Atlantic Theatre Research Articles

Navigating Conflict

Situated strategically in the Atlantic Ocean, the Azores Islands emerged as pivotal theaters during World War I and World War II and profoundly shaped these global conflicts through its geographic significance and technological advancements. In this paper, the evolution of navigation techniques, routes, and the strategic importance of the Azores according to the changing nature of warfare was analyzed. Through an examination of historical narratives and technological progress, insights were made into how the islands developed into critical hubs for naval and air operations. Advancements in airport infrastructure, telecommunications, and harbor facilities transformed the Azores into essential nodes for transatlantic shipping, communication networks, and surveillance in the Atlantic theater. Navigational strategies, informed by technological innovations, optimized air routes and access to strategic bases which bolstered military capabilities in both conflicts. Through the exploration of the relationship between technological progress, evolving warfare dynamics, and geopolitical significance, the enduring impact of the Azores Islands on shaping global conflicts throughout history was revealed.

The Global American Civil War and Anglo-American Relations in China's Treaty Ports

AbstractTaking a global approach to the American Civil War from the vantage of China, this article explores the nineteenth-century transnational connections and disconnections that linked the American community there to distant diplomatic crises unfolding in the Atlantic. Such episodes as the raiding of the Confederate privateer Alabama and the Trent Affair reached China's Americans through newspaper articles and correspondence that described an Atlantic theatre dominated by the spirit of war. Such reports had an ambiguous effect in China. On the one hand, they undermined American mercantile enterprises that had been poised to expand into China's interior. On the other, they created only ephemeral ripples of discontent amongst a wider Anglo-American community ultimately bound together by common interests and a sense of racial and cultural solidarity. I argue that while rumour and speculation were powerful forces capable of crippling the United States’ merchant marine, colonial society in ports such as Hong Kong proved surprisingly resistant to metropolitan socio-political crises. Through the central case-study of the Alabama and related debates sustained in 1860s China, this article accordingly explores the extent to which (semi)colonial societies were susceptible to or insulated from metropolitan crises.

How the Pandemic Changed Theater

How the Pandemic Changed Theater Michael R. Jackson (bio) and Lileana Blain-Cruz (bio) In 2019, michael r. jackson's A Strange Loop was the first musical by a Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play dramatizes the inner life of a queer Black musicaltheater writer named Usher, who works as an usher at a Broadway theater and is struggling to write his own metafictional musical. The other cast members personify his "Thoughts" as he wrestles with his dismal job, his creative ambitions, and his alternatingly loving and homophobic family. Lileana Blain-Cruz is the current resident director of Lincoln Center Theater. Her directing credits include Anatomy of a Suicide at Atlantic Theater Company and Marys Seacole at LCT3, for [End Page 162] which she won an Obie Award. Blain-Cruz is currently directing Jackson's newest musical, White Girl in Danger, which excavates the experience of a young Black woman named Keesha living in a fictional "soap opera town" called Allwhite. After years of being relegated to the town's "Blackground," where she is forced to perform stock roles reserved for Black characters, Keesha refashions herself as a protagonist by appropriating the narratives of the white girls around her. White Girl in Danger, like A Strange Loop, juxtaposes bright, earwormy music with complex social commentary on race, gender, and representation. Development of White Girl in Danger proceeded during the pandemic; throughout, Jackson and Blain-Cruz spoke extensively about unconventional narratives and the future of theater. In late August, over Zoom, the two artists discussed epic stories, the economics of working in theater, and their dreams for cultural change. Their conversation has been edited for style and clarity. —the editors lileana blain-cruz I've been feeling particularly attuned to the idea of "liveness" after having lived inside a pandemic bubble alone for so long. What does it mean to be in the presence of other human beings in the midst of story? What stories are speaking to us right now, creating a reverberation of the spirit? If theater is a spiritual and a civic practice that requires an act of gathering, what are we gathering about? When the stakes of gathering now are so high—when doing so can actually risk death—then why am I really here? What is the importance of this story that needs to be told? When I enjoy my experiences in the theater, I feel all those questions reverberating. When I walked into Playwrights Horizons to see A Strange Loop in 2019, my jaw dropped. It was two hours of being flooded and overwhelmed: by my sensory experience, my tracking of character and thought and argument, my emotions around family and relationships, my core desires and needs as a [End Page 163] human being. The musical posed this fundamental question: What does it mean to be an artist, to strive against seemingly impossible odds? What was truly remarkable about the show was watching a consciousness laid bare—completely uncensored, hilarious, ugly, messy, vulnerable—and in that exposure being also completely free. The ideals of liveness and theater activate us on all of those different levels of experience at once. michael r. jackson I feel so gratified to hear that said out loud. When I found out that I had the opportunity to do A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions, I didn't know when I'd ever get the mic again to do something like it. Because who knows when there would be another opportunity to see a high-profile Black queer musical by a Black musical-theater writer? That doesn't happen all the time. If I and Stephen Brackett, Raja Feather Kelly, and Rona Siddiqui, the core creative team, were going to do it, we had to make it count. That meant taking nothing about the show or its production for granted. Usher's story had to be interrogated and rehearsed with open hearts and minds. We also had to be fearless about what the show was saying and doing at every turn. Coming out of or continuing through the pandemic, my mission statement now is that life and time are...

NORWEGIAN WAR FLEET ON GUARD OF THE SECURITY OF NATO DURING THE COLD WAR, PART 1

Due to its geographical location, Norway was, is and will continue to be an important component of the security system of NATO countries. Its direct border with the Soviet Union (now Russia) over a distance of over 170 km has influenced the fact that this region has been perceived as pivotal. After the end of World War II, when Europe and the world split into two political and military factions, a dynamic process of conventional and nuclear armaments began, and thus the world was heading toward an armed conflict and an extermination of civilization. Today we know that the Cold War did not turn into a hot war. This region, the North European region, was of particular importance. It offered the possibility for the Soviet nuclear fleet to leave for the Atlantic Ocean and carry out a nuclear attack on the USA and Canada. In order to prevent such a situation, the North Atlantic Theatre of War was created which included without limitation the Norwegian naval forces. The aim of this article is to present that issue

The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, and :Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, and:The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey

Reviewed by: The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, and :Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, and:The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey Michael C. O’neill THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN. By Sean O’Casey. Directed by Ciarán O’Reilly. Irish Repertory Theatre, New York City. January 31, 2019. JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK. By Sean O’Casey. Directed by Neil Pepe. Irish Repertory Theatre, New York City. March 21, 2019. THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS. By Sean O’Casey. Directed by Charlotte Moore. Irish Repertory Theatre, New York City. June 20, 2019. New York City’s Irish Repertory Theatre celebrated its thirtieth anniversary by devoting the second half of its 2018–19 season to Sean O’Casey, [End Page 107] staging his so-called “Dublin Trilogy” in repertory at the Irish Rep’s intimate space on West 22nd Street. Marking the first time in the New York area that The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926) have been performed in repertory, the productions captured the comic energy and relentless suffering of O’Casey’s characters, connecting contemporary audiences to the domestic turmoil and political upheaval that permeates these plays first staged by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre almost a century ago. An audacious undertaking by any measure, the Irish Rep’s productions maintained O’Casey’s legacy without challenging it, and instead embraced the novice playwright’s passions and developing ideas. This method allowed audiences a sense of how O’Casey’s early work, particularly his strong portraits of selfless, sometimes heroic women helped revolutionize theatre in Ireland and beyond. Click for larger view View full resolution James Russell (Donal Davoren) and Michael Mellamphy (Seumas Shields) in The Shadow of a Gunman. (Photo: Carol Rosegg.) Set in 1920 during the Irish War for Independence, The Shadow of a Gunman, under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, immediately thrust the audience into a confusing Dublin tenement flat governed by the guarded behavior and puzzling innuendo of the peddler Seumas Shields and his illegal tenant, the hapless poet Donal Davoren, who, according to tenement gossip, is secretly an IRA gunman. Although the acting ensemble provided vivid portraits of the nosey tenement dwellers, O’Reilly’s direction did little to help the audience distinguish them from one another; moreover, James Russell as Davoren complained so strongly when the neighbors interrupted his writing that he may have made it difficult for the audience to understand these denizens of an unfamiliar era as more than merely part of O’Casey’s microcosm of Dublin’s impoverished working class. O’Casey pokes fun at would-be poets, including his own youthful artistic pretensions, through Davoren, but Russell seemed to equate passion with yelling and never captured the modulation in the wonderful lines O’Casey has written for Davoren. Russell’s Davoren, however, stirred briefly to life in his first act encounter with Minnie Powell, played by Meg Hennessy as a potential “new woman” deprived by her lack of education from taking her place in a culture redefining itself. She imposed upon a receptive Davoren her simple preconceptions of a heroic ethos embodied by soldiers fighting against Britain. In feigning to share her revolutionary fervor, the duplicitous Davoren by the close of The Shadow of a Gunman ironically became a foil to Minnie, whose accidental death was quickly mythologized by tenement gossip as an act of heroism; meanwhile, in one of the production’s most genuine moments, Seumas [End Page 108] and Davoren realized their debt to Minnie for saving their lives must remain a secret they keep forever. Presented at the Irish Rep in 1995 and 2014, Juno and the Paycock remains O’Casey’s most popular play, and in terms of theatrical artistry, it is far more accomplished than The Shadow of a Gunman. The Atlantic Theatre Company’s artistic director, Neil Pepe, directed the production without much evidence of his customary visceral approach, reflecting instead the Irish Rep’s steady and unobtrusive directorial aesthetic. Pepe appropriately contrasted the mundane troubles of the Boyle family in 1924, however, against the insufferable loss of children to...

Treating the Public: Charitable Theater and Civic Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World. By Racheal Ball

Racheal Ball takes a refreshing vantage point on early modern Atlantic theater: the intersections between public health, charity, and theatrical performances. Her ambitious book spans multiple sites in the Spanish and Anglophone colonial Atlantic and is divided into chapters that compare Madrid and London, Seville and Bristol, Mexico City and Dublin, and Puebla de Los Angeles and Williamsburg, rounded off by a concluding chapter on antitheatrical sentiment in the Atlantic world. Ball’s imaginative linkage of public health and theater pays dividends in the Spanish and Spanish colonial contexts, but this angle is far less illuminating for understanding the Anglophone theatrical and philanthropic worlds, both in the metropole (London and Bristol) and the colonies (such as Williamsburg). Ball intriguingly excavates previously lost connections between public health, theater, and local politics in Spanish and Spanish colonial sites. I learned a great deal, for example, about the fascinating interplay in the Spanish metropole and empire between religiously-founded institutions, the established church, and performances. To offer just one example: as Bell uncovers, in Madrid, the confradías, or Catholic confraternities, “helped to fund hospitals, orphanages, and dowries to enable the marriages of poor girls” (22). These confraternities, which undergirded the establishment of hospitals in the mid- to late sixteenth century—such as the Hospital de la Pasión, “designated for the care of the sick and poor women” (22)—also “received the exclusive right to put on performances during Corpus Christi to raise funds for their charitable funds and hired acting troupes to do so.” (22). In all of her coverage of Spanish and Spanish colonial sites, these kinds of revelations abound, bespeaking a tour de force of original research.

New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. New Drama: Tire Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Pp. x, 354. US$94.95. In New Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon reframes the study of theatre in Atlantic rather than national terms. New Drama aims to remedy the gap in the study of eighteenth-century Atlantic theatre by highlighting the emergence of early American theatre as an independent cultural form. Throughout, Dillon calls for a broader consideration of representation as she examines how the theatre serves as a space for reinforcing and contesting social belonging. In each chapter, Dillon draws on archival evidence to illustrate that Atlantic world theatres functioned as representational and inherently political spaces. New Drama begins by positioning the 1649 beheading of King Charles I and the 1849 Astor Place Riot as turning points in theatrical performance in the Atlantic world. Dillon introduces the commons as a collective that often challenged political, economic, and religious boundaries. She argues that this new performative commons emerged in the eighteenth and functioned as a means of individual and collective representation. Central to Dillon's analysis is the concept of the colonial relation, which she defines as the between the colony and the metropole in the Anglo-Atlantic world of the eighteenth century (31). She explores this connection in works such as The West Indian and Oroonoko. Expanding upon Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer, or bare life, Dillion contends that slaves exist as figures of 'bare labor'--labor stripped of the resources of social life and the capacity for social reproduction (35). As Dillon suggests, the colonial relation was rendered visible through displays of belonging and non-belonging that reflected the racialized division inherent in colonial appropriation. Chapter Two returns to King Charles I's execution as a moment of emerging popular sovereignty. Dillon views the theatre as a mobilizing force and asserts that the staging of tortured bodies in Tears of the Indians enabled the English public to witness the genocidal acts of the Spanish. She suggests that the performance of Spanish cruelty generate[d] the identity of the Englishman as rightful occupant of the New World (81). By establishing the staging of tortured bodies as symbols of sovereign power, Dillon calls attention to the links between theatre, nationalism, and empire. The third chapter continues the text's discussion of tortured native bodies in works such as The Tempest and The Enchanted Island. Dillon distinguishes between the seventeenth-century figure of the tortured Indian and the eighteenth-century image of the royal slave. I found this chapter illuminating, in part because it touches on the disruptive function of women's bodies. Since Dillon's text surveys eighteenth-century Atlantic theatre, the subject of women performing as men is outside the book's scope. Nevertheless, the reference to cross-gendered casting is a compelling addition to a chapter that addresses the erasure of indigenous bodies. Dillon's fourth chapter investigates how slave bodies in Charleston were required to be both present (in terms of labor) and absent (in terms of political agency). …

From The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage

from The House in Scarsdale:A Memoir for the Stage Dan O'Brien Come back, come back, my wretched, feeble and unwanted child. —John Cheever For my brother characters Two men play all the roles here—an actor in his thirties, who plays Dan most of the time, and an actor in his fifties to play the "other" Dan and most every other character. The younger actor has the first line of the play, and with each new character heading the actors alternate. place & time Various, the present. notes In the margin of the script are suggestions for lighting, sound, some stage direction, as well as photographs, moving images, etc., to be displayed as video and/or projections. The excerpt presented here is approximately the first third of a play that runs about ninety minutes without an intermission. The House in Scarsdale was runner-up in the 2016 Humanitas/Center Theatre Group Playwriting Prize, and has benefited from the Center Theatre Group Writers' Workshop, residencies at the New Harmony Project and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy, and readings and workshops at Center Theatre Group, Atlantic Theatre Company, and Hartford Stage. The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, California, Jessica Kubzansky and Michael Michetti Artistic Directors, premiered The House in Scarsdale in 2017, directed by Michael Michetti and performed by Tim Cummings and Brian Henderson. [End Page 47] 1: What Has He Given You? dan: The first thing I remember is looking up at his face. A dark place. dan: Sunlight in the window, dan: I'm playing on the floor. dan: The whole family's sleeping still. dan: My father's younger brother is sitting beside the window looking down at me. dan Smiling. With a long black beard and heavy, black-framed glasses, he looks like a hobo, and a poet. A window appears dan: He gives me a children's Bible. dan: No he's giving you something else, dan: some other kind of gift.—What's he giving me? dan: What has he given you dan: —before he walks out the door? Overcast 2: things You Do Not know skip: Hey! light, dan: Hey! July, skip: How are you? dan: —How are you? New Jersey. skip: So good to see you! dan: Good to see you! You look great. skip: Yeah right. dan: You do! skip: You look the same. Except you're about ten feet taller—Danny! dan: —Skip, thanks for answering that message I sent you. skip: Isn't Facebook amazing? dan: All I did was type your name and there you were—! skip: Too bad I couldn't get here sooner, otherwise we could've hung out! dan: Well it's not your fault [End Page 48] I've got rehearsal. skip: Oh yeah? dan: For a play. skip: That's amazing! You're an actor? dan: I write plays and uh, poems. skip: Ha ha ha!—So how long do you think it'll take to get into the city? dan: Don't know, half an hour? skip: Sorry about the mess, been driving cross-country, the kids are with their mom on Long Island, and I have to pick them up and take them to Vermont for summer camp and then how the hell do we get out of here? They're sitting in a car dan: Go left pretend at this sign. to drive. but please don't skip: Right here? dan: Go straight and then— Maybe the window has become a windshield. skip: God New Jersey's so confusing! Even worse than like Marin! dan: Is that where you live, Skip, in Marin? skip: San Francisco, but I lived in Marin for about a year afterthe divorce. dan: Oh. Right. Sorry. skip: So tell me how long's it been? dan: I don't know, like almost twenty years? skip: Are you married? dan: Our wedding was four years ago, we've lived in LA three years now, no kids and we're coming up on a right at this light not a sharp right more like— skip: One of those soft sort of bear-right kind of rights— dan: Right, and...

Shakespeare among the “Salvages”: The Bard in Red Atlantic Performance

This essay looks at theatre and performance in the Red Atlantic (a concept developed by the author that re-centers Atlantic world history on the Indigenes of the western hemisphere). Specifically, it looks at the imbrications between the Red Atlantic and the works of William Shakespeare. In Red Atlantic theatre Natives were initially simply objects of representation; later, they interacted with Shakespeare’s works as audience, performers, and ultimately as tellers of their own alternative narratives. Far from always being passive victims of colonialism, Natives enacted their own fierce agency.

Beyond center and periphery: new currents in French and francophone Atlantic studies

This introductory essay explores recent shifts in perspective in the study of the French and francophone Atlantic world. It takes as a touchstone changes in the place of Louisiana and the French colonial period in American history and consciousness. The essay traces the evolution of both anglophone and francophone Atlantic historiography, elucidating the shift in meanings attributed to the relationship between France and its Atlantic colonies. It then explores the recent emergence of alternative interpretations grounded in a vision of a decentered Atlantic theater where local actors, locations, vectors and networks of power, knowledge, and resources interact with each other and with the metropolitan center. It suggests that this reframing has led to a renewed appreciation for earlier primary and secondary French colonial history writing which can now be seen as central texts for understanding Europe during the emergence of modernity. A similar transformation is traced in the localized histories of former French Atlantic colonies, from Quebec and West Africa to Haiti, and then continued in the emergence of new research efforts – concentrated in centers of French colonial influence and especially France's port cities – based on a direct confrontation with the role of the slave trade and the complex forms of exchange behind it. A discussion of recent approaches to French Atlantic science highlights the networks of actors and political and economic power that were often implicated in the establishment of matters of fact in the Atlantic colonial theater. The contrasting experiences of Jesuit, Franciscan, and Huguenot colonials point to a newly complex understanding of the New World religious and missionary experience. The essay then explores some of the ways that recent Atlantic scholarship has influenced the practice of French history, casting new light on such traditional topics as the Wars of Religion, education, and the Enlightenment. After brief summaries of the issue's articles, the essay then suggests that through this new understanding of the complex interaction of natives and colonizers, local, European, and native world views and alliance structures, and of indigenous and metropolitan knowledge and power, a coherent historical image of a francophone Atlantic world finally emerges.

Practical Aesthetics and the Formation of the Atlantic Theater Company

The Atlantic Theater Company has been one of Off-Broadway's most successful theatre companies over the past twenty years, having won twelve Tony Awards, eight Lucille Lortel Awards, thirteen Obie Awards, and three Outer Critics Circle Awards. The company, originally founded in 1983 by the playwright David Mamet and the actor William H. Macy, has mounted over one hundred plays, many by new writers. Included among its successes are Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Woody Allen's A Second Hand Memory and Writer's Block, the revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo, Celebration and The Room by Harold Pinter, Mojo and Night Heron by Jez Butterworth, and the new musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening, which won the 2007 Tony for best new musical. But producing plays is only part of Atlantic's mission: it also runs the Atlantic Acting School, which operates both as a private conservatoire and an undergraduate training studio in conjunction with New York University. Its curriculum focuses on Practical Aesthetics, the acting technique developed by Mamet and Macy. Mary McCann, in conversation here with NTQ Contributing Editor Ian Watson, is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company and Director of the Atlantic Acting School, where she also teaches. She continues to act, having appeared in many of the company's productions, on Broadway, on television, and in several independent films. The conversation took place over two meetings at the Atlantic Acting School in New York City, on 25 April and 5 June 2007.

LANCE E. DAVIS and STANLEY L. ENGERMAN. Naval Blockades in Peace and War: An Economic History since 1750. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 453. $85.00

This book by Lance E. Davis and Stanley L. Engerman looks at a number of blockades carried out over the past few centuries but primarily focuses on the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and World Wars I and II. A rather brief chapter toward the end skims through a large number of post–World War II cases. An unusually large amount of tabular information is reported, primarily taken from other studies, but helpfully concentrating the data in one place. It is easy to forget what the book is about at times, but it is clear that the central question is whether blockades are successful. The answer is that some are and some are not, depending on, among other things, the vulnerability of the target and the capabilities of the blockader. But other questions are raised, including ones about the effects of changing technology and what role international law plays in modifying blockading behavior. The answer to the technology question is quite a bit, with improved technology making blockades more and less likely to be successful, as exemplified by the use of submarines against Japan in World War II and the use of radar and broken codes in the Atlantic theater of the same war. The answer for the role of international law is not much. Belligerents and targets have usually done what they felt they needed to do without much concern about rules proscribing their behavior.

Conquer or Die: Staging Circum-Atlantic Revolt in Polly and Three-Finger'd Jack

The 1777 resurrection of John Gay's Polly represents a watershed moment in the stage history of Atlantic underclasses: its first self-conscious act of racial mimicry. This self-reflexive blackface also activated a cohort of lower-class types; Polly marks class with theatrical blackness. John Fawcett's 1800 pantomime Obi, or, Three-Finger'd Jack, revives such resistant characters, enacting new forms of social disorder and performing another version of the multiracial underclass crew Marx would name the "lumpenproletariat." Together, Polly and Three-Finger'd Jack imagine the convergence of race and class identity in the Caribbean. Most importantly, however, they imagine such rogues, with their tendencies to don burnt-cork makeup and perform piracy and banditry, as already theatrical. These plays and their rogue antiheroes performed threats to the existing social order, becoming a charismatic and popular part of the Atlantic theatre culture.

"There Was No Resisting John Canoe": Circum-Atlantic Transracial Performance

\ “There Was No Resisting John Canoe” Circum-Atlantic Transracial Performance —PETER REED John-Canoe is considered not merely as a person of material consequence, but one whose presence is absolutely indispensable. . . . There was no resisting John Canoe. —MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS, Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in the West Indies (1816, published 1845) In her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs writes of popular holiday slave performances she calls “Johnkannaus.” The performances , appearing in various guises throughout the Atlantic world, once spread up the eastern seaboard of the United States and survive today in the Caribbean. Their movements—geographical as well as cultural—make them some of the most compelling and slippery performances in the nineteenthcentury Atlantic world. In its various forms, the acts performed black Atlantic culture to a variety of observers. Anglo-Jamaican planter and playwright Matthew G. Lewis (perhaps best known for helping to create gothic melodrama back in England) sensed Jonkonnu’s allure in the ¤rst decades of the 1800s. He found “John Canoe”just as compelling as Jacobs did, calling the act’s main character “indispensable,” even irresistible. As Lewis’s journal suggests, the performance meant much to audiences both white and black.For slave and slaveholder alike,the actrepresentsacompellingmoment of interracial interaction.Jonkonnu generated its broad appeal in a series of shifting reinventions, revealing mobile { 65 } and active concepts of race and identity at play inthenineteenth-century circumAtlantic world.1 Broadly speaking, Jonkonnuactsevolved from Caribbean and North American planter society performances, through Atlantic street performance, to the stage, eventually ¤nding their way into Jacobs’s memoir. The collective performance histories of Jonkonnu, then, reveal geographical movement accompanied by generic movement: its performances do not passively remain in one location or in any one form. As the act traveled, it jumped generic boundaries, insinuating its characters and scenes ¤rst into institutionalized theatre and eventually into literary culture. This movement, of course, happened repeatedly, de¤ning nineteenth-century theatre culture. Jonkonnu’s movements also point to elaborate and complicated dynamics of attraction and exploitation, rebellion and collusion in nineteenth-century representations of race. Jacobs’s use of the popular performance in her emancipatory memoir suggests that Jonkonnu enacted some liberatory potential, even if resistance was only masked and momentary . At the same time, Lewis’s journal entry reveals that the act exercised a compelling attraction to white audiences, despite its riotously disruptive potential . Such tensely competing claims reveal the importance of Jonkonnu acts to Atlantic theatre culture. Jacobs’s account of antebellum American slave life, with one of the bestknown descriptions of Jonkonnu, can give us a sense of some of the act’s prominent elements. Jacobs remembers a collective, group-oriented event: “They consist of companies of slaves from the plantations, generally of the lower class. Two athletic men,in calico wrappers,have a net thrown over them,covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows’ tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box.A dozen beat on this,while others strike triangles and jawbones, to which bands of dancers keep time.” Jacobs describes the performances as elaborately staged and thoroughly prepared events. For some time leading up to the festivities, participants composed songs for the occasion. The performance event itself provided a pretext for barely controlled revelries hinting at threatening reversals of slavery’s power structures. Jacobs recalls the license granted on these occasions: “companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning , and are allowed to go round till twelve o’clock, begging for contributions.” The actors used the contributions of rum and money for “carousals”authorized but not supervised by the masters.2 Such are the classical elements of American Jonkonnu performances of the nineteenth century. It took place during the winter holidays, tolerated and even encouraged in the break between Christmas and the New Year.3 Dancers (usuPETER REED { 66 } ally male), costumed in a variety of disguises, performed the act on the street or the grounds of a plantation. In descriptions, spectators frequently use the name “Jonkonnu” to refer to the leading character as well...

Notes from a Maritime Kitchen Talk on Lighting: Leigh Ann Vardy in Conversation with Emmy Alcorn

Leigh Ann Vardy is a Halifax-based lighting designer who has created lighting for many Nova Scotia theatre companies, including Neptune, Eastern Front, Jest in Time, Mulgrave Road, the Atlantic Theatre Festival, Alive Theatre, Elsinore Theatre Company and Ships Company. Outside Nova Scotia, she lit shows at Great Canadian Theatre Company, Factory Theatre, the National Arts Centre (in co-production with Eastern Front) and the LSPU Hall in Newfoundland.

On Stage

ON ,ffiS QTAfTTSSr ^^JUDITHFISHER 0 * ^vJXL·^ ßween'i University It's festival time again. Stratford revealed its renovations of the Festival Theatre (which have met with mixed reviews) at the grand opening on June 2. The tradition of the "Su-atford shuffle" (the lights-down movement of all those who bought the cheap side seats to more central seats) might be missed, but Tm sure no-one will bemoan the loss ofthose awful sight-lines! And the Atlantic Theatre Festival, now in its third year,joins our Canadian line up this summer. BRITISH COLUMBIA: Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw Vancouver Playhouse· 9 February - 7 March 1998 · Directed by Glynis Leyshon, the Playhouse's new Artistic Director, in a coproduction with Edmonton's Citadel Theatre. ALBERTA: Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw Citadel Theatre, Edmonton See Vancouver Playhouse SHAW FESTIVAL, NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO: The Shaw Festival will mail its handbook and brochure on request Telephone: (905) 468-2153 or 1-800-51 1-SHAW (7429); Fax: (905) 468-3804; and. bowing to the inevitable, the Festival can be found on the Internet at http://shawfestsympatico.ca Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw Festival Theatre· Until 26 October · Directed by Tasdeusz Bradecki The Seagull by Anton Chekhov; translated by David French Festival Theatre· 20 June - 26 October · The Good King Charles' Golden Days by George Bernard Shaw Court House Theatre· 1 July - 27 September · Directed by Allen Macinnis The Chocolate Soldier Music: Oscar Straus Royal George Theatre· Until 26 October · Directed by David Latham, based on Shaw's Arms and the Man 140Victorian Review STRATFORD FESTIVAL, ONTARIO: The Stratford Festival will mail its brochure, which includes die Visitor's Guide, on request To order, telephone: (519) 273-1600 or 1-800-567-1600; Fax: (519) 273-6173. Little Women Avon Theatre· 20 May - 8 November · Adapted by Marisha Chamberlain from Louisa May Alcott's novel. ATLANTIC THEATRE FESTIVAL, WOLFVILLE, NOVA SCOTIA: For information telephone: (902) 542-1515; fax: (902) 542-1526. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen· 2 August - 7 September · Directed by Michael Langham and Helen Bums. NEW YORK, UNITED STATES: The Toronto musical production of Jane Eyre is due to open on Broadway in October 1997; die tiieatre has not yet been confirmed. Jekyll and Hyde Plymouth Theatre, Broadway· Opened 28 April · A musical thriller; music by Frank Wildhom; book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse; directed by Robin Phillips. ENGLAND: ROYAL SHAKESPEARE THEATRE, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON: Booking information: Telephone: (01144) 1789-295-623: London (01144) 171-683-8891. Linie Eyolf by Henrik Ibsen Swan Theatre· Until 23 August · Directed by Adrian Noble. LONDON, ENGLAND: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov The Old Vic· Booking to 17 August · On Stage141 Oliver by Lionel Bart London Palladium· current · Cameron Mackintosh's production of Bart's musical version of Charles Dickens's Oliver Tyfot, with "Dame Edna" as Fagin. The Seagull by Anton Chekhov Donmar Warehouse· 14 August - 6 September · This production by die English Touring Theatre stars Cheryl Campbell. Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde Theatre Royal, Haymarket· Booking to 28 June · Produced by Bill Kenright whose production of The Doll's House won a Tony on Broadway diis year. The Wood Demon by Anton Chekhov The Playhouse· Opens 18 June · Adapted by Frank Dwyer and Nicholas Saunders; directed by Anthony Clark. Dorian Grey Arts Theatre· 23 September - 1 November · A musical version of Oscar Wilde's novel by David Reeves. Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw Almeida Theatre, Islington· 3 September - 11 October · This Fringe theatre production is directed by David Hare, and stars Emma Fielding, Richard Griffiths, Patricia Hodge, Malcolm Sinclair, and Penelope Wilton SCOTLAND: EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL: Booking information: Telephone: (from Canada 01144) 131-225-5756; Fax: 0131-225-1173. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov· 29 August - 31 August · Produced by Salzburg Festival (Austria) PITLOCHRY FESTIVAL: Mrs. Warren's Profession by G.B.Shaw· Until 1 1 October · 142Victorian Review FESTIVAL D'AVIGNON, AVIGNON, FRANCE: Un mois à la campagne by Ivan Tourgueniev · 1 1 July - 22 August · Actual dates of diis production not specified. FINLAND: TAMPERE INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov Kom Theatre· 12...

Wolfville Doing It Right: Bawtree’s Atlantic Theatre Festival

Overlooking the Bay of Fundy, situated in the quaint university town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, stands a steel-supported wooden ‘O’, a proposed 514-seat skating-rink-turned-theatre, soon-to-be home of the Atlantic Theatre Festival. The brainchild of Artistic Director Michael Bawtree and associates, ATF stands as proof positive that local initiative and grass-roots collaboration are the key to Canada’s cultural future. Other than local residents and area politicians, further contributors include some of Canada’s finest theatrical talent: Christopher Plummer is ATF’s Honourary Fundraising Chairman; Michael Shamata, recently-appointed Artistic Director for London’s Grand Theatre, offers ATF invaluable advice on the daily running of, and casting for, a repertory company; Stratford lighting designer Michael Whitfield provided ATF with their initial requirements for stage lighting. He continues to advise project architect Michael Harvey (Halifax), on the theatre’s structural design. Former Artistic Director of Canada’s Stratford Festival, Michael Langham, is the festival’s Associate Director. On 16 June, 1995, ATF will launch its inaugural season with Langham’s mise en scène of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Atlantic Theatre: A Review Article

Atlantic Theatre: A Review Article

Halifax Towards an Atlantic Playwrights’ Colony

Two years ago, participants at the Atlantic Theatre Conference held in Halifax moved that delegates representing the region’s theatre community study the feasibility of an Atlantic Playwrights’ Colony. As a result, the Dramatists’ Co-op of Nova Scotia established a committee to assess support for the colony idea. Founded in 1976, the Co-op is a self-governing branch of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. During the past 10 years, it has developed programmes that serve the interests of playwrights, including the publication of a monthly newsletter, a catalogue of members’ plays, public readings, round-table workshops and, most recently, a highly-successful workshopping and public presentation of six new Nova Scotian plays.

Halifax The First Atlantic Theatre Conference

Twenty-one professional theatre companies from the Maritimes and Newfoundland met at Neptune Theatre on 26-28 April 1985 to discuss mutual concerns and possible co-operation at the first ever Atlantic Theatre Conference. The event was organized by the Canada Council at the request of theatre companies in the region, and representatives of federal and provincial funding agencies, as well as the Professional Association of Canadian Theatre (PACT), the Playwrights Union of Canada, and the Dramatists Co-op of Nova Scotia, were in attendance.