at the same time, he got involved in extensive talks with Chinese scholars. After returning to America, Miller published some of his travel notes in an article entitled “In China,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, the 3rd issue of 1979. Later, he collected many beautiful pictures taken by his wife, Inge Morath, a photographer, and made them into a travelogue and published it with a new title: Chinese Encounters. As the development of dramas in America and China was unbalanced and there left a big gap between the two different cultures after so many years of separation, this imbalance was reflected clearly in the direct conversations between contemporary young writer Su Shuyang and Miller, “Talking with such a great American playwright who should be referred to as a master, I am more mentally disturbed as a fledgling and ignorant youth….”[5] This kind of nervousness preceded from his own ignorance of America and American drama as well as his shock from intercultural communication with foreign worlds and what’s more, it reflected Chinese literary men’s and artists’ uneasiness and disturbance for the incoming foreign culture. “People have lived under abnormal conditions so long that once life returns to normal, they are lost and stubborn, instead.”[6] Qiao Yu, a poet, and Su Guang, an interpreter who accompanied Miller, were more anxious when talking about their knowledge of American writers. However, little did Miller know about Chinese writers either and he called this separation from each other as “being covered with clouds and fog, separated from the world.”[7] Cultural differences were so great that collision and misunderstanding were inevitable. Miller was most surprised at Chinese writers’ working system that they were subordinate to government institutions and paid with monthly salaries. However, Su Shuyang was also perplexed that there was no Ministry of Culture in America. The consequences of these two different organizations were that Chinese writers “spare no efforts to maintain and establish a certain concept which our government exactly needs”[8] while those American writers such as Miller had to live on writing as his occupation and therefore serious American writers “are always unwelcomed as they are criticizing the society and moral values all the time.”[9] The difference between Chinese and American cultural concepts illustrates even more about thinking patterns since these two countries have undergone their own different historical progresses. For instance, China pays more attention to collectivism while America advocates individualism. When Su told Miller confidently that “we are optimistic and we believe that collectivistic spirit will make people warm forever,” Miller said with a smile, “I hope so.”[10] Hence, there seemed a great discrepancy which has been separating the two peoples for several decades. It is impossible to bridge the gap and to integrate to the harmonious realm. Moreover, Miller was still a “left and progressive writer,” compatible with Chinese perceptions in some respects. Beijing had been a glamorous place for Miller. As early as the 1930s, Miller was greatly concerned about Chinese Revolution (a communist revolution to overthrow Guomintang regime) and he knew some celebrated names like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, etc. who “were like flares shot into sky out of a human sea.”[11] He learnt these from Edgar Snow’s reportage on the Long March of Chinese Red Army (a great withdrawal of Chinese communist army from south to north) “Red Star over China,” and later the Anti-Japanese War. However, the forthcoming cold war between the two countries isolated one another by demonizing each other. He considered that “no one knows a country until he can easily separate its merely idiosyncratic absurdity from its real contradictions.”[12] Therefore, when China exerted open policy and Sino-US relationship was normalized, he came to visit Beijing, Nanjing, Yanan, Xi’an, Shanghai, Guilin, and Hangzhou and many other places for trips and interviews. As to informal discussions with Chinese writers, he sighed, “the gap caused by our mutual ignorance of each other’s real rather than reported culture seemed limitless one morning when we sat down to talk with some ten writers, movie directors, novelists, and one actress in a Peking hotel. …I felt a far more deeply depressing sense of hopelessness that such isolation could actually have been structured and maintained. … we emerged from darkness to confront each other.”[13] Long-term indifference as well as cultural barriers made both sides unacceptable and this sense of abrupt fainting at the sudden collision was exactly the cultural shock when two different cultures began to communicate again after long intervals. Apart from his travel experiences in Chinese Encounters, Miller discusses mainly his impressions on China after the catastrophes of the GCR: so many artists were persecuted that only eight model operas were left and economy was withered all over the country. Miller’s keen interest in Chinese traditional opera was manifested in his reflections when watching Beijing Operas as A Woman General of the Yang Family (a famous legend of Song Dynasty about Mu Guiying, a heroine, leading an army fighting against the foreign invaders), Wang Zhaojun (a sad story about a beauty in Han Dynasty who was sent to marry a Mongolian king for peace) and Kunqu Operas as The Tale of the White Snake (a southern love story about a white snake loving a young scholar). His evaluations were pertinent when watching spoken dramas Loyal Hearts (a play by Su Shuyang about a devoted scientist fighting against the Gang of Four), Cai Wenji (a play by Guo Moruo about a Han Dynasty official’s daughter being captured by Mongolian troops for 12 years and later coming back after paying a ransom), The Other Shore (an early absurdist play by Gao Xingjian, a Nobel Prize-winner, about contemporary Chinese people’s spiritual pursuit), etc. And he talked with Cao Yu (author of famous Chinese play The Thunderstorm, an O’Neill-like tragedy of a woman loving her step-son who loves his half-sister blindly). He discussed with Huang Zuolin about the theory of “Freestyle Theater” (Zuolin’s theatrical idea involving Chinese culture of space, in Chinese “Xieyi”) and his recommendation of The Crucible to Zuolin.[14] This visit allowed Miller to learn current situations of Chinese spoken drama. First, he thought Chinese and American people could undertake cultural communications through drama, “Chinese people’s emotions in theater are the same. Although there are great differences between eastern and western cultures, the roots which produce the cultures are absolutely identical.”[15] He praised the brilliant Chinese civilization and traditional operas. However, he had a deep impression on the political and conceptual tendency in problem plays, “Clearly, Loyal Hearts was fashioned as a blow and a weapon, and its force as a social document seems undeniable; … The tone is that of An Enemy of the People; the impulsion being preeminently social and moral, there is little or no subjective life expressed and the people have characteristics rather than character. While the dialogue manages to ring in all the main current slogans—“Learning from the facts,” “Don’t forget that all reactionaries will come to a bad end,” and so forth.”[16] He pointed out the platitude and vapidity of Cai Wenji with classical American straightforwardness, “the story was told four and possibly five separate times in the first hour. The only difference is that new characters repeat it, but they add very little new each time.”[17] He also hit the point of actors’ overacting performance, “A remark that might call for smile causes its hearer to laugh; a mild chuckle becomes a guffaw accompanied by deep, appreciative nods. What should be a wave of recognition to an acquaintance turns into a bang of the palm on his back and plenty of ha-ha-ha thrown in.”[18] His critique for contemporary Chinese playwrights, directors, and performers was pivotal. After Cao Yu exchanged views with Miller in this respect, he invited Miller to come and direct his dramas in China and this was the cause that Miller came to China again in 1983. The Translation and Reviews of Arthur Miller’s Plays in China As early as in 1962, Miller’s work was introduced into China by Mei Shaowu (son of Mei Lanfang, famous Beijing opera actor who visited America in the 1930s) whose article introduced six of Miller’s plays but had limited reading circle for the restriction of western cultures in Mao’s times, while the Chinese version of his plays didn’t appear until the end of the GCR. In 1980, Chen Liangting translated Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman (published in Foreign Drama Resources, Issue 1, 1979, and later included in Selected Plays of Arthur Miller, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1992). Chen had a high view on Miller in the afterword, “He [Miller] pursues meaning of human life contiguously, does well in analyzing humanity and rationality, shows solicitude for the whole humanity and takes it as his own mission to evoke audience and readers’ social awareness as well as people’s moral values and sense of responsibility.”[19] Mei Shaowu’s two articles introducing Miller and his eight plays were published Foreign Drama Resources (Issue 1, and 2, 1979). In 1981, Liao Kedui edited American Drama Collection (Chinese Drama Publishing House) including Yao Dengfo’s article On Arthur Miller’s Plays. The script of The Crucible (directed by Huang Zuolin in 1981) was interpreted by Mei Shaowu and published in Foreign Literature Quarterly (Issue 1, 1982) while Nie Zhengxiong translated it with the title of “Yanjundekaoyan” (Severe Trials, Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1982). Ying Ruocheng translated Death of a Salesman in 1983 and in 1999 it was reprinted by China Translation and Publication Corporation with a Chinese-English version. With the successful performance of his Death of a Salesman in China, other Miller’s plays entered China in succession. In 1986, The American Clock was translated by Mei Shaowu and was printed in Foreign Literature and Art (Issue 5, 1986). His completed collection was Selected Contemporary Foreign Dramas (Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1992) which included A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays and After the Fall besides the above-mentioned three plays. His Death of a Salesman is compulsory in university courses as “Selected Reading of Foreign Literature” and “Selected Reading of English and American Literature.” There are two kinds of selected Chinese versions of essays written by Miller: The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (selected and translated by Chen Ruilan, et al, Shanghai Joint Publishing House, 1987) and Arthur Miller on Theater (translated by Guo Jide, et al, The Culture and Art Publishing House, 1988). In 1997, Ren Xiaomei translated Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press). According 2000 China Reading Weekly poll, Sun Weixin and Wu Wenzhi edited Abstracts of a Hundred Famous Chinese and Foreign Literary Works Influencing China in 20th Century (Lijiang Publishing House) in which Death of a Salesman is chosen. In 2000, Death of a Salesman entered New Chinese Text Book of High School (People’s Education Press, Volume Six). The Ministry of Education wanted to “break through previous limitations on selection that merely emphasizes critical realistic works, and introduce some foreign literary works of great influence in different respects.”[20] It can be perceived from the transmutation of above translation and introduction, Chinese passion for Miller and his works has been on the increase and his influence in China is also gradually far-reaching. Soul-Hunting: The Crucible in China The Crucible was recommended by Arthur Miller to Huang Zuolin, director of Shanghai People’s Art Theater. This play, bearing many similarities with “the GCR,” was staged in Shanghai People’s Art Theater in 1981. The story of The Crucible was derived from the historical “witch trials” as a result of which some 20 innocent people were hanged (Miller increased the number to seventy) and more people were put into jail. At the beginning of the play, a group of girls, who were obsessed by asceticism, danced nakedly in the forest under the leadership of Abigail. But they were found and scared. These girls were said to be bewitched and influenced by evil supernatural beings (devils). They were forced to accuse their villagers of being devil’s spokesmen. This case gave rise to a chain of reactions and more and more people were accused. Abigail, the heroine, had been once a farmer John Proctor’s assistant and in deep love with Proctor. Later their affair was discovered and dismissed by the Proctor’s wife Elizabeth. She was always hateful and vengeful to Elizabeth. Therefore, Abigail accused Elizabeth of practicing witchcraft while Proctor admitted his improper relationship with Abigail in front of the public in order to save his wife. The court burst into an uproar and Elizabeth was immediately required to testify for her husband while she denied the testimony to save his fame. Proctor was faced with a trial: either to retract his statements to ruin his own reputation or insist his statements (regarded as perjury by the court) to be executed. Finally, he went straightforward to execution gallows. The Crucible was written during an era of white terror when McCarthyism was prevailing. Coincidentally, Miller himself was called in 1957 by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to force him name names of members of Communist Party. But he refused reasonably. Although the playwright always denied that The Crucible has direct connection with American McCarthyism in 1950s, we can infer their inner relationship clearly. First staged in America for 197 performances in 1953 and again for 633 performances in 1958, The Crucible has been always widely popular among audiences and has become part of the repertoire on Broadway. The first performance of The Crucible in Shanghai on September 4, 1981 raised great concerns immediately and got a big hit. Miller once said confidently before the Shanghai performance, “It (The Crucible) will obviously acquire Chinese audiences’ understanding.”[21] Cheng Yan said “it enormously shortens the distance brought by several decades’ gap as well as national difference”[22] The attention on history, politics, humanity as well as morality in The Crucible appealed to Chinese audiences after the GCR because they saw the similar situations as false-accusation, crime-involvement (innocent people being punished for their relatives’ crimes), persecution, under which everyone felt insecure and frightened. These feelings and experiences enabled Chinese audiences to understand and sympathize with characters in the play. Miller wrote in his autobiography Timebends: A Life, “The writer Nien Cheng, who spent six and a half years in solitary confinement and whose daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, told me that after she saw the Shanghai production she could not believe that a non-Chinese had written the play. Some of the interrogations were precisely the same ones used on us in the GCR.”[23] Chinese critics immediately expressed two different opinions on Abigail. Guo Jide said, “Abigail is the primitive evil power which causes the whole disaster, tells lies and creates a great deal of fraud. Proctor is the symbol of integrity and bravery as well as a heroic image which is standing erect and accepting ordeal in a fierce fire.”[24] However, the opposite opinion states, “although she is false to be deliberately mystifying, her sentiments towards Proctor are as real as true love.”[25] Another great significance brought about by the performance of The Crucible is the theatrical concept of “Freestyle Theater.” As early as in 1962, Huang Zuolin began to reform the then dominant theatrical idea of Stanislavsky style so he proposed “Freestyle Theater” concept which blended Bertolt Brecht’s theory and staging concept, emphasizing on the unreal scenes and presupposition of stagecraft rather than the reality of “illusionism.” The Crucible was the first American play after the GCR performed in China and directed with the idea of “Freestyle Theater.” “There are merely several wooden poles on the stage with all gloomy background under which crucifixes exist everywhere. These crucifixes give a sense of divinity. Although doors, windows, court, jail, etc. vary, crucifixes stand there all the time.”[26] Afterwards, other Chinese “Freestyle Theater” plays appeared on stage one after another such as The Chinese Dream (1985), Moth (1989), etc. When National Theater Company of China was established in May of 2000, it performed two foreign plays, one of which was The Crucible. Meanwhile, on the other shore it was also performed on Broadway. It more or less indicated both nations’ appealing to traditional dramatic culture of much historicalness and universal humanity. Many Chinese comment on the somber mise-en-scène atmosphere of this drama, “The director rendered the atmosphere of repression and distortion on the stage. Actually, entering into the theater, one could feel the ominous aura that ‘something’ would happen. ... The ropes, dangling overhead from the ceiling of the theater, were virtually questioning each of us, when we face the same situation that those people in the play face, how shall we choose?”[27] Soul-hunting in Chinese Drama After the GCR, searching for humanity became the main theme in plays as well as Chinese fiction and poetry. In the Chinese plays since 1980, honesty and trust were questioned and the persecuted victims experienced bloodier treatment than those in The Crucible. The representative among them is Sangshuping Chronicle (script by Zhu Xiaoping, born in 1952, who went to the border area as a student. The story is based on a titled novel by Chen Zidu and Zhu Xiaoping.), which was first performed in 1988, revealing northwestern Chinese peasants’ living conditions and feudal ideology precipitated from history and tradition in 1968. People at Sangshuping are both persecutors and victims. Caifang, a widow falls in love with a wheat reaper (like a seasonal migrant worker) who helps to do the seasonal harvest work. They are caught in elopement, lynched and beaten by the villagers. Caifang drowns herself in a well. In order to carry on the family bloodline, the parents of Fulin (an idiot) marry his sister in exchange for Qingnu as Fulin’s wife. Some youngsters put Fulin up to pull off Qingnu’s clothes in front of the public, which drives Qingnu mad. Wang Zhike is marginalized and persecuted by villagers after the death of his wife and finally is falsely charged with murder. He is driven away for his non-native identity. Their only farm cattle is reluctantly butchered by farmers who have raised it when some inspection officials want to eat it and they have to kill it themselves. Characters in this tragedy are all victims persecuted under feudal autocratic dominance. The Crucible expresses the destruction of human nature by rigid religious persecution and immorality while Sangshuping Chronicle shows the tragic life overburdened under traditional and feudal cultures and poverty. But people still show their brave pursuit for happiness. The vilification and persecution of virtuous human beings in The Crucible are fully embodied in Sangshuping Chronicle while the latter is more powerful than the former in many respects. And its exploitation of unenlightened humanity bears no difference from Miller’s calling for morality and justice. But both “hunting” scenes of Sangshuping and the Salem were rooted historically, relying on the similar events resulted from feudalism. Both of them criticize the human ignorance and backwardness, selfishness, narrow-mindedness and superstitious beliefs. Both plays employ wizard rituals to add supernatural and mysterious atmospheres. Dancing in the forest and exorcism ceremonies in The Crucible are the discourses of the middle ages. Sangshuping Chronicle exploits praying for rain, sacrificing cattle, man-hunting and other ceremonies as well as bass drum, chorus and other skills full of national characteristics that make the whole drama permeated with poetic significance just as Gao Huibin said, “association with poetic techniques and illusionary skills in artistic conception.”[28] Strong national characteristics, distinctive performance, and the mysterious mise-en-scène aura set up Sangshuping Chronicle as a banner of contemporary Chinese spoken drama. According to Xu Xiaozhong, its director, the staging of the play was a dramatic pattern of “combining Chinese and Western cultures. Reviewing the whole process, I clearly realize that no matter realism or romanticism, concrete or abstract, reproduction or expression, the artistic concepts and principles of drama may vary and the principal method of how to extract and abstract life may differ while all stage artistic creations come from life directly or indirectly.”[29] Selling Dreams in Beijing From March to May in 1983, invited by Cao Yu and Ying Ruocheng, Miller came to Beijing People’s Art Theater to direct his masterpiece Death of a Salesman. It got such a great success that it enters the theater’s repertoires. After returning home, he published his directing notes Salesman in Beijing (New York: Viking Press, 1984) which recorded the cultural and dramatic concepts and the conflicts as well as communication during the process of his directing Death of a Salesman. It also included all sorts of interesting episodes, anecdotes even disputes when transplanting this play in China. On the March 20, 1983, Beijing People’s Art Theater welcomed Arthur Miller, the ambassador of Sino-US cultural exchanges.[30] Miller obviously felt the atmosphere of China’s rapid economic development and the signs of social transformation. He was still fluttering with fear of the experience when he watched plays acted by Chinese actors in 1978: “How appalling it was to see actors made up with chalk-white faces and heavily ‘rounded’ eyes, walking with heavy, almost loutish gait as they think Europeans and especially Russians do, and worst of all, wearing flaxen or very red-haired wigs that to us seemed to turn them into Halloween spooks.”[31] Therefore, he began to utilize cultural transplanting principle of “adapting foreign things for Chinese use”. The first moment meeting the actors, he proposed that it should bear resemblance in spirit rather than in appearance, telling them to express common humanity instead of “specious acting”. He suggested, “The way to make this play more like American is to make it more like Chinese. … One of my main motives in coming here is to try to show that there is the same humanity. Our cultures and languages set up confusing sets of signals whuch prevent us from communicating and sharing one another’s thoughts and sensations, but that at the deeper levels where we are joined in a unity that is perhaps biological.”[32] Miller highlighted the cultural exchanging function of the drama, carrying on the comparison between Chinese and American cultures from different aspects such as the plot, characters, performing techniques, etc. Placed in a manifesting areas such as comparing Chinese salesmen, insurance, refrigerator, cars, family life with those of America’s; comparing father’s earnest expectation for his sons with Chinese father-son relationship, “great ambitions for one’s child” (Wangzichenglong in Chinese idiom),[33] discussing with actors about the character Charley, and Willy Loman’s mistress, scenes of kissing as well as the different understanding and expression of sex, etc. Through bilateral negotiations, Miller compromised in many aspects, for instance, the representation of sex with the Chinese actors dealing implicitly with their accustomed and traditional ways.[34] During the performances, conflicts and problems raised contiguously. Some officials were afraid that the favorable material conditions (refrigerator, car, house of Loman’s family) displayed on the stage would bring about negative effects for the then poor Chinese conditions while social critical significance of the play would be weakened for this. However, the fact that the performance of Death of a Salesman obtained a great hit proved that Miller’s practice of sinicizing his drama was the most successful interpretation of the original American work. It represented the essence of the Chinese culture, emphasized the resemblance in spirit more than in appearance, broke through the traditional realistic staging methods employed for decades in China and reflected the principles of integration of Chinese and Western cultures. The major newspapers published detailed reports on Miller’s direction of his own play in Beijing. Foreign Drama invited Miller to have a formal seminar, and published feature-length comments on the direction, acting and text analyses. All these made it rise to a hot trend of Miller and Death of a Salesman in China and the year of 1983 determinedly witnessed the successful cooperation between Miller and Beijing People’s Art Theater. Since then, cultural exchanges between China and America revived, breaking the ice of tight cultural relationship. From 30 tough years’ hostility and exclusion to face-to-face conversation, peoples of both countries could eventually open their mind and exchange as they like. When everyone was cheering for the great success of the performance, Miller said to himself, “America will need this country as an enrichment to our culture one day just as China needs us now.”[35] This reflected Miller’s modesty and wish for communication. Chinese people accepted and acknowledged this classical American drama. They speculated on human’s survival predicament brought about by modern society. Cultural misunderstanding was inevitable that there were many Chinese interpretations such as problems of the elderly, generation gap, problems of the rich and poor, success and failure and dream and reality. Many young people considered that Biff and Happy’s cynical values and philosophies were inadvisable. Although they lost much time for working in the countryside during the GCR, they could not be irresponsible for society and their country. Zhong Yingjie, a dramatist, said, “Chinese audiences can understand easily and resonate with love as well as hatred between parents and their children as expressed in the conflicts between Loman and his sons.”[36] Chinese audiences felt angry for Loman’s being dismissed and happy for China had no such unfortunate things then.[37] Afterwards, Miller recalled emotionally in his memoir Timebends, “Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of this lies and his self-deluding exaggerations as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what they wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be darling, and above all, perhaps to count.”[38] Many people thought the real purpose of China’s reform and opening up was to lead people to success and wealth as aroused in the play, “a young Chinese student said to a CBS interviewer in the theater lobby, ‘We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful.’”[39] Miller published his directing notes in a book, Salesman in Beijing, in America in 1983. Later he wrote his directing experience in his autobiographical memoir. Miller’s directing and the play’s performance were made into a documentary series by CBS which was broadcast in America, introducing the performance spectacle of Death of a Salesman in China. All these promoted Sino-US cultural exchanges forcefully.[40] Since 1983, the Chinese version of Death of a Salesman has been performed in Shanghai, Japan, Hongkong, Singapore and many other places, gaining a great popularity and an enormous success. Ying Ruocheng not only translated the script himself, but also acted the role of Willy Loman. He pointed out in his articles, “As an actor, I do my best to obtain the value of the person which I act.”[41] In Ying’s opinion, Loman remained in paradox of dilemma: affectionate but always breaking up in disagreement with his sons; alternately sober and absent-minded at whatever he does; his suicidal action was both passive and active, both terrified and conscious. In the end, the more delighted the deceased (Willy Loman) was, the more sorrowful the living people were. Zhu Lin, a renowned actress, starred a powerful and virtuous mother Linda. She represented Linda as a classical Chinese mother who was a obedient, hardworking, understanding wife and loving mother.[42] Zhu Lin recalled the cooperation with Miller, “Mr. Miller helped us continually enrich the understanding of the script and characters. ... He is one of the greatest directors whom I encountered and are good at enlightening actors. ... He is absolutely in the standpoint of the actors, respecting actors’ work and attaching great importance to the coordinating relationship between the director and actors. ... We established profound friendship with each other during the pleasant rehearsals.”[43] Zhu Xu, actor of Charley, discussed his cooperation and rehearsal with Miller from the perspective of understanding of the character as well as its sinicization during the whole processes of rehearsals and performances in an article in Theater Studies.[44] Zhu Xu thought of Charley as a sophisticated character. In his opinion, Loman didn’t understand the function of money but he believed such things like “popularity,” “personal loyalty,” “relationship” which showed his “innocence.” However, Charley lacked imagination and was pragmatic. Death of a Salesman has been most popular among the audiences and has become one of the most significant foreign repertoires of Beijing People’s Art Theater. As to the American culture reflected in Death of a Salesman, Miller thought Chinese cast’s “95% of the comprehension of the drama is right because they know American People’s lifestyles and customs.”[45] The audiences’ comprehension and appreciation of the play was due to these American cultural media, Ying Ruocheng and other crew members as “retransmitters.” They made great efforts to have this famous western play deeply rooted in Chinese soil. As Wang Zuoliang, a famous literary critic, commented, “Chinese translators have the good taste, Chinese actors have the ability and Chinese audiences have the spiritual sensitivity and expansive art interests. All these enable them to understand and appreciate all the excellent dramas from all over the world.”[46] Chinese Tragedy of "Stream of Consciousness" and "Success Dream" Since it was presented on Chinese stage, Death of a Salesman has always been drawing attention from all over the country. Its influence is mainly manifested in three respects. First, more and more Chinese tragedies began to deal with disillusioned dreams of common people. Secondly, realistic play-writing began to absorb the expressionist method of “stream of consciousness,” digging into characters’ inner worlds. Finally, all kinds of modernist techniques began to be widely used in performances rather than Stanislavsky method. The Success of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (written by Liu Jinyun, born in 1938, president of Beijing People’s Art Theater, first staged at Beijing People’s Art Theater) in 1986 was due to its realistic depiction of common people in the GCR. It was also a typical work of tragedy of success dream and realism integrated with modern expressionist techniques. The unsuccessful salesman in Miller’s commercial competition became a common Chinese peasant cherishing a dream for success in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana. Uncle Doggie, two of whose wives either died or departed, often dreams of working hard to buy land and become a landowner. When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, he got some land for a few years in the land reform. But more political movements (Cooperative 1953-55, the Great Leap Forward 1958-1960 and the GCR 1966-76) to come, his land was deprived and his hopes for success became slimmer and slimmer. Uncle Doggie’s dream of possessing land and becoming rich vanished and he was getting crazy. Meanwhile the landowner Qi Yongnian, his fellow villager, was charged as an exploiting landlord and was criticized, denounced, severely persecuted and eventually died in the GCR. When the play begins, those things in his earlier life constantly appear in his mind and they flash back continually on stage. He often talks with the ghost of the deceased landowner Qi Yongnian, even dispute. When China reopened its door in 1978, Uncle Doggie got his land again under the new reform policy. His joy lasts only a short time for he is no long young and needs his son Dahu’s help. But Dahu and his wife decide to set up a factory instead of plowing land. Uncle Doggie burns himself in the end. Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Death of a Salesman bear many similar characteristics in respect of themes and techniques. Both plays take social, familial and moral problems as their themes. The essence of tragedy is the disillusion of dream of obtaining success or of getting rich. The two protagonists are both common people with merits and demerits: Loman is industrious, loves his family and sons but he likes boasting and gets an affair with another woman, while Uncle Doggie is a dutiful and kind farmer who is hardworking and persistent but owns a small peasant’s consciousness and is selfish. Two plays both end with the suicides of the protagonists. Their tragedies are spiritual and moral ones with the disillusion of dream as the main cause. They both employ symbolism and expressionism as artistic techniques: the high buildings and sowing vegetable seeds in Death of a Salesman, the “small box” (with seals in it) and the high gateway in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana are symbols of identity and power. The utilization of lighting is similar to that of Death of a Salesman. They both have a special time span: Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana jumps from one period to another: the Cooperative Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the GCR, the Reform and Opening-up, and together with the protagonist’s obsession with land as the clues, employing flashbacks to narrate the story, while Death of a Salesman narrates a story within two days during which many anecdotes are carried out through fantasies and recalls. The playwright Liu Jinyun once said at a conference, “In recent years, modern Euramerican plays and performances have impressed me strongly. This feeling is just like opening the window and breathing fresh air, offering suggestions to me. I set sights on something ‘new’ ... Any methods can be employed for me. For example, I have never thought of such methods before like symbolism, expressionism, stream of consciousness, etc.”[47] During a symposium on Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, Wang Yusheng said, “The appearance of Qi Yongnian, the landlord’s ghost is similar to the emergence of Salesman’s brother ‘Ben.’”[48] In the chapter “Experiment Drama in Twentieth Century Chinese Literature and Modernism Trend” of a college textbook, Tang and Chen said, “The drama of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is strongly influenced by western expressionistic drama which takes characters’ stream of consciousness, emphasizing externalizing characters’ deeper minds to visualized stage images. The ghost’s appearance in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is close to that of Karel Capek’s Mother and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.”[49] Ding Chunhua’s “The Comparison Between Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Zhejiang Business Technology Institute Journal, 2002, Issue 1) and Wu Ge’s “Chinese Dream and American Dream: Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Artistic Drama, 2002, Issue 4) have stated their opinions from their themes and artistic expressions. Before and after the performance of Death of a Salesman in China, many other playwrights undertook experimental techniques. For example, Ma Zhongjun (an avant-garde playwright born in 1957), and Jia Hongyuan’s Hot Currents Outside (the 1980 best play about a brother and sister quarreling about their deceased elder brother’s pension), employing transparent stage from which the dead could break through the wall with freedom. “This technique obviously stems from Arthur Miller’s famous play Death of a Salesman.”[50] Besides, there are many other plays using ghosts such as Gao Xingjian’s Alarm Signal (1983, a play about train robbers involving many modern techniques as recalls, mental imaginations and symbolist method) and Wild Men (1985, a play about an archaeologist looking for wild men with modern skills of inner thoughts and multitrack), Liu Shugang’s (a playwright born in 1940, president of the Central Experimental Theater) A Deadman’s Call On the Living (1983, a play about a passenger killed on a bus and the ghost coming back to reality to pay visits to the living), Su Shuyang’s Taiping Lake (1986, a play about the deceased famous writer Lao She returning to witness the world), as well as Wang Zifu’s (a play born in 1947in Beijing) Red River Valley (1996, a play about a victim of the GCR coming back to invest a business to cut down trees but interrupted and haunted by a ghost), etc. Conclusion Miller’s "tragedies of common man,” offering criticism of society and exploring character’s psychology, greatly broadened the horizon of Chinese dramatic circle immediately after his plays entered China. His two visits to China brought about brand-new concepts and atmospheres to Chinese stage. He draws more attention to society and family with conscience and responsibility, reevaluates the essence of humanity, combines modern techniques like “stream of consciousness” with realistic drama creation, explores characters’ inner changes, and criticizes social inequality through the disillusion of dream. The consistency between Miller and Chinese dramatists’ interest in social problem drama makes his plays much easier to be performed, understood, accepted and influential in China. Integrating with their own dramatic concepts, Chinese artists have created Chinese-style expressionist plays (such as Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Sangshuping Chronicle). However, influence is not unidirectional. “The communicativeness within literary receptive activities reflects mainly in the ‘backflow’ or feedback to writers of readers’ aesthetic experience.”[51] Miller found a lot worth learning during his stay in China, for instance, supposition and stylization in classical Chinese operas. Zuolin helped Miller understand “Freestyle Theater.” He even utilized these techniques of opera into his own plays as soon as he returned home. While directing Death of a Salesman, he employed the technique of “similarity in spirit” of Chinese opera. Through the repeated performances of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible in 21st century and more scholars reviewing Miller and his works, Arthur Miller’s influence in China has become more and more extensive.[52] Wu Wenquan is a Professor and PhD of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. He earned his PhD in Nanjing University in the study field of contemporary American drama in China. He has published in journals like Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature and Drama in China. His current study is on Tennessee Williams and his works. Chen Li is a graduate student of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. Zhu Qinjuan is a lecturer of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Yancheng Teachers’ University, Jiangsu, China. [1]The Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is a political movement led by Mao Zedong to mistakenly criticize bourgeois mentality and culture. Lin Biao (a general, and Mao’s successor, later died in an air crash) and the Gang of Four (including Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen) assisted Mao to put China into a disorder. During these ten years of upheaval, millions of students joined great parades and followed Mao’s order to work in poor border areas and countryside. And millions of officials and intellectuals were persecuted and Chinese traditional culture was greatly damaged. [2] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garpett Barden and John Cumming (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1999. Reprinted from the English Edition by New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1975), 154. [3] Yue Daiyun, Comparative Literature and Chinese Modern Literature (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1987), 44. [4] Ibid., 57. [5] Su Shuyang, “People Will Reach a Great Harmony: A Talk with American Playwright Arthur Miller,” Reading 1 (1979): 119-22, esp. 119. (Su Shuyang, born in 1938, is a Chinese writer who published his famous plays as Loyal Hearts and Taiping Lake and a novel Homeland.) [6] Ibid., 120. [7] Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, Chinese Encounters (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), 13. [8] Su Shuyang, 120. [9] Ibid., 120. [10] Ibid., 121. [11] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 8. [12] Ibid., 7. [13] Ibid., 15. [14] Soon after, Sun Huizhu and Gong Boan wrote an article (“On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang,” The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8) to describe the different understanding and conflicts on the idea of “Xieyi (Free-style) Drama” between the two dramatists, “Huang Zuolin explained, ‘The Chinese character of ‘drama’ is made up of two parts of ‘vacant’ and ‘spear’, being real and false should both be suitable. Being real is not drama and being not real is not art. Acquiring emotion and meaning is both drama and art.’ On hearing this, Miller was at a loss. Huang continued, ‘We must find the inner truth, the essence of the real world, their connections and feelings. Then take it out from the superficial matters.’ To enable Miller to know the real meaning of Free-style Drama, Zuolin invited Miller to watch traditional Kunju opera The Tale of the White Serpent. Sure enough, Miller appreciated the play and said to Zuolin that the west realistic drama was much less colorful and exciting.” [15] Dong Leshan. “Arthur Miller Reviewing Loyal Hearts, Cai Wenji and The Other Shore,” Reading 2 (1979), 77. [16] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 93. [17] Ibid., 94. [18] Ibid., 95. [19] Chen Liangting, “Words after Translation,” Selected Plays by Arthur Miller (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Press, 1979), 249. [20] Gu Zhichuan, “Replies on the New Senior High School Textbook of Chinese,” http://www.360doc.com/content/11/0328/05/503199_105231591.shtml (accessed 19 October 2008). [21] Cheng Yan, “The Appealing Art: On the Performance of The Crucible,” Shanghai Drama 5 (1981), 18. [22] Ibid., 19. [23] Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 348. [24] Guo Jide, “Arthur Miller and His The Crucible,” American Literature Special Issue (1981), 74. [25] Wu Peiyuan and Hu Chengyuan, “On The Crucible Directed by Zuolin,” Foreign Drama 2 (1982), 41. [26] Ibid., 42. [27] Liu Xiaochun, “The News in Spring,” Drama 2 (2002), 141. [28] Gao Huibing, “The Shangshuping Chronicles and the Mystery of Imagery,” in A Study of Xu Xiaozhong’s Directing Art, ed. Lin Yinyu (Beijing: Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1991), 188. [29] Xu Xiaozhong, “Changes in Combining and Connecting,” (Part I and II) Drama Journal 5 (1988), 43. [30] Ding Zhou, a journalist of China Construction reported on the visit of Miller, “The similar share of human feelings brought the aged American salesman from New York to Britain, Mosco, Rome, Oslo, Sydney, and Tokyo. And now, he comes to Beijing with heavy pace and same heavy case of commodity samples.” (Ding Zhou, “Review on the Spoken Drama Death of a Salesman,” China Construction 8 (1988), 25). [31] Ibid., 5. [32] Ibid. [33] The Chinese idea of Wangzichenglong (“high hopes for one’s child”) and the expectations for the sons in Death of a Salesman match each other. Miller often commented on this point, “What surprised me is that the parents’ expectations for the children are very Chinese way of thinking. They called it ‘high hopes for one’s child’, ie., hoping the children to succeed… Therefore, when Happy said life is a game, ie., to be No 1. Chinese audiences are the first to get the meaning of these words.”（See David Richards, “Arthur Miller, Survivor,” Manchester Guardian Weekly (Mar. 25, 1984), 17） [34] Yuan Henian expressed his counterviews on the sex scenes being too strict. He pointed out that the two sex scenes in the restaurant and hotel are restrained and sex is always a taboo in Chinese literature and art. (See: Yuan Henian, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” Chinese Literature (Oct., 1983), 108-9) [35] Ibid., 252-53. [36] “Stones Borrowed from Other’s Hills: A Forum on the Performance of Death of a Salesman,” Drama Newspaper 7 (1983), 42. [37] See: Tan Aiqing, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” China Reconstructs (August, 1983), 26. [38] Miller, Timebends: A Life, 184. [39] Ibid., 185. [40] Miller’s directing his Death of a Salesman in China and his Salesman in Beijing (a diary of his directing experience published in the US) received warm responses in the US. The Wall Street Journal reported Miller’s play and Miller’s Salesman in Beijing on April 26, 1984. Meanwhile, Broadway staged Death of a Salesman again, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. It was another big hit, bringing about more reviews and essays on the play. Next comes the 1998 performances of the play in Goodman Theater, Chicago, and the following year, it was moved to the Broadway. [41] Ying Ruocheng, “The Stage Image Creation of Willy Loman and Others,” Guangming Daily (June 3, 1983), 3. [42] Zhu Lin, “A Hard but Pleasant Performance: Experience of Acting Linda,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 12-13. [43] Ibid. [44] See Zhu Xu, “I Act Charlie: Records of Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 14-17. [45] Rui Tao, “Notes on Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” The People’s Daily (May 8, 1983), 7. [46] Huang Zuoliang, “The Exciting Performance in May: After Seeing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Journal 6 (1983), 8. [47] “Exploring the New and Thriving the Drama Creation,” Literary Studies 1 (1988), 44. [48] “Five People on The Nirvana of Gouerye,” Drama Review 1 (1987), 9. [49] Tang Zhengxu and Chen Houcheng, 20th Century Chinese Literature and Western Modern Literature (Beijing: The People Publishing House, 1992), 609. [50] Wang Xinmin, The History of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2000), 216. [51] Zhu Liyuan, Aesthetics of Reception (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1989), 175-76. [52] Huizhu Sun and Bo'an Gong, "On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang," The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8. "Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China" by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jim Bredeson Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre” by Benjamin Miller “West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s” by Malcolm Richardson “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China” by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

James M. Cherry Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle James M. Cherry By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. The principal undertaking of August Wilson’s playwriting career—the “Pittsburgh Cycle”—is a singular accomplishment in American theater. A series of ten plays highlighting the cultural shifts and stresses of African-American experience throughout the 20th century, the Cycle was written and staged over the course of three decades and completed shortly before Wilson’s death in 2005. Wilson situated his opus largely in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where he spent his childhood, a once-vibrant African-American community that fell into decay following failed urban development schemes and resultant poverty. Throughout the Cycle, Wilson connects the Hill District’s transformations to the larger history of African-Americans—slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, persistent institutional racism—and the ways in which these realities reveal themselves on stage in micro-histories of Black lives. Wilson also foregrounds the historical linkages of music, ritual, ceremony, and oral culture as critical dramaturgical elements. As their descendants replace characters on Wilson’s stage, these are the ties that bind still. The restoration of a fragmented ancestry is personified in the reoccurring figure of Aunt Ester, the wise woman who physically embodies the link across time to Africa. Taken together, the plays of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle can be seen as the work of playwright tethering a community to an obscured past. As Sandra G. Shannon rightly notes in her introduction to a new collection of essays, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays, the narratives that fill Wilson’s plays are not simply representations of African-American life, but are also intensely personal, “reflect[ing] the playwright’s own fragmented life exacerbated by a complete disconnect with his biological father, by his flight from a racist Pittsburgh’s school system, and by his discovery or “reunion” with the blues, Africa, Amiri Baraka, and by his newfound regard for the vernacular of fellow Pittsburgh natives” (5). For Shannon, as well as many authors in this excellent collection, Wilson’s dual roles as an “autoethnographer of the black experience,” and as “the wounded healer” (6) who confronts his own personal history as a way to make sense of the larger historical narrative, are essential to understanding Wilson’s great accomplishment; they are also essential to comprehending what Wilson’s vision of the twentieth century means in our twenty-first. Since August Wilson’s death, there have been many attempts to examine and reconcile Wilson’s completed project, and recent scholarly treatments of the complete Cycle resonate throughout the volume under review here. Shannon’s text joins an already active critical conversation, including Harry Elam’s touchstone work The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), a recent Cambridge Companion collection, and the frequent stagings of the plays across the country. Appropriately enough, Shannon’s collection ranges widely in subjects and inventive theoretical perspectives. Sarah Saddler and Paul Bryant-Jackson’s piece on Two Trains Running brings together Manning Marable’s advocacy of a multidisciplinary “living history” to reclaim the lost narratives of people of color, and Diana Taylor’s argument to consider the “embodied behaviors that serve to e/affect the outcome of the social drama, and thus “ history” itself” (53). Saddler and Bryant-Jackson conclude that Wilson creates a document of living history in which the political struggles of the 1960s are played out on a personal and spiritual level on stage. In another essay, Psyche Williams-Forson probes the Wilson’s frequent use of food as way to depict communal and gender relationships, citing Wilson’s own interest in cultural anthropology. These arguments reframe August Wilson not just as a significant “realist” playwright, but as a writer whose works respond to various theoretical frameworks. Wilson deploys African ritual in his plays, often as a way to reconnect with a lost heritage, and several essays in this collection tease out the various dramaturgical and symbolic meanings of this connection. Artisa Green’s analysis of the “Òrìșà archetypes, sacred objects, and spaces” (10) and the Yoruban week calendar “which comprises a seven day cycle characterized by daily attributes that resulted from events which occurred in Yoruba creation stories” (156), facilitates a significant new understanding of the spiritual architecture of Gem of the Ocean. In the case of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Connie Rapoo looks at Loomis’ “acts of sacrifice” (177) as ways to “remember the spiritual African past in order to restore cosmic order” and to reclaim a forgotten cultural identity. More significantly, this collection often shows how Wilson’s work uses history to reflect upon contemporary concerns. Isaiah Matthew Wooden’s piece on the fraught relationship between the American justice system and the African-Americans subject to it in Gem of the Ocean is deeply relevant to the America of Black Lives Matter and police action captured on cell phone video. The concluding essay by Susan C. W. Abbottson deploys the work of theorists Alan Wilde, John McGowan, and Linda Hutcheon to investigate the optimistic, inclusive humanism in Wilson’s work. For Abbottson, “what Wilson is modeling through this cycle are lessons of responsibility, connection, history, and identity, which combine to create a final vision of what contemporary society most needs: active democracy” (200). In illuminating the experience of Black people in America, Wilson’s “self-defining American chronicle for the ages” (199) also sheds light on the desires, anxieties, and possibilities of all human beings. The main utility of the August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is as a companion to, and an expansion of, previous Wilson scholarship. While it is inevitable for any collection to focus on some works more than others, Jitney (1982), Fences (1985), and Radio Golf (2005) are seldom addressed in this volume, though they are certainly topics of examination elsewhere. The inclusion of a production history of the Cycle would have made the text more user-friendly. Yet, the multiplicity of theoretical perspectives here acts as a provocation for other scholars to look at August Wilson’s work in new, inventive ways. Just as Wilson himself sought to forge links between the present and past, readers of his work should be encouraged to connect it with our present and future. James M. Cherry Wabash College The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

SHONNI ENELOW + DAVID LEVINE presents David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: WTF at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: WTF SHONNI ENELOW + DAVID LEVINE 6:30-7:20 pm Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP An expression of pure 80s id, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross geysers up craven capitalism, deranged method acting, and American maleness at its most revolting. But has its moment truly passed? Enelow and Levine preview the third of their performance dinners at the Invisible Dog, in which actors read, Lucien cooks, guests eat, and everyone discusses great plays with freaky politics. Performed with Eric Cotti and Noah Gold 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). Shonni Enelow is a critic and scholar who writes about film and theater. She is the author of Joanna Hogg (Contemporary Film Directors series, University of Illinois Press, 2024) and Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama (Northwestern University Press, 2015). She is the winner of the 2015-2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Her book with David Levine, A Discourse on Method , was published by 53rd State Press in 2020, and her book with Una Chaudhuri, The Ecocide Project , was published by Palgrave in 2013. She is Professor of English at Fordham University. David Levine is an artist whose work encompasses theater, performance, video, and photography. Recent exhibitions include Dissolution , at the Museum of the Moving Image and Some of the People, All of the Time at the Brooklyn Museum. His work been featured in Artforum, Theater, n+1, BOMB, and the New York Times. He is the author, with Shonni Enelow of A Discourse on Method (53rd State Press), and with Alix Rule, of International Art English (Triple Canopy). He is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim fellowship and a 2012 OBIE, and is Professor of the Practice of Performance, Theater, and Media at Harvard University. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

By Cory Tamler | An experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. < Back A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography Cory Tamler Download PDF A work of social choreography. A training ground for the imagination. A psychedelic experience without substances. A technology for cleaning social relations. A proposal for embodied civic duty. A journey into the realer real that gives back to the real—as if it were possible to bring an object from the dream world into waking life. A lifeboat. Over the past decade, at least a thousand people (among them philosophers, office workers, professional dancers, scientists, students, artists, and the author-editor of this book) have participated in Parliament sessions from Athens to NYC. For all its potency, Parliament resists being written about, starting from any attempt to describe what it is. It resists authorship too. Choreographer and artist Michael Kliën prefers to say he discovered it, or wished for it, from within “a felt urgency that things are just not sustainable.” In this book, Parliament writes out of itself. Artist and writer Cory Tamler holds the container, editing together her memories of her own experiences as a participant, excerpts from conversations with Kliën and from his personal archive, theoretical propositions for the way Parliament could go to work in the world, and reflections from other participants in Parliament over the years. An annotated bibliography makes visible the framework of ideas—from art and choreography to systems theory and political theory—within which Parliament sits. This text is an experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. It is meant for readers who, whether familiar or unfamiliar with Parliament, are interested in how the social is formed and in bodies as key agents in its formation. Contributors: Michael Kliën with Catherine Cabeen, Mallory Catlett, Blythe Davis, Barbara Dickinson, Jeffrey Gormly, Floor Grootenhuis, Frank Hentschker, Vitoria Kotsalou, Steve Valk, Shuntaro Yoshida. More Information & Order Details Publication date: December 2022 Hardcover, 179 pages, 5.25 x 8.3 inches ISBN: 9781953892072 Design by Rafal Kosakowski Retail price: $25 Published by special arrangement with the Laboratory for Social Choreography To order this book, click here (https://forms.gle/HXqK4N87HDCNbbJE6) or email corytamler@gmail.com . Available for in-person purchase: Unnameable Books and Quimby’s (Brooklyn), b_books (Berlin).

By Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker | A collection of contemporary Italian plays, presented in English. < Back New Plays from Italy Volume 4 Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker Download PDF Italian and American Playwrights Project is curated by Valeria Orani with Martin E. Segal’s Director, Frank Hentschker. The project brought together some of the brightest, most innovative, and most engaging Italian contemporary playwrights, developing their pieces through translation into English. Italian Playwrights Project restarted an artistic dialogue between Italy and the US, adding continuity to an on-off relationship between the two countries for the last decades. This book has been translated thanks to a grant from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. MIMOSA CAMPIRONI - FAMILY GAME (TRANSLATED BY PATRICIA GABORIK) After an earthquake, a man finds his loved ones’ bodies under his home’s rubble. Shocked, he starts to travel without a destination until he finds himself getting drunk at a highway gas station. Someone identifies him as a man who had disappeared several years before. The identity swap causes a series of unforeseeable events which, on the one hand, redeem the man’s spirits through a new love and, on the other, uncover the trauma of a terrible family tragedy. MARIANO DAMMACCO - A GOOD EDUCATION (TRANSLATED BY ADRIANA ROSSETTO) A Good Education tells the story of a woman, an aunt, who, because of the unexpected death of her sister, “inherits” her nephew, who she has to take care of for the first time in her solitary life. The reader finds himself following the adventures of this woman who has to face the hardship of someone having to create a bond, a relationship with a young boy, the last heir of her family. The aunt has to host him in her life, home, and mind. She has to educate him, plan his future, and participate in a young man's upbringing. But will she be suitable for the job? GABRIELE DI LUCA - METROPOLITAN MIRACLES (TRANSLATED BY THOMAS H. SIMPSON) While outside, the sewer, filled with garbage and toxic trash, is flooding the city, causing people to panic and forcing them to remain in their homes; in an old body shop turned kitchen specializing in takeout for people with allergies, are eight characters: Plinio, former star chef now broke; his wife Clara, former dishwasher and social climber; Igor, Clara’s son and Plinio’s step-son, who is affected by a form of emotional disorder; Patty, Plinio’s mother, a declared feminist; Cesare, an aspiring suicide attacker; Mosquito, an aspiring ex-con actor who is forced to do community service; Mohamed, a university professor from Lebanon turned underpaid, overworked rider; and Hope, a mysterious and bizarre dishwasher from Ethiopia who hides a big secret and morally controversial objectives. TATJANA MOTTA - WHITE NIGHT (TRANSLATED BY THOMAS H. SIMPSON ) A woman and a man visit a city for a brief vacation. Their plans are disrupted when they meet the guest, the owner of an apartment they rented online, a stranger who leads them from the city center to its outskirts. EDITED BY FRANK HENTSCHKERWITH VALERIA ORANI More Information & Order Details