Researching Cuban Drag, or Queer Diasporic Ethnography and Ethnomusicology

The global COVID-19 pandemic has led us to this current public health and political moment, bringing widespread attention to social and health inequalities and interconnecting racial discrimination faced by Black communities and other communities of colour. The pandemic has also precipitated a transition of the qualitative methodology classroom from physical to virtual spaces. At this juncture, an opportunity has emerged to amplify critical pedagogies challenging White, Eurocentric, hetero- and cis-normative epistemologies and introduce their practice into the ever-evolving classroom. Rooted within a genealogy of Black women’s political and intellectual activism, Black feminist pedagogy captures their unique intersectional experiences and presents a methodology for teachers and learners alike to promote equity in the classroom and our society. In this presentation, we discuss the ways in which Black feminist pedagogy can support reflection on the inherent relations of power shaping the pedagogical practices and knowledge production of/in the classroom. We hold that Black feminist pedagogy is not simply concerned with the instruction of, for, and about Black women. It additionally puts forth learning strategies informed by Black women’s historical experiences of race, gender, and class discrimination that can support the inclusion of diverse epistemological positionings and meaningfully represent the social and health inequities of marginalized communities. We affirm that a ‘standpoint epistemology' is foundational to Black feminist pedagogy and that those who experience marginalization are best positioned to make claims about its meanings and impacts. The presenters draw from their epistemological standpoint as Black women, graduate and postdoctoral scholars, and Black feminist thinkers. We center our own experiential knowledge as learners and teachers to reflect on the value of Black feminist pedagogy. A major learning from our experiences in this current moment has compelled us to advocate for integrating a critical reflexivity process. This process is undertaken by teachers and learners to assess how knowledge is being produced, legitimized and/or erased as a counter to the social and institutional power and authority constituting the classroom. We also discuss considerations for teaching theoretical and methodological approaches to intersecting oppressions as elemental to Black women’s experience and a cornerstone of Black feminist pedagogy. An intersectional approach supports us to take stock of the interlocking stigmas shaping health inequalities, ontologically and epistemologically (re)position the multiply marginalized communities they impact, and take up theories, methods, and practices that better align with our experiences. Intersectionality will be used to exemplify tensions as a ‘travelling theory’ and its strengths when rooted in a Black feminist pedagogy. At a time where Black feminist thought is at the forefront of public consciousness, we emphasize the dangers of taking up this tradition through white and patriarchal logics and pedagogies. As we rework the notion and formations of ‘the classroom’ in this current moment, it is important to not only recognize it as a place of intellectual advancement but also as a historical site of colonial, racial, and epistemic violence. Black feminist pedagogy holds that the experiential knowledge of racialized communities uniquely positions them for the teaching of ontologies and epistemologies characterizing their social realties and the methodological approaches employed to interpret them. To this end, redressing academic violence unequivocally requires the meaningful engagement and inclusion of Black (feminist) scholars in academic institutions and actively creating an environment that supports this pedagogical practice as an ethic and praxis towards decolonizing the classroom and qualitative health research more broadly. In this presentation, we aim to represent Black feminist thinking as a pedagogical tool to emphasize the intellectual, experiential, and cultural contributions of Black scholars to knowledge production and to help practitioners meaningfully approach teaching-learning and conducting qualitative health research in a (post-)COVID-19 reality.

New York City School cafeterias in the American post‐war period are prisms through which we can understand struggles to assert new relations of power – in terms of gender, race and class. This article examines the documented grievances of rank‐and‐file cafeteria aides in New York City's Local 372 union and the importance of institutional carework as part of a longer legacy that informs our current moment. Letters of complaint sent by workers illustrate assertion of their rights as workers while they negotiated for control of their bodies, and identities within the realm of the cafeteria and a larger male‐dominated union framework.

Radley Horton,1,a Daniel Bader,1,a Yochanan Kushnir,2 Christopher Little,3 Reginald Blake,4 and Cynthia Rosenzweig5 1Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research, New York, NY. 2Ocean and Climate Physics Department, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY. 3Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Lexington, MA. 4Physics Department, New York City College of Technology, CUNY, Brooklyn, NY. 5Climate Impacts Group, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University Earth Institute, New York, NY

On Irish Science Fiction: A Letter to the Editors Kim Stanley Robinson (bio) Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of nineteen novels, including the Mars trilogy, has been awarded two Hugo Awards for Best Novel (1994 Best Novel (1997), two Nebula Awards for Best Novel (1994 Best Novel (2013), and many other literary prizes for his science fiction. His work regularly engages with questions of ecology and our collective social future in the wake of climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Robinson was the Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Colby College in 2018 and a Muir Environmental Fellow at Muir College, University of California, San Diego, in 2011. His recent work deals directly with the climate crisis, and New York 2140 (2017) depicts New York City after sea-level rise inundates most of Manhattan and forces residents to create new forms of social, economic, and political engagement. His most recent novel, Ministry for the Future, was published in October of 2020. It has been lauded for directly grappling with the “transitional phase toward a better and different society,” a period that critics of speculative and utopian fiction argue almost always gets overlooked in favor of a focus on “the final stages of a utopian experiment.”1 Robert Markley describes Robinson as “a utopian writer—if we understand that utopia is not an endgame but an ongoing struggle for a more just and sustainable society.”2 The author’s interest in bringing together political, ecological, economic, and collective social ideas into fiction suggests that science fiction can offer us alternatives to capitalism.3 Science fiction—and particularly the genre [End Page 173] “cli-fi” (climate fiction)—offers, by some measures, the only “serious” treatment of “the ecological devastation of Earth by industrial capitalism.”4 Indeed, Robinson himself argues that “if you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece.”5 To contemplate the contemporary moment of environmental crisis requires engaging with scenarios of the future: thus the genre of science fiction and questions of the environment are inextricable. Robert Markley goes as far as to argue that Robinson’s work is a case study for “seeing science fiction, and not traditional literary realism, as the truly significant genre for our current moment in human and planetary history.”6 This claim for science fiction as more significant than literary realism is also a claim for the political necessity of moving away from the territory of individual moral action and back to imagining something like a collective. Amitav Ghosh makes precisely this point in The Great Derangement, arguing that “the contemporary novel has become ever more radically centered on the individual psyche while the collective . . . has receded, both in the cultural and the fictional imagination.”7 Ghosh deftly links this novelistic shift not to inherent elements of literary form but instead to a cultural sense of “progress” and modernity that runs parallel with accelerated carbon emissions and other aspects of the “Great Acceleration” during the twentieth century. Science fiction may be uniquely poised to offer pointed critiques of both the contemporary political situation and longer cultural histories. “In their ambitions to record a history of the Anthropocene that we do not yet know,” Markley argues, Robinson’s “novels brilliantly chart imaginative topographies that encourage us to reassess our collective histories and imagined futures.”8 Thus we can see science fiction at its best as offering not just that imaginative leap to [End Page 174] a future that is not (only) dystopian or postapocalyptic but also offering potential avenues for moving to a more sustainable and just place both environmentally and socially. But what about science fiction in an Irish context? What might Irish science-fiction writers have to say about political and environmental issues? How might their work be changing in response to the climate crisis? I heard that Robinson had an interest in Irish writing, so I asked him if he had ideas about the past and future trajectory of Irish science fiction. This letter is his response. Kelly Sullivan ________ Dear Kelly, Thanks for the invitation to...

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

Reviewed by: Moving Targets: Political Theatre in a Post-Political Age Adam W. Nixon Moving Targets: Political Theatre in a Post-Political Age. By Ryan Reynolds. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2008; pp. 212. The essential question posed in Ryan Reynolds's stimulating book Moving Targets: Political Theatre in a Post-political Age is existential: "Is there such a thing as political performance in the post-political age?" Reynolds, an American scholar and theatre artist working in New Zealand, wonders at the utter lack of belief in alternative social structures in our current moment. He writes, with some disappointment, that the grand ideas of the past have been subsumed into the market of late-stage capitalism. Using the postmodern theories of Baudrillard and Jameson as his lens, Reynolds views late-stage capitalism as a "moving target" in the crosshairs of political theatre, which itself must remain a moving target so as to avoid commodification by, and absorption into, the market of late capitalist exchange. Moving Targets is concerned with the efficacy (or lack thereof) of postmodern performance in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Chapter 1 examines the conundrum of being defined by the very postmodern conditions that political artists seek to critique. Chapter 2 examines the work of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, based in New York City. Chapter 3 focuses on Reynolds's own work with Free Theatre Christchurch in New Zealand. Chapter 4 examines Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an avant-garde performance collective from Toronto. And chapters 5 and 6 return to New Zealand, where Reynolds theorizes his own work in the broader context of political performance in the West. In chapter 1, Reynolds places Fredric Jameson, Augusto Boal, and Baz Kershaw in conversation, finding a method by which political performance can be effective even if its form is pastiche. Reynolds aligns himself with Boal and Kershaw, insisting on the possibility that a performer can, at least momentarily, transcend commodification in the marketplace and achieve political efficacy—even if that efficacy is fleeting. The important question for Reynolds is not how efficacy is achieved (form), but what is achieved (outcome). Parody/pastiche, clothes on, clothes off, gender, sex, sexuality—all is eventually consumed by the marketplace, concedes Reynolds, who nonetheless maintains that if an opening of consciousness is achieved in performance, then the political has been realized within the aesthetic. Chapter 2 offers a detailed analysis of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. As he documents, Reverend Billy appears in full religious costume atop a soap box in Times Square engaging in "mock sermons," organizing store invasions, preaching against mega-retailers, leading his choir in "Stop Starbucks" chants, and calling for the voluntary withdrawal of large corporations from the local economy. Against this backdrop, Reynolds details the myriad ways in which Reverend Billy has ironically commoditized himself: he offers classroom lectures for $500, sells appearances, and organizes events funded by rival retailers. By Reynolds's account—with a nod to Jameson—commodification is the end of the political. He reminds us that punk rock, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, and hippies have all been subsumed and commodified to a significant degree by capitalist culture. He tells us that simply having radical aims or controversial content is insufficient, since the capitalist system is so adept at incorporating opposition into commodity culture. In such a world, is it possible for an aesthetically compelling avant-garde artist to set up a website that sells T-shirts and still remain avant-garde? Of the performers Reynolds profiles, CAE (discussed in chapter 4) is in many ways the most compelling, in that it appears to have best resisted market commodification. It has even provoked severe reactions from government authorities, including the Canadian government's absurdly fabricated charges of terrorism, which led to members' arrest and trial. Even if these charges are dismissed, CAE could face bankruptcy or ruin; if they are upheld, the troupe could face prison terms. According to Reynolds, CAE achieves autonomy from the marketplace by continually transforming its aesthetics. In one type of performance it produces and distributes fake television commercials and newspaper circulars, while in another type of performance it screens audience members genetically...

In his recent immersive media art project titled Machine Hallucinations, artist Refik Anadol collected over 100 million images of New York City from social media and, using machine learning, created a 30-minute immersive experimental cinema experience that visualized the database. On his website, Anadol explains that computation allows “a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques.” With this project, Anadol demonstrates a tendency shared by a group of contemporary media artists who work at the intersection of cinema and the digital archive and who use machine learning and generative adversarial networks to render specific somatic experiences in relation to thousands of images. This essay discusses this shared focus by examining projects by three artists who use computational processes to assemble, manipulate, and then exhibit an archive of images as a part of their practice and output, translating the archival into the cinematic. The projects are significant in their evocation of what has been named by Ingrid Hoelzl the “soft-image” or “post-image,” shifting from the single image as a solid, stable representation within a collection of similarly single images, to that of the distributed, in-process experiential image. Further, each example approaches the creation of the collection with varied intentions; and each presents the material in disparate modalities that, while deeply connected to the cinematic, produce very different sensory experiences. Together, the examples offer a perspective on the archive in our current moment’s transition from representation to computation.

IntroductionLin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical and the Early American Republic Catherine E. Kelly By now, we all know the story: In 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda, a twenty-eight-year-old composer, lyricist, and performer, fresh from his Broadway hit In the Heights, took Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton on vacation to Mexico. The 800-page biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury might have seemed like strange candidate for a beach read. But the sympathetic study, which recounted the personal and political ascent of a West Indian émigré from a nondescript childhood to his death in a duel, resonated. Miranda, himself the child of Puerto Rican immigrants who had achieved professional success in the United States, saw in Chernow's book a distinctly American story, an immigrant striver's story. The following spring at a White House event celebrating poetry and the arts, Miranda performed "My Shot," a song that serves as Hamilton's declaration of intent. By 2015, when Hamilton: An American Musical opened at New York City's Public Theater, "My Shot" had become the opening salvo to a projection of the nation's origins and its identity, set to the cadences of hip-hop and R&B, and performed by actors of African American and Hispanic descent. Nearly three years and countless performances, awards, and YouTube video views later, Miranda's masterpiece has secured a place in contemporary culture. Following the cast's post-performance message to Vice President Mike Pence in the tumultuous aftermath of the 2008 presidential election, it also secured a place in our culture wars. Just as Hamilton: An American Musical made its way to the center of popular culture, it pushed its way into conversations among U.S. historians, who took to print and social media to debate the production's accuracy and its politics. The 2016 meeting of the Society for Historians of [End Page 251] the Early American Republic devoted two sessions (including the presidential plenary and a videotaped interview with Miranda) to the phenomenon. At their most fruitful, the conversations at SHEAR focused on how we might connect Miranda's show to our scholarly practice. How can historians work with Hamilton? How can they teach it? Five of the following essays represent revised and expanded versions of those contributions; Marvin McAllister's essay was solicited separately. Our aim in publishing them here is to provide a view of the musical that is both longer and deeper than even the best punditry affords. ________ Joanne Freeman and Andrew Schocket situate the musical in different historiographical contexts. Freeman acknowledges that Miranda's Hamilton ("a flawed but charming master rap-battler with an almost superhuman work ethic") emerges partly from the historical record and partly from Miranda's imaginative engagement with the present moment. But as she reminds us, American scholars have been figuring and refiguring Hamilton for well over a century. Rather than looking back at previous generations' depictions of Hamilton, Schocket looks at the culture industry's fascination with the founding. He explores this emerging entertainment industry genre (the "American Revolution Rebooted") to consider what its formulaic conventions tell us about the current moment. Readers of this journal might be especially interested to think about Hamilton from the perspective of theater history. As Heather Nathans observes, Miranda is hardly the first actor to play Alexander Hamilton. Recovering a mostly forgotten collection of plays dating back to the turn of the nineteenth century, she demonstrates how artists used Hamilton to consider "critical moments in the nation's passionate and often painful debates about race, citizenship, and belonging." If Hamilton the character has a long history, so too does Miranda's color-conscious casting. Marvin McAllister situates one of the musical's most controversial elements in a far longer tradition of "whiting up." Starting at least with William Brown, African American performers have whited up for multiple and contradictory reasons ranging from social satire and career advancement to the exposure of the "unrelenting terror wrecked on black bodies." The forum comes full circle by assessing Hamilton: An American [End Page 252] Musical as history in general and as a distinct form of popular, if not precisely public...

From the Guest Editor

From the Guest Editor: The Legacy of Poe’s Graphicality in the Expanded Field

Playing with Noah in Wanamaker's Temple:(Re)Thinking U.S. Christianity in American Studies Rachel Beckley (bio) WANAMAKER'S TEMPLE: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store. By Nicole C. Kirk. New York City: New York University Press. 2018. ARK ENCOUNTER: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park. By James S. Bielo. New York City: New York University Press. 2018. Religion has been, and remains, a driving force in American history. Yet, all too often scholars of American society and culture view religion and religiosity as secondary to prime movers like race, class, and gender. American Studies rarely engages with an in-depth analysis of religious practitioners or religious cultural creation, falling into the trap of relegating religious motivation to the realm of superstition. This is especially true in the current political moment where conservative Christian support of Republican politicians is seen as either the height of hypocrisy or a testament to political manipulation. Nevertheless, religious [End Page 7] practitioners, far from opiate-takers with dulled senses, are active and creative in the public sector. With the recent scholarly work coming out of Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, and American Studies, however, religion is coming to the fore as a prime mover and motivator in American history. Two such scholars, Nicole Kirk, an historian, and James Bielo, an ethnographer, have different methodologies, sources, time periods, and people, but both discuss how conservative Christians (variously defined) have influenced U.S. culture particularly in the business sector. Both at least tacitly understand their forms of conservative Christianity to be oppressive cultural creators, upholding gendered, classist, and racialized cultural norms. But, both scholars demonstrate how religious practitioners help(ed) to (re)create those cultural norms. Fashioning Decorum with Wanamaker In Nicole C. Kirk's first book Wanamaker's Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store, Kirk uncovers the life of John Wanamaker and the growth of his iconic department stores between 1880 and 1920. Wanamaker's example allows Kirk to interrogate the development of good taste, decorum, and respectability in U.S. culture by Protestant businessmen, a development that privileged white, middle-class values and norms. Kirk represents the most recent scholar to take up the question of the role of religion, particularly Protestantism, and how it intersected with business interests and consumerism. Other scholars, including Kim Philips-Fein, Kevin Kruse, Darren Grem, Bethany Moreton, and Darren Dochuck (to name a few), have looked to the 1920s-1960s to set up the interwoven nature of business interests/free market economics and Protestantism. These authors often connect the amalgamation of business interests and Christian interests to the rise of the Religious Right and the conservative turn in U.S. politics. Kirk's analysis, however, represents one of the first to focus on the 1850-1920s rather than the mid-century. During the late 1800s, most religious revivalists viewed businessmen as corrupt, greedy, and irreligious. Unfortunately, Kirk notes, modern scholars also assume corrupt business/religion connections by presupposing an inverse correlation between the rise of consumerism and a presumed decrease of Protestantism (and religious perspectives in general). In this perspective, businessmen used religious language or "gimmicks" in order to sell their products. However, this historical perspective devalues the work performed by religious practitioners in bringing their perspectives to bear on the public sector. Kirk is particularly interested in turn-of-the-century Christian moral reform projects during the urban crisis and increased immigration from Europe. In response to a rapidly changing U.S. landscape, Protestants felt fear. An influx of immigrants caused explosive growth in unprepared urban centers. While many at the time interpreted urban growth as a sign of progress and technological wonder, Protestants worried about sprawl, unemployment, crime, poverty, and unsanitary conditions. City work accepted women in the workplace while following [End Page 8] on the heels of diminished church authority and the decline of family-owned stores in favor of large businesses. All this led to a belief that city life inherently caused moral degradation. But these changes paled in comparison to the fear of increased immigration. Immigrants between the 1820s-1920s challenged the Protestant majority and brought unassimilated workers into sprawling, poverty-stricken urban landscapes. In...

Future Perfect

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman Emily Masters (bio) Americans are less able than ever to tell the difference between real and fake," memoirist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman says. "And we are all suffering for it." This blunt observation about our current national moment strikes at the heart of her debut memoir, Sounds Like Titanic, which tells the story of her experience touring the United States as a violinist in an ensemble of musicians led by a man she calls The Composer. But there is a catch. [End Page 36] Unbeknownst to their audiences, the microphone is dead, and they are miming to a recording. As the strange, bewitching tale unfolds, Hindman grapples with what it means to be a woman, an Appalachian, an American, a writer, and a performer. After a recent reading at Berea College, Appalachian Heritage's Emily Masters caught up with Hindman to chat about translating music to the page, the blurred lines between reality and falsity, her views on the education system in Appalachia, and the prevailing notions of beauty and female bodies. ________ EMILY MASTERS: This is a fascinating memoir. You toured the country as a violinist in an ensemble that played along onstage with a dead microphone to a recording—and audiences across the country were completely fooled. When did you know you would have to write about this experience? JESSICA CHICCEHITTO HINDMAN: Thank you! By the time I went on the fifty-three city tour around America with The Composer in 2004, I knew that this would be an experience I would write about in some way. The experience was just so absurd that I knew it would make great writing material. EM: You grew up in the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia, which figures into the book at various points. In Sounds Like Titanic, you bring to light the lack of access to opportunity due to the topographical features of Appalachia. The picture you paint of education and [End Page 37] opportunity in the region is pretty dismal. Do you think much has changed since you were growing up and going to school in the region? JCH: Yes, it has changed, sadly for the worse. I grew up in two very small towns in the Appalachian region—one in West Virginia, the other just over the state line in Virginia. My family moved to the town in Virginia in 1990, when the West Virginia teachers went on strike and school was cancelled for some time. The differences between those towns were immense in 1990 and are even more immense now. In recent years, my town in West Virginia was hit very hard by the opioid crisis. Despite having around 2,000 people, the town has been featured in a lot of national news stories about heroin and painkiller addiction. The last time I visited, I noticed that even some of the most basic businesses, like the 7-Eleven gas station, were boarded up and abandoned. Meanwhile, my town in Virginia has been thriving, with lots of new businesses, beautification efforts, and expanded public services such as new parks and other community activities. My Virginia town has also been featured in national news stories about the opioid crisis, but it hasn't been annihilated by that problem the way that my West Virginia town has. It is both heartbreaking and fascinating to see how two towns separated by a single mountain range have had such a different trajectory. EM: You talk a lot about your experiences of inferiority when you left the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia due to your dialect and accent and how you felt like you had to be a spokesperson for the region as a whole while you were in college. How have you grappled with maintaining your identity as someone from the mountains [End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman Photo: Vanessa Borer [End Page 39] while trying to make outsiders understand the complexity of the region? Do you still feel the pressure to speak for the people from back home? JCH: When I first arrived in New York City, I felt a lot of pressure to explain to folks where I was from...

In early spring 2020, efforts to halt the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing resulted in the suspension or cancellation of live theatrical performances throughout the United States. In a self-proclaimed attempt to “keep the theatre's pilot lit” and more specifically to support theatre artists during this enforced furlough, New York City's Metropolitan Playhouse launched a “Virtual Playhouse” season of free readings, live-streamed on Zoom and YouTube and simultaneously broadcast on New York's Pacifica radio station, WBAI. At the time of this writing in late August 2020, the Virtual Playhouse had provided support for over 150 artists/technicians and reached an audience of over 8,600. The twenty-four plays presented, drawn primarily from early twentieth-century works in public domain, included five by Washington Square playwright Alice Gerstenberg; Suppressed Desires, by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook; The People, by Glaspell; Constancy, by Provincetown playwright Neith Boyce; Compromise, by Black Renaissance playwright Willis Richardson; and two O'Neill one-acts, The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made. The bounty will continue: near my deadline, the theatre announced a fall season that would include Glaspell's Woman's Honor, Alfred Kreymborg's Vote the New Moon, and Alice Rostetter's The Widow's Veil (all originally produced by the Provincetown Players). Although the entire Virtual Season would be of interest to this journal's readers, this essay focuses primarily on performances of the two works by O'Neill.Nearly a century separates the writing of these plays with their Metropolitan presentations in a manner undreamed of even by the forward-thinking theatrical experimenters at the Provincetown Playhouse. Their re-viewing under these circumstances and in this context sheds new light on their meaning(s) and their enduring significance, as well as occasioning a few thoughts on the possibilities and limitations of virtual theatrical performance. These performances highlight links between our current cultural moment and that of a century ago, beginning with affinities between the Provincetown Players and the Metropolitan Playhouse, its East Village location a ten-minute cab ride from O'Neill's theatrical home at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street. The stated mission of the Metropolitan Playhouse—to explore “America's theatrical heritage” in order to “illuminate contemporary American culture”—resonates with the Provincetown Players' commitment to developing a home-grown American drama that would effect artistic and social transformation. Recurring reminders to viewers to love and care for their neighbors from Metropolitan's artistic director, Alex Roe, evoke Provincetown spiritus rector Jig Cook's zeal to foster a “beloved community of lifegivers.” (Roe provided information for this review and generously made the Virtual Playhouse archive available to me.)The Virtual Playhouse season and the Provincetown Players' 1918–19 season, when The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made debuted, share the extraordinary social context of pandemic: from 1918–19, the so-called Spanish flu caused over 600,000 deaths in the United States, with an estimated global death toll of 20–50 million. Then, as now, social distancing, mask-wearing, and similar precautions were employed to prevent infection. Although theatres across the United States closed, Broadway carried on with minor adjustments, for example the staggering of curtain times, the elimination of SRO, and the banning of smoking, coughing, and sneezing in auditoriums. The Washington Square Players and the Greenwich Village Theatre closed—presumably due to the pandemic, which peaked in October 1918—but the Provincetown Players performed twenty-five one-acts and one full-length play during the 1918–19 season. The lack of attention granted the 1918 pandemic by theatre historians and playwrights is mystifying, although the Players' first chronicler, Edna Kenton, reported that during rehearsals for O'Neill's Moon of the Caribbees in December 1918, “the postwar influenza epidemic was raging. Player after player succumbed. We recast up to the end, and all the while [actor] Hutchinson Collins lay closer to death at St. Vincent's hospital nearby” (The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights' Theatre, 1915–1922, ed. Bogard and Bryer [2004], 87). Collins died in January 1919. Moon cast-member and Greenwich Village photographer Berenice Abbott reported that the flu “hit the Village especially hard and killed several of her friends”; Abbott's housemate, Provincetown playwright Djuna Barnes, contracted the flu but survived (Philip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes [1995], 105). Provincetown playwright Neith Boyce's son, Boyce (Harry), died in the pandemic.That era also shares with our own a widespread awakening to social injustice. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the political activism of disenfranchised women, workers, immigrants, African Americans, and others anticipated that of early twenty-first-century movements like Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Fair Fight, and Occupy Wall Street. Then, as now, activists took to the streets to protest injustice and demand change, and then, as now, the theatre often provided a platform for revolutionary ideas. The Provincetown Players' repertoire regularly included works advancing progressive and egalitarian causes, and the Metropolitan's Virtual Playhouse season and inclusive casting practices, as well as Alex Roe's introductory and closing remarks, have allied the organization with Black Lives Matter and other progressive movements.Written at about the same time, The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made are a well-matched pair: both are “sea plays,” featuring seacoast settings and characters who have lived and worked on ships, and both integrate meticulous realistic detail and expressionist and symbolist elements. Both plays portray deeply wounded human beings and troubled relationships, especially between fathers and sons; both dramatize the folly of human greed. These themes have been generally viewed as autobiographical, reflecting O'Neill's conflicted relationship with his own father, actor James O'Neill, and O'Neill's conflicting drives for material versus artistic success (see, e.g., Brenda Murphy, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity [2005], 172–77). As in his better-known, later plays, The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made depict characters haunted by the past and unable to learn from it. Common factors that make these works especially conducive to the live-streaming medium include their unified structure (a single line of action unfolding in real time, in a single location) and small cast size (five in The Rope; four in Where the Cross Is Made, excluding the ghosts). Both depend on relaying considerable information to the audience about past events in long expository speeches, for which O'Neill was faulted. This “flaw,” however, lends itself to the Zoom format. Because our attention must zero in on individuals in close-up, the Metropolitan performances focused on psychology and the inner life of the characters, rather than on physical action, which is minimal in both.The Rope is a mordantly ironic revisioning of the tale of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15:11–32, featuring an aging, raging patriarch, Abraham; his careworn daughter, Annie; her hard-drinking husband, Pat; their intellectually disabled daughter, Mary; and Abraham's “prodigal” son, the aptly named Luke, who five years earlier had stolen a hundred dollars from his father and run away to sea. At Luke's desertion, Abraham hung a rope in the barn with the directive that Luke should hang himself should he ever return home. Luke's sudden reappearance brings the hatred and greed festering within the family to a head—the farm and a hidden hoard of fifty twenty-dollar gold pieces are at stake—and brings the action to its ironic conclusion. In Where the Cross Is Made, a cash-strapped, sailor-turned-writer whose sea captain father forced him into the career that cost him his right arm initially resists but finally succumbs to his father's mad obsession with recovering a treasure presumably lost at sea.First performed by the Provincetown Players in spring 1918, The Rope was live-streamed by the Metropolitan Playhouse on April 4, 2020, the second performance of their virtual season. The evening's running time of just under an hour featured a ten-minute preshow virtual tour and an introduction by Roe, which served to create an illusion of space-sharing communality. As the audience virtually “enters,” signs invited them to make themselves comfortable in the homey lobby, and to eat, drink, and “go wild” with cellphone use. A sign bearing the charge “Love One Another” was prominently displayed, and the illusion of an audience's presence is humorously sustained by Roe, who cautioned viewers to “watch their step” on the stairs. Roe, who directed the reading, also served as narrator (sporting a devil's mask), skimming through most of O'Neill's thick descriptions but pointing out important stage directions. A photograph of a weathered barn suggested the setting, and a practical rope with a noose was visible in each actor's home space. As with all Virtual Playhouse readings, actors, in consultation with directors, furnished suggestive apparel and properties. Other practical props included a cane brandished by Abraham; bottles of liquor (this bottle is meant to be shared and should look the same in each space, but the actors did not seem to coordinate on this small detail); a chisel, to be used by Luke and Pat to torture Abraham into revealing the location of his hidden hoard; a silver dollar, which Luke gives to a delighted Mary upon his arrival; and the bag containing the gold coins.In 1918 O'Neill resisted director Nina Moise's advice to cut some of the exposition, insisting that the drama relied on the psychological and emotional truth conveyed by the actors: “Make them act!” (O'Neill to Moise, April 14, 1918, in Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill, ed. Bogard and Bryer [1988], 82). The deep commitment to O'Neill's text revealed by the Metropolitan cast validated O'Neill's conviction. The several expository scenes were charged with emotion and revelatory of character, relationships, and tormented psyches. As the unhinged Abraham, gaunt, gray-haired, growling Marty McDonough was especially effective during Luke's homecoming scene, when the prodigal misinterprets Abraham's incoherent joy as anger. Noelia Berkus, as Annie, provided a convincing portrait of barely suppressed bitterness, wisely eschewing O'Neill's call for speaking in a “high-pitched, sing-song whine.” To his vibrant rendering of Sweeney, David Logan Rankin brought a piercing gaze, a subtly brogue-inflected speech, and an appropriately underplayed inebriation. There was a lurking sweetness about Jamahl Garrison-Lowe's Luke that made one believe his compassion to the “soft-minded” Mary, an otherwise uncharacteristic generosity necessary to set up the resolution. The gifted young Talia Cuomo shone in the difficult role of Mary. Following the reading, actors disappeared until Roe “re-entered” and invited them back for a virtual curtain call. This early experiment in virtual performance had a few technical glitches: some overlapping sound; a slight delay in Abraham's “entrance”; and, more notably, an inability to activate the chat function, an interactive feature that greatly enhanced the “liveness” of subsequent performances. Before ending the session, however, Roe was able to retrieve and share a few congratulatory comments submitted by YouTube viewers and to deliver a final reminder to all to act with compassion during the current crisis.By the time the Virtual Playhouse live-streamed Where the Cross Is Made on June 20, the theatre had fine-tuned the technology and significantly enhanced the interactive “liveness” of the experience through postshow conversations, frequently facilitated by scholars and artists from across the country. Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon facilitated the discussion for Compromise; Dorothy Chansky for Gerstenberg's Pot Boiler; J. Ellen Gainor for Constancy and Suppressed Desires; actress Louise Heller for Mary E. Freeman's The Apple Tree; Andrew Ball for William Dean Howells's The Smoking Car; and Howells's great-granddaughter Polly Howells for his The Parlour Car. I had the honor for Glaspell's The People, and Alex Pettit handled Where the Cross Is Made.The evening began with slides projecting the exhortation from Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address that those who died fighting for liberty and justice “shall not have died in vain.” This moment linked past and present struggles and connected the evening's performance to the forthcoming Virtual Playhouse reading of Glaspell's The People, in which Glaspell employs this quote for similar purposes. As usual, Roe's welcoming remarks specifically referenced the COVID-19 situation and the Black Lives Matter movement as illustrative of the play's themes of “unfinished business” and the impact of the past on the present. Reminding viewers that the theatre helps us “look at and understand the past to understand the future,” Roe affirmed the Playhouse's unequivocal support of BLM protestors, and postshow facilitator Pettit ironically referenced the evening's Trump rally in Tulsa as a “counterprotest.” Roe wrapped up with a unifying message of “health and safety to folks gathering wherever they are,” and a reiteration of his view of O'Neill's play as a depiction of one man's tragic failure to break with, or learn from, the past.As in The Rope, each actor's screen featured the actor in a head and shoulder shot, simply dressed in subtle colors that suggested an earlier era. An abstract background design of dark blue with heavy black lines, rendered by Danny Licul, was interestingly evocative of the “postimpressionist” backdrops by Provincetown designers William and Marguerite Zorach. Practical properties were limited to a lantern and treasure maps, and stage business to Nat's burning of his father's map in a futile attempt to exorcise the obsession. The sound of the sea, provided by sound and video operator Rachael Langdon, heightened the mood and emotional content of this play about a mad sea captain's obsession with the return of a wrecked ship bearing treasure.With this play, also, the commitment of the performers, under the direction of Frank Kuhn, justified O'Neill's refusal to cut expository dialogue. The burden here rested primarily with Michael Hardart as Nat, the only character aware of the backstory of his father's obsession with recovering long-lost treasure and the family's current financial predicament. Nat's sharing of this information with his sister Sue (sympathetically and sincerely portrayed by Julie Pham) and with the doctor he has summoned to commit his father revealed far more: it revealed a tortured emotional journey that culminates in his own descent into madness. The white-bearded and feverishly energized Joe Candelora was perfectly cast as Captain Bartlett, the “old salt” in the grip of a hopeless dream. As Dr. Higgins, John Ingle was well served by a rangy look, raspy voice, and rather caustic manner that called to mind the late, great O'Neill interpreter Jason Robards.At the time of the play's Provincetown debut in fall 1918, director Ida Rauh and others strongly objected to the entrance of the ghosts of three drowned sailors at the play's climax, fearing that what O'Neill intended to engender terror in the minds of the audience might instead invoke laughter. O'Neill won the argument (as usual), and critic Heywood Broun, at least, found the effect “fearful” (Eugene O'Neill: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Bryer and Dowling [2014], 47). This challenge was magnified for a virtual staged reading. The Metropolitan met it with a somewhat abstract painting of the ghosts, rendered by Pamela Lawton and suggestive of O'Neill's detailed description of decomposing flesh being washed in green light, which was read in full by narrator Dena Miller.The forty-five-minute reading was followed by an invigorating thirty-five-minute conversation, during which the actors “re-entered,” joined by Pettit, Roe, Kuhn, Licul, and Lawton. Following Pettit's engaging and authoritative commentary on the play and performance, a number of viewers submitted questions and comments, some joining the conversation through the magic of Zoom and becoming visibly as well as audibly present. This conversation created a remarkable semblance of theatrical “liveness” and communality, underscoring the fact that the audience was sharing time, if not space. For Pettit, the reading confirmed his opinion that Where the Cross Is Made is better than its later, full-length adaptation, Gold, and that Hardart's performance as well as O'Neill's abundant visual details rendered Nat's long expository monologue the centerpiece of the play. Roe highlighted the play's timely potential to teach us “how we bear the legacy of the past and how to reconcile with it and move on.” Other topics treated during the interactive conversation included possible influences on O'Neill (Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Stephen Crane among them); the play's autobiographical aspects; the theme of reality vs. “pipe dreams”; and the character of Sue Bartlett, in relation to O'Neill's reputed inability to create complex or sympathetic female characters, especially early in his career. Pettit declared that Pham's performance had given O'Neill more than he deserved. Director Kuhn and participant Robert Brophy viewed Sue as anticipating the maternal Josie Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten. It is worth noting not only that Pham wisely ignored stage directions requiring “hysterical” line deliveries, but also that the character as written seems entirely motivated by love and compassion, attributes that apparently render her immune to the inherited obsession that infects her brother. Particularly within the context of this performance, Sue highlights Roe's consistent pre- and post-show appeals to “the better angels” of our nature. The Eugene O'Neill Foundation's artistic director, Eric Fraisher Hayes, Zoomed in with an interesting question regarding the appearance of the ghosts that are meant to be seen by the audience (presumably from the Captain's and/or Nat's POV). Hayes's observation that in their madness, Bartlett and Nat believe they are seeing living sailors, not decomposing specters, stands to be of considerable interest to future directors and designers of this play.Some plays from the Virtual Playhouse season (Compromise and The People, for example) are overtly political, speaking directly to issues hotly debated then and now: what is the worth of a Black life in a white supremacist society? What is our responsibility as citizens to ensure a “more perfect union”? The two O'Neill plays are not political in this way, yet these readings illuminated their implicit political impact. Both plays strike deep at greed and materialism, values that are arguably at the root of our nation's most grievous errors, and they also strike deep at the failure to confront past and present realities. The Virtual Playhouse performances of these plays, significantly augmented by interactive engagements with audiences, underscore their resonance for our time and highlight O'Neill's recurring theme of the past's impact on the present and his recurring use of the dysfunctional family as a metaphor for a nation suffering the sins of the (founding) fathers.One of the obvious advantages to virtual theatrical events is their ability to facilitate real-time interactive exchanges among geographically distant audiences—for the Metropolitan, much larger audiences than their intimate East Village space could accommodate. A consideration of this season contributes to our understanding of the shifting concept of “liveness” in relation to performance in the twenty-first century. The Playhouse's interaction with its virtual audience managed to create the illusion of shared space; to underscore the actuality of shared time; and, in my perspective as an audience and to foster a of and community during a time of social the of theatre to us of our

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