American Stage Research Articles

Reviews: The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management, and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–70, Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780–1830., Performing Herself: Autobiography and Fanny Kelly's Dramatic Recollections, Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxyrsquo; Rothafel and

Reviews: The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management, and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–70, Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780–1830., Performing Herself: Autobiography and Fanny Kelly's Dramatic Recollections, Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxyrsquo; Rothafel and

Corsican Brothers and the Legacy of its Tremulous “Ghost Melody”

Audiences for stage plays, like audiences for narrative film, rarely remember much about the music, only whether or not it was appropriate to the dramatic genre. The “Ghost Melody” represents one specific case of nineteenth-century music for melodramatic theatre that lingered in the minds of audiences long afterward. It appeared in the original French production of The Corsican Brothers (1850) and carried over into British and American stage productions. Always coupled with special scenic effects, it worked as a persuasive tool to help suspend disbelief. The melody with its setting represents a specific type of melodramatic music, one used for the supernatural appearance of a deceased loved one. Its effect resonates in the music of other stage plays and in music composed to films of a similar genre.

On SHOT! : A Rationale for Research and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ’Hood

Can you perform research data? And if so, can we as scholars/artists turn “research” into an equally exciting and dramatic piece without sacrificing efficacy? Theatre, by definition is both theatrical and engaging. “Situated at the crossroads of theater and anthropology, thanks to the collaborations of Victor Turner in anthropology and Richard Schechner in theater studies” (Koram 3), ethnodrama takes research data off the printed page and disseminates it to a much larger audience on the American stage (see also ; , ). Like traditional theatre and judged for its dramatic quality, ethnodramas are dramatic stories peculiar to a culture or a people that encompass that group’s history, cultural memory, and ethos. Gleaning dramatic monologues from taped interviews as “transcripted-testimonials,” performed research is a constructed process that mediates issues of authenticity, ownership, and social activism. Who constructs the performance is as critical to the development and process of the project, as insider/outsider dynamics can color or compromise the participant/observation. This essay looks at the impetus behind the North Philadelphia research and its resulting world premiere of the performance piece SHOT! (2009) as the constructed process to performed research.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen by John W. Frick (review)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen by John W. Frick (review)

Desire beyond the Château d'If

Desire beyond the Château d'If

Women's voices on American stages in the early twenty-first century: Sarah Ruhl and her contemporaries

Introduction: The Context for Ruhl and her Contemporaries 1. Educating Sarah Ruhl 2. Emotional Journeys 3. Caring Labor 4. Theatrical Devotion 5. Mobile Lines 6. Natural Forces Epilogue: 'The Curtain Goes Up'

Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays ed. by Verna A. Foster (review)

Reviewed by: Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays ed. by Verna A. Foster Stephe Harrop (bio) Verna A. Foster , ed. Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Pp. viii + 250. $40.00. Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends is an admirably wide-ranging survey of the ways in which contemporary dramatic literature appropriates, contests, and transforms pre-existing mythic and fantastical narratives. Verna A. Foster's introduction makes a strong case for the volume's chosen terminology and self-consciously diverse range of subject matter. Dramatic "revision," Foster [End Page 268] contends, does not (unlike more conventional terms, including "adaptation" and "translation") presuppose the existence of an identifiable, literary source-text (2-3) and thus opens the way for an expansive and inclusive range of narratives— incorporating "various kinds of retellings of myth, fairy tale, and legend" (3)—to be considered alongside one another. The resulting breadth of critical focus aims to develop new insights into the contemporary use of "old stories for new cultural purposes" (12), traversing genre- and subject-boundaries to explore a varied collection of modern playwrights, their different creative practices, and their distinctive "dramatic revisions" of myth, fairy tale, or legend (12). The book's first four chapters offer new perspectives on relatively familiar territory, as they examine the contemporary adaptation and dramatic revision of ancient Greek myth. Miriam Chirico develops a structuralist analysis of the "mythic revisionary drama" (15) of Karen Hartman, Sarah Ruhl, and Caridad Svich, highlighting the diversity of revisionary strategies and styles being deployed in three key works. Karelisa Hartigan discusses the challenges posed to Aristotelian definitions of tragedy by modern dramatic revisions and, in particular, their intense focus on individual experience. Elizabeth W. Scharffenberger explores the ways in which contemporary playwriting and performance can radically "unmake" myth (52), inviting modern audiences "to reflect on their own participation in, and vulnerability to, the phenomenon of mythopoesis" (53), in the process rendering the received mythologies of Helen and Jocasta "metamythopoetic" (63). Finally, Jeffrey B. Loomis identifies a complex network of connections between the Homeric "Hymn to Demeter" and "the affirmation of a vital, dynamic, life-heralding spirituality" (76) in the seriocomic dramas of Tina Howe. There is plenty to stimulate and provoke in these essays, but what is particularly valuable about this volume is the juxtaposition and interaction of these analyses with later chapters drawing on a more diverse range of source materials, which invite a broader exploration of the role of dramatic revision in contemporary theatrical writing and performance. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.'s exploration of the transformation and reception of West African myth on American stages highlights the role of revisionary drama in creating and representing "complex and fluid" diaspora identities (93). Similar themes also emerge in Christy Stanlake's study of the multiple mythologies uneasily co-inhabiting Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and the ways in which this complex drama might ultimately function as "a bravely wrought ceremonial action" designed to aid a fractured Native American community's attempts at self-healing (110). Amelia Howe Kritzer argues that Caryl Churchill's use of mythic figures and themes in The Skriker deliberately pushes the play beyond the personal and the everyday in order to make visible "the psychological, social, and economic burden carried by young people" and address the wider issues of "social breakdown" and "natural [End Page 269] catastrophe" (122). Sharon Friedman contributes a fascinating survey of multiple revisions of the "dybbuk" in modern theater and the ways in which this Jewish folkloric figure has been used to engage contentious issues of gender, identity, and sexual desire, additionally stressing "the performative aspect of storytelling" (140) as a key factor in myth-inspired drama's ability to restore the unpredictable, flexible qualities of traditional narratives. Anthony Ellis comparably addresses the relationship between staged fairy-tale narratives and their contemporary audiences, examining Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman and the play's unsettling depiction of "the struggle for the control of representation" (156) between the creative artist and the state. And the fairy tale's potential to dramatize and contest contemporary social...

Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater by Jeffrey Magee (review)

Irving American Musical Theater. By Jeffrey Magee. (Broadway Legacies.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [xiii, 394 p. ISBN 9780195398267. $35.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, discography, index.Although many Americans know Irving talent for songwriting, most are not as well versed in his seventy-year musical theater career, which profoundly influenced American stage. Jeffrey Magee's thoroughly researched narrative delves into this previously untapped area of career in a well-crafted style, and results are extremely informative and engaging.Because this book focuses on the Broadway (p. xi), a medium that cultivates close collaboration, its organization is guided by theatrical relationships. I was immediately attracted by this idea because it reinforces Magee's focus on a life that, until now, had been most thoroughly explored through songbooks. It is also important to note, although it is certainly not surprising, that Berlin worked with many of Broadway's top writing and producing talents, including Florenz Ziegfeld, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Robert Sherwood, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse, Victor Herbert, Dorothy Fields, Richard Rogers, and Oscar Hammer stein II. In this book, their stories, along with those of many significant Broad - way performers, are woven together with to aid in Magee's analysis of many period masterpieces, which become focus of book's chapters. These shows include Watch Your Step and Stop! Look! Listen! (chap. 2); Yip Yip Yaphank and Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 (chap. 3); Music Box Revues, 1921-24 (chap. 4); The Cocoanuts, Face Music, As Thousands Cheer, Louisiana Purchase, and Happy Holiday (chap. 5); This is Army (chap. 6); Annie Get Your Gun (chap. 7); and Call Me Madam and Mr. President (chap. 8).Because Berlin, youngest child in an immigrant family, had to work at an early age in order to support his family and himself, it is surprising that regarded his childhood as ideal, insisting that 'everyone should have a East Side in their lives' (p. 9). Magee begins his first chapter with a discussion of this quote, which defines driving force behind success. Magee's notion of Lower East Side Aesthetic bears exploration due to its central role in work and Magee's book. It is an aesthetic that holds a practical, and even survivalist view of creativity as a job joining ambition, entrepreneurship, mercantilism, and not least craft. The ethic required [Berlin] to work hard, meet deadlines, create opportunities, heed his audience's reaction, study competition, and deliver goods without cutting corners (p. 10). Throughout rest of monograph, Magee reminds reader of beginnings in New York City and how they continually informed main themes of his creative output for stage and screen. This modern, urban aesthetic, fueled by his need to assimilate, turns up not just in way Berlin worked, but also in themes of his work-even in unexpected places, like western-themed Annie Get Your Gun (p. 240).The Lower East Side Aesthetic bears significant weight on compositional values, which Magee emphasizes in his examination of songs, as opposed to their style (p. 14). These include his overwhelming desire to write quality songs that would reach largest possible audience (p. 11). His strong work ethic was an important part of his value system, described throughout book in words of his many collaborators. Perhaps his most important value from perspective of his listeners, however, was diversity of musical styles he assimilated throughout his career.With his finger on pulse of public aesthetics, Berlin wrote songs for popular theatrical media of day, starting with vaudeville and revue, and moving into book musicals. Many of these songs, for example, carry Berlin's brand of ragtime (p. …

Reimagining Greek tragedy on the American stage

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction CHAPTER ONE. Greek Tragedy Finds an American Audience 1. Setting the Stage 2. American Theater Makes Greek Tragedy Its Own CHAPTER TWO. Making Total Theater in America: Choreography and Music 1. Hellenic Influences on the Development of American Modern Dance 2. American Gesamtkunstwerke 3. Musical Theater 4. Visual Choreography in Robert Wilson's Alcestis CHAPTER THREE. Democratizing Greek Tragedy 1. Antigone and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: The Boston 1890 Antigone 2. Performance Groups in the 1960s--1970s: Brecht's Antigone by The Living Theatre 3. The 1980s and Beyond: Peter Sellars's Persians, Ajax, and Children of Heracles 4. Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound in the United States: From the Threat of Apocalypse to Communal Reconciliation CHAPTER FOUR. Reenvisioning the Hero: American Oedipus 1. Oedipus as Scapegoat 2. Plagues 3. Theban Cycles 4. Deconstructing Fatality 5. Abandonment CHAPTER FIVE. Reimagining Medea as American Other 1. Setting the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Medea 2. Medea as Social Critic from the Mid-1930s to the Late 1940s 3. Medea as Ethnic Other from the 1970s to the Present 4. Medea's Divided Self: Drag and Cross-Dressed Performances Epilogue Appendix A. Professional Productions and New Versions of Sophocles' and Euripides' Electras Appendix B. Professional Productions and New Versions of Antigone Appendix C. Professional Productions and New Versions of Aeschylus's Persians, Sophocles' Ajax, and Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound Appendix D. Professional Productions and New Versions of Oedipus Tyrannus Appendix E. Professional Productions and New Versions of Euripides' Medea Appendix F. Professional Productions and New Versions of Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis and Iphigeneia in Tauris Appendix G. Other Professional Productions and New Versions Notes References Index

A Different Integration: Race and Disability in Early-Twentieth-Century African American Drama by Women

In a recent talk I gave, titled Fabulous Invalids Together: Why Disability in Mainstream Theater Matters, I asked: Why should we care about theater in this age of multiple visual media? And more to the point, why should we care about disability in theater, given how crips onstage have been so unimaginatively imagined? In response, I argued that we needed to understand a figure I have deemed the fabulous invalid, borrowing the title of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's 1938 play of the same name in which theater is represented as an invalid who is down but never out, perhaps dying but not dead yet. (1) In essence, I posited, this is a potentially rich figure that we ignore at our peril; it is one that we also need to update and embrace in considering the dramatic representation of disability, particularly in the face of the unceasing parade of disabled characters who limp, stroll, and sit on American stages. What if we rejected a cure or kill mentality in critical analysis of our own, hacking away from demanding that images be either politically resistant or polemically resisted? What if, instead, we embraced the idea that the range of disabled characters onstage over time, creates for audiences a kind of figurative fabulosity? This fabulous invalid, then, is a paradigm for understanding productive tensions in theater, for refusing to reject a given representation of disability as politically ineffectual just because it may seem to contain elements of the conventional or stereotypical, and for reclaiming those aspects of disability representation that do important aesthetic and political work. But, of course, the fabulous invalid has other aspects to her identity than disability. In his landmark essay Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies? the late Chris Bell pointedly and satirically presents his own modest proposal for perpetuating the bias of what he names White Disability Studies. When you come across a non-white disabled person, he writes, tongue firmly in cheek, focus on the disability, eliding the race and ethnicity, letting them he run over, forgotten. Do not consider how the intersection in which this subject lives influences her actions and the way she is seen. Choose not to see that intersection and move on down the road of disability, away from the perpendicular roads of race and ethnicity. The fact that the intersection exists is not your fault. It is prime example of poor engineering. (378) Bell's point is, of course, that these intersections of the different aspects of embodiment do matter and that we bypass them at our own peril; therefore, the fabulous invalid cannot be assumed to be the normate in every other way except disability. What, then, do the multiple identities of this figure offer as they intersect with disability, enhancing and enriching our understanding of how disability functions to make drama more fabulous in its very querying and queering of multiple social structures? In works by contemporary African American women playwrights, disability works with race and gender to give voice to the lived experience of being a disabled person of color, to call attention to common experiences, and to enhance an understanding of identities as socially constructed. Some examples include Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, which tells the story of Saartjie (Sarah) Bartman, the infamously nicknamed Venus Hottentot, whose excessive body was put on display for sideshow audiences in the nineteenth century; Parks's In the Blood, which references forced sterilization as it was deployed against poor, African American women; Lynn Nottage's Ruined, which shows the physical aftereffects of rape used as a tool of wartime violence in the Congo; and Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy, which depicts illness and the contingency of the human body. These playwrights figure disability in various ways: to recount history, pain, sexual violence, caregiving, the disposability of disabled bodies of color in American society, and the intersecting and stigmatized experiences of women of color and the disabled. …

Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage by Helene P. Foley

Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage by Helene P. Foley

Early American Stage Hits: Spinning Gold from Chaff

Nineteenth century America spawned world-class novelists: Herman Melville, Mark Twain – poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson – and essayist/philosophers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau. But in the field of drama, no memorable or even noteworthy name can be put forward. No early dramatic work endures as part of ‘the canon,’ even of American literature. None of the plays are taught in high-school; rarely do they appear on university reading lists. Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) is occasionally anthologized, by virtue of being the first post-Constitution native-authored drama. Even Andre (1798) – the most critically regarded work by “the Father of the American Drama” William Dunlap – seldom appears in any venue but esoteric collections of early American drama. Beyond the above named playwrights, it is difficult to find works by any of their contemporaries still in print, though the Internet has opened a door for more of them to have some public access. But to accept that these mostly awful works were indeed of poor literary quality is not to say that these native dramas were not successful. Certain works were bona-fide financial hits: Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion, George Aiken’s “pirate” version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the most successful of the dozen or more spin-offs of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark book), and a handful of star-driven vehicles like Rip Van Winkle or Metamora: the Last of the Wamponoags, written specifically for their super-stars, Joseph Jefferson and Edwin Forrest, respectively. Long forgotten works like Clari, the Maid of Milan contributed the enduringly popular and sentimental song “Home, Sweet Home” – now traditionally in the American song canon, learned by all elementary school children. (Its final line “There’s no place like home” is also the closing sentence intoned by a teary-eyed Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.) Financial and popular success, however, are

Pretty's Got Me All Bent Out of Shape: Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady and the Ritual of Queerness

Pretty's Got Me All Bent Out of Shape:Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady and the Ritual of Queerness Matt DiCintio (bio) In Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953), Laura Reynolds delivers what passes as a revelation to young Tom Lee before she locks the door, unbuttons her blouse, and requests that years from now, he speak of the ensuing encounter kindly: "Manliness is not all swagger and swearing and mountain climbing. Manliness is also tenderness, gentleness, considerat ion. You men think you can decide on who is a man, when only a woman can really know."1 A half century after the lights dimmed with Tom's hand at Laura's breast, Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady, which premiered at the Humana Festival in 2006, exemplifies what has become possible for young men in queer theatre. Harrison is using the American stage to dismantle hegemonic assumptions about gender roles and sexual relevancy, as opposed to Anderson and his contemporaries, who perpetuated what Eve Sedgwick has called a "crisis of homo/heterosexual definition."2 Act a Lady is a response to John M. Clum's "challenge for post-Boys in the Band and post-Stonewall gay dramatists to find forms more suited to the creation of a positive gay self."3 Clum has observed that "in traditional, realistic drama, there is no meaningful place for gay experiences or explorations and expressions of what has been inadequately called the 'gay sensibility.'"4 Still, as Victor Turner writes in From Ritual to Theatre, "Theatre in complex, urbanized societies on the scale of 'civilizations' has become a specialized domain, where it has become legitimate to experiment with modes of presentation, many of which radically (and indeed, consciously) depart from Aristotle's model."5 With that specialization, we can see how Harrison is kinder to his gay boy than Anderson [End Page 59] was to his straight boy. Turner continues: "Through the performance itself, what is normally sealed up, inaccessible to everyday observation and reasoning, in the depth of sociocultural life, is drawn forth—[Wilhelm] Dilthey uses the term Ausdruck, 'an expression,' from ausdrucken, literally, 'to press or squeeze out.'"6 To paraphrase the hypermasculine, moonshine-swilling bad boy True in Act a Lady, pretty's got Harrison's characters all bent out of shape. They do not need to return to the status quo ante of Tom's hand and Laura's breast.7 In demonstrating how queerness in Act a Lady manifests as ritualistic, I recall the distinction Victor Turner has made between the "tribal-liminal" and the "industrial-l iminoid,"8 particularly his assessment that the liminal in tribal societies cannot be subversive, but the liminoid in postagrarian industrial societies can be.9 Still, concluding his 1977 essay "Variations on a Theme of Liminality," Turner notes, "It remains true that in complex societies today's liminoid is yesterday's liminal."10 In "Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp," Moe Meyer argues that "what 'queer' signals is an ontological challenge that displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts."11 I suggest that Meyer's "ontological challenge" constitutes the queer ritual in Act a Lady and ultimately answers John Clum's call for a suitable form. Such a ritual may be "today's liminoid," but because the self-actualization of the young gay man, Casper, requires him to undergo the "ontological challenge," the play indeed constitutes a "social drama." In "The Queer Root of Theater," Laurence Senelick writes that "queer theater has an advantage in that its most essential component, sexual un-orthodoxy, still packs a considerable punch, for all the commercialization of the gay image . . . the enactment of sexual scenarios and gender metamorphosis still aims for the viscera."12 In Act a Lady, that aim is also to legitimize. According to Eli Rozik, "Although secular rituals do not share the intention to reach the sacred, they may equally well fulfill these secondary functions [of promoting a sense of community and social cohesion, and bestowing legitimation of social and political order]."13 With my investigation of Harrison...

Metaphorical Mirrors and Subverting Selves in Adrienne Kennedy’s One-Act Plays

Abstract Beginning her career in the 1960s, Adrienne Kennedy was one of the most influential writers of the period. Her plays subverted both Western and African American theatre. Although like her contemporaries she reacted to the political events of the period, in contrast with them she presented racial issues in a non-realistic mode. Her plays exemplify the re-theatricalisation of the African American stage.

“In Search of the Orphan”: Intercultural Theatre, Multi-Ethnic Casting, and the Representation of Chineseness on European and North American Stages.

In May 2012, La Jolla Playhouse in the United States staged a musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's “The Nightingale”. Four months later, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced its upcoming production of a “new adaptation” of the late thirteenth-century Chinese play “The Orphan of Zhao”. Both plays were severely criticized for the decidedly poor quota of East Asian actors in their multi-ethnic casts, and the discrepancies present in the portrayal of “Ancient” and “imaginary” Chinas. Each production draws on plays and stories that are part of a history of one-directional cross-cultural appropriation by European artists. Despite the change in mentalities over the past century, and the attempts at diversifying the British and American theatre industries through multi-ethnic casting and intercultural performance, the legacy of the imperialist appropriation of supposedly “exotic” art-forms resurfaces in such productions. This article aims to assess the pitfalls of Western-led intercultural performance and multi-ethnic casting, the representations of Chinese stage stereotypes, and the state of racial relations in the entertainment industry.

Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (review)

Reviewed by: Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany Joel Fishbane Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany. By Stephen Sondheim. New York: Knopf, 2011; pp. 480. According to Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, a good theatre critic is so passionate that he can persuade you to attend something you would never want to see. He might have been issuing reviewers a subtle plea: write something about his new book that will persuade those with little interest in musical theatre to read something they would never want to read. It is a Herculean task given the nature of Look, I Made a Hat, an exhaustive collection of lyrics interspersed with Sondheim’s curmudgeonly remarks about the world of theatre. Sondheim is the preeminent [End Page 627] composer/lyricist of the American stage and is so influential that New York Magazine once ran a cover story that dared to ask the question, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” The answer is not as definitive as one might expect. For all his fame, Sondheim has long been accused of being the cold intellect, writing music that is “unhummable” and lyrics that keep his audience at arm’s length. At first glance, Hat threatens to be the literary proof of these accusations. It is an uneven companion to Finishing the Hat (2010), a collection of lyrics from the first half of Sondheim’s career. To his credit, he attempts to make it accessible to neophytes by including a plot synopsis between each song. Still, the inclusion of birthday songs written for friends, and a glossary explaining the references, feels more than a bit narcisstic. It would be all too easy to write off Hat as little more than a coffee-table book for the musical fanatic in your life. Thankfully, Hat ultimately proves to be something of an inadvertent memoir. It is stunningly intimate, as Sondheim graciously lays bare his creative life. For an artist, nothing could be more personal. His exhaustive set of lyrics and rewritten lyrics (and re-rewritten lyrics) may appear self-aggrandizing, but like the best musicals, the songs occur only in service of the plot. His narrative is his journey through the act of creation, and in giving us his lyrics, he delivers the portrait of the artist as a developing man. It is a compelling window into an artist’s methods, which, of course, means a window into the artist himself. This is not the most conventional way to structure a memoir, but then what would you expect from the composer of a plotless musical (Company) or a vaudeville about American assassins (Assassins)? The title of Hat comes from Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize–winning musical Sunday in the Park with George. During the first act, we find the artist Georges Seurat in the process of creating A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . Lost in the work, Seurat ignores life as he struggles to finish a minor part of his masterpiece, a single hat: And when the woman that you wanted goes. You can say to yourself, “Well, I give what I give.” But the woman who won’t wait for you knows That however you live, There’s a part of you always standing by, Mapping out the sky, Finishing a hat, Starting on a hat, Finishing a hat… Look, I made a hat Where there never was a hat. (27) “Finishing the Hat,” writes Sondheim, “reflects an emotional experience shared by everybody to some degree or other, but more keenly and more often by creative artists . . . that phenomenon of losing the world” (ibid.). It is a telling remark. Like Seurat, Sondheim is a man who is always busy “finishing the hat”; his creative life is the most important aspect of his life. From this perspective, Hat might as well be a diary. Sondheim also takes the opportunity to deliver a playwriting masterclass: “Less Is More / Content Dictates Form / God Is in the Details / all in the service of / Clarity / without which nothing else matters” (xv). Nonetheless, Sondheim’s primary focus is...

Examining the Use of Safety, Confrontation, and Ambivalence in Six Depictions of Reproductive Women on the American Stage, 1997-2007: Staging "the Place" of Abortion (review)

Reviewed by: Examining the Use of Safety, Confrontation, and Ambivalence in Six Depictions of Reproductive Women on the American Stage, 1997-2007: Staging "the Place" of Abortion Lynn Deboeck Examining the Use of Safety, Confrontation, and Ambivalence in Six Depictions of Reproductive Women on the American Stage, 1997-2007: Staging "the Place" of Abortion. By Lisa Hagen. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. Cloth $149.95. 424 pages. The national response to Roe v. Wade and other milestones of the pro-life/pro-choice debate illustrate the issue of abortion as one full of dramatic crisis, and yet this issue has not largely been confronted on stage. Lisa Hagen's insightful work, Examining the Use of Safety, Confrontation, and Ambivalence in Six Depictions of Reproductive Women on the American Stage, 1997-2007, reveals important information about why and how abortion has remained in the margins of theatrical creation and what this does to hinder the realization of the female experience. She explains that "we want to hide abortion, but also to drag it to light, to face it with fascination and fear" (157). This observation introduces Hagen's argument that the further the abortion procedure is distanced from the stage, the further the audience is distanced from the reproductive woman's lived reality. Critical to this thesis is the assertion that the abortion procedure itself is the only experience shared by reproductive women who have chosen to terminate their pregnancies. Hagen uses this claim to support her central argument, and yet it shows itself to be problematic, given the plethora of reproductive experiences presented in the pieces chosen for this study. Hagen analyzes six contemporary plays, chosen partly because of their use of abortion as a key element to the plot. She effectively leads the reader from plays that distance the procedure to those that attempt to stage it. Hagen further justifies her selections by noting their contemporary scope (all were written between 1997 and 2007) and their traditional nature (Hagen defines these plays as traditional because none of these pieces were explicitly politically motivated or executed, and all were single-authored). Following an extended introduction, three core chapters center around specific themes: the relationship between abortion and issues of safety/ concealment, visibility/confrontation, and ambivalence. Hagen's approach is one that integrates textual analysis of plays with social and academic discourse around the topic of abortion. Her purpose is to present a model for viewing abortion that can be used to examine the many different areas of study that handle abortion— including those excluded from her study due to necessary limitations of scope. The first chapter analyzes plays that distance the characters and audience from the abortion procedure in order to, as Hagen suggests, protect the audience from the trauma of the reproductive woman's life. The women represented in the plays for this section are primigravidas (women experiencing their first pregnancy). By using this medical term, Hagen parallels the plays' distancing of the abortion experience from the protagonist. The distancing tactics used in these two plays include avoidance of the abortion procedure itself and displacement of focus away from the reproductive [End Page 140] woman. Keith Bunin's The Credeaux Canvas, for example, places emphasis on the reactions of the two male characters. Hagen successfully demonstrates how this conceals the true woman's experience by drawing the parallel to society's focus on the emotions and concerns of people other than the reproductive woman herself. In Elizabeth Heffron's Mitzi's Abortion, Hagen highlights how family, medical, and historical groups' perspectives are acknowledged more than the title character's. Chapter two uses protest to highlight the tensions between abortion and its representations on stage. As Hagen states: "Protest is inherently performative, therefore it contains a great deal of theatricality; the 'watched' aspect of protest along with its desire to communicate a message in the most memorable way possible makes it a mimic of theatre" (165). The two plays discussed in this chapter, Wendy MacLeod's The Water Children and Dominique Morisseau's Retrospect for Life, use protest to emphasize the sensationalism and politicization of abortion. Hagen skillfully shows how the inclusion in The Water Children of certain extremist...

Laurette Taylor, American Stage Legend (review)

Laurette Taylor, American Stage Legend (review)

Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley

On the American stages of politics and journalism in the mid-nineteenth century, few men were more influential than Abraham Lincoln and his sometime adversary, sometime ally, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. In this compelling new volume, author Gregory A. Borchard explores the intricate relationship between these two vibrant figures, both titans of the press during one of the most tumultuous political eras in American history. Packed with insightful analysis and painstaking research, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley offers a fresh perspective on these luminaries and their legacies. Borchard begins with an overview of the lives of both Lincoln and Greeley, delving particularly into their mutual belief in Henry Clay's much-debated American System, and investigating the myriad similarities between the two political giants, including their comparable paths to power and their statuses as self-made men, their reputations as committed reformers, and their shared dedication to social order and developing a national infrastructure. Also detailed are Lincoln's and Greeley's personal quests to end slavery in the United States, as well as their staunch support of free-soil homesteads in the West. Yet despite their ability to work together productively, both men periodically found themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Their by turns harmonious and antagonistic relationship often played out on the front pages of Greeley's influential newspaper, the New York Tribune. Drawing upon historical gems from the Tribune, as well as the personal papers of both Lincoln and Greeley, Borchard explores in depth the impact the two men had on their times and on each other, and how, as Lincoln's and Greeley's paths often crossed--and sometimes diverged--they personified the complexities, virtues, contradictions, and faults of their eras. Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley goes beyond tracing each man's personal and political evolution to offer a new perspective on the history-changing events of the times, including the decline of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republicans, the drive to extend American borders into the West; and the bloody years of the Civil War. Borchard finishes with reflections on the deaths of Lincoln and Greeley and how the two men have been remembered by subsequent generations. Sure to become an essential volume in the annals of political history and journalism, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley is a compelling testament to the indelible mark these men left on both their contemporaries and the face of America's future.

Masculinity and National Identity on the Early American Stage

This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrate how early American drama addressed changing concepts of ideal masculinity, republican democracy, and the colonial past.