Contemporary American Theater Research Articles

Staging Race and Gender in the Era of Contemporary Crises: Dramas of African American Women Playwrights

Abstract Starting from the premise that contemporary crisis is a pervasive continuation of the modern “series of interrelated crises” (Fernández-Caparrós and Brígido-Corachán vii), this article examines the manner in which the US theater has responded to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously considering crises as “agents of change and transformation” (xvii) and bearing in mind the #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter movements, the article questions the likelihood of contemporary American theater overcoming its own crisis of representation. Relating modern and current crises, the essay first outlines twentieth century dramatic literature and theatersi against the backdrop of the World Wars, the 1918 health crisis, economic depression, and post-war (racialized) society, focusing on plays by American women of color. The study then centers on dramatic and theatrical developments brought about by the annus horribilis of 2020, surveying new genres, authors and performances, and discerning no significant improvement in systemic discrimination on Broadway stages. The essay also offers complementary reading of Trouble in Mind (1955), a meta-drama mirroring systemic racial and gender discrimination in American theaters, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) which unravels similar issues, albeit in the film industry.

A New Feminist Absurd?: Women’s Protest, Fury, and Futility in Contemporary American Theatre

Absurdism has long been associated with existentialist white male writers like the ones Martin Esslin analysed in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which coined the term that came to define a lasting dramatic genre. More recently, however, several female playwrights have begun to reinvent this movement with an uncanny brand of feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. In this essay, a close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) serves as a touchstone for analysing performances of ludic feminist futility in plays by diverse writers including Ruby Rae Spiegel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Alice Birch, and others. In their festive moments of anti-structural and non-linear oscillation between rage and glee, these plays mark the messy implosion of an outdated feminist political project, first anticipating and later reflecting the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 US presidential election. Often confining their characters within domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, hidden supermarket aisles, or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights celebrate failure and madness in the lives and labour of their female characters. By transforming historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of resistance as well as spectacular failure, these performances of excess, from dieting to devouring, precarity to privilege, force audiences to confront cultural blind spots and failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality. Furthermore, by bridging contemporary women’s anger research with whiteness and affect studies, this essay identifies a nascent trend in US theatre with a growing international profile that engages an updated absurdist rubric within a larger feminist praxis of political revolt.

America’s Postsecular Stages

Dana Tanner-Kennedy stakes a claim for an unacknowledged category of contemporary American theater: postsecular theater. She argues that religious belief becomes a matter of choice in a postsecular era that struggles between post-truth reality and transcendental belief. Through in-depth readings of contemporary plays and performances—such as Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, Stew’s Passing Strange, and the Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals—Tanner-Kennedy suggests that these works rescript existing religious values and counter the historic secularity of the American dramatic canon since modernism. She advocates for a renewed emphasis on “religious literacy” in education so that academics and critics may better understand these works and their successors.

Dante the Everyman

January 01 2020 Dante the Everyman Marco Martinelli, Marco Martinelli Marco Martinelli, playwright and director, and Ermanna Montanari, actress, author, and set designer, founded the Teatro delle Albe (1983) in Ravenna, Italy, and share its artistic direction. Martinelli's texts have been staged in several European countries, South America, Africa, and the U.S. and translated into French, German, and English. He has received several awards, including: seven Ubu Prizes, the Prize for Career Achievement-Festival Journées théâtrales (Carthage, Tunisia), the Vereinigung Deutsch-Italienischer Kultur Gesellschaften cultural award 2018. MONTANARI, the recipient of the Eleonora Duse Prize, among many others, is known for her vocal and musical research. Her virtuosic work with the voice is the subject of several books and essays in multiple languages. In 2017, the artists premiered their first movie, Aung San Suu Kyi's Life Under Arrest, written and directed by Martinelli, with Montanari in the title role. Their film The Sky over Kibera, takes as its subject the Divine Comedy, brought to life in Nairobi with one-hundred and fifty children and adolescents. In 1991, Martinelli and Montanari founded Ravenna Teatro, at the Teatro Rasi in Ravenna. (teatrodellealbe.com) Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Thomas Haskell Simpson Thomas Haskell Simpson Thomas Haskell Simpson is currently visiting professor in the department of language and literature (LeLiA) at the University of Bari (Italy) where he teaches courses on translating contemporary American theatre. His article “New American Theatre in the Age of Trump,” will be published in 2019 by the press at Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Marco Martinelli Marco Martinelli, playwright and director, and Ermanna Montanari, actress, author, and set designer, founded the Teatro delle Albe (1983) in Ravenna, Italy, and share its artistic direction. Martinelli's texts have been staged in several European countries, South America, Africa, and the U.S. and translated into French, German, and English. He has received several awards, including: seven Ubu Prizes, the Prize for Career Achievement-Festival Journées théâtrales (Carthage, Tunisia), the Vereinigung Deutsch-Italienischer Kultur Gesellschaften cultural award 2018. MONTANARI, the recipient of the Eleonora Duse Prize, among many others, is known for her vocal and musical research. Her virtuosic work with the voice is the subject of several books and essays in multiple languages. In 2017, the artists premiered their first movie, Aung San Suu Kyi's Life Under Arrest, written and directed by Martinelli, with Montanari in the title role. Their film The Sky over Kibera, takes as its subject the Divine Comedy, brought to life in Nairobi with one-hundred and fifty children and adolescents. In 1991, Martinelli and Montanari founded Ravenna Teatro, at the Teatro Rasi in Ravenna. (teatrodellealbe.com) Thomas Haskell Simpson Thomas Haskell Simpson is currently visiting professor in the department of language and literature (LeLiA) at the University of Bari (Italy) where he teaches courses on translating contemporary American theatre. His article “New American Theatre in the Age of Trump,” will be published in 2019 by the press at Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski. Online Issn: 1537-9477 Print Issn: 1520-281X © 2020 Thomas Haskell Simpson2020Thomas Haskell Simpson PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (2020) 42 (1 (124)): 78–81. https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00513 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Marco Martinelli, Thomas Haskell Simpson; Dante the Everyman. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 2020; 42 (1 (124)): 78–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00513 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsPAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Thomas Haskell Simpson2020Thomas Haskell Simpson Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Multicultural Voices in the Contemporary American Theater

Multicultural Voices in the Contemporary American Theater

Shepherdstown 2017: Race and Faith

Shepherdstown 2017: Race and Faith Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) I’ve been following the Contemporary American Theater Festival for six seasons (often in these pages). Produced each July in Shepherdstown, WV, it focuses on new or nearly new full-length conventional plays (as distinct from musicals or from the “theater pieces” more associated with fringe theater) by contemporary American playwrights, mostly of the emerging variety (though there were productions of newer plays by the well-established Sam Sheppard and Neil LaBute in recent seasons). In other words, this is a proving ground for fare that may be headed for Off-Broadway and then regional theater, not for either Broadway or fringe festivals. CATF provides thoroughly professional conditions: Equity casts, top-notch sets, excellent acoustics, lavishness of costumes where it’s called for––in short (to borrow a phrase from the vocabulary of self-help books) it dresses the shows for the New York or regional theater job they want. There is a seriousness about the enterprise that might seem a bit conservative to some: no messing around with nontraditional casting, nothing fringe-y, limited fourth-wall violations. Those things might appear to some to be major components of the future of the American theater, but CATF exemplifies the present, a present which is not at all ready to consider itself vieux jeux. And in many ways, especially in the area of race, the Festival aggressively pushes the envelope. About half the shows in the last two seasons, for instance, had major and often challenging racial themes, and many of the playwrights were nonwhite. This season, without a doubt, the most racially charged entry was The Niceties, by Eleanor Burgess. The setup was simple: At a northeastern university that strongly resembles Yale, Janine, a middle-aged history [End Page 124] professor, goes over a paper with Zoe, an African American student. They differ, politely at first. Zoe’s thesis is that the American Revolution was a moderate one not because of the statesmanship of the Founding Fathers but because those who waged it had no desire to right the wrong of slavery and fix the fundamental problems of American society. Janine demurs. She argues that historians must work with the primary data available, and that everything not found in such data must be ignored. Because nothing that might support Zoe’s conclusions stands out in the primary data, she reasons, there is no good reason to subscribe to Zoe’s conclusions. Janine’s initial lines come across as measured, rational, and supremely composed. Zoe’s initial riposte, almost as measured, is that this neat construct consigns us to relying entirely on the voices of white men, history’s winners, who had a nearly exclusive ability to create the record and were unreliable narrators. To Zoe, Janine’s utter dismissal of her theory ignores self-evident truths of human nature, which should be evidence enough. As the discussion grows more heated, leading to a crisis that leaks out of the professor’s office, it becomes both a proxy for and a microcosm of the larger disputes around race in our country. In the second act (I almost wrote “the second round”) Zoe accuses Janine of not being a suitable teacher. When Janine responds she earned her position, Zoe reminds Janine of all the reasons certain potential competitors may have fallen by the wayside on the way to earning that position: “[F]irst came 250 years of slavery, and then came a hundred years of segregation, and then came a deliberate and systematic attempt to exclude black people from good school districts and good jobs and to lock them up or hunt them down for doing things white people do every day. I need you to say that whatever else it stands for, America has systematically persecuted one part of its population, in a way that benefits the other part. In a way that has benefitted you. . . . You won fair and square cuz everyone else had lead boots on.” The fight culminates with Zoe demanding that Janine make personal reparations for the illegitimate benefit she has received. With the positions of the parties so lucidly laid out, this rather shocking demand seems...

A New Noble Kinsmen: The Play On! Project and Making New Plays Out of Old

A New Noble KinsmenThe Play On! Project and Making New Plays Out of Old Martine Kei Green-Rogers (bio) and Alex N. Vermillion (bio) When evaluating any play, dramaturgs ask of it: "Why this play? Why this play now?" The answers to these questions are complicated when evaluating the purpose and power of a play that is a retelling of a currently existing dramatic story. What does it mean to make a "new" play out of an "old" play? Why do we need to make a new play out of an old one? This line of questioning belies subtextual questions such as, What is the issue with the older version of the play that hinders an audience's understanding of or appreciation for the story being told? Has something changed about our society and the way we view the older version of this story that needs to be addressed for the story to resonate with contemporary audiences? How do our answers to these questions shift if we are talking about one of the most revered playwrights of the early modern era? To engage these questions, this article discusses Tim Slover's "translation" of The Two Noble Kinsmen, commissioned as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play on! project and supported by a workshop and production process at the University of Utah during the 2015–16 and 2016–17 school years. It seeks to document the successes and challenges facing Slover, the dramaturgs, the students at the University of Utah, and the leaders of the Play on! project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) involved in this experiment to modernize the language of the canon of Shakespeare. What adds to the difficulty of this Play on! project is that Shakespeare and Fletcher's version of The Two Noble Kinsmen is a modernization and dramatization of another "old" text: Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale." Slover's translation of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen [End Page 231] continues their precedent by making "new" writing out of "old" writing, and that positions his resulting new play as a dramatic metanarrative that continues the bold statement foregrounded by Shakespeare and Fletcher's original version. We explore these iterations of old and new texts to argue that for the continued relevance and survival of some stories, those stories must be changed and updated as language shifts and evolves. We also challenge a contemporary academic assumption that early modern English is close enough to contemporary English that it is easily understandable to a lay audience. The OSF project sets up a paradoxical task—to preserve Shakespearean text by rewriting it—and therefore opens debate about the general comprehensibility of early modern plays left unchanged, the continued role of Shakespeare in contemporary culture, and the type of newness desired in contemporary American theatre created by focusing on contemporary language. Slover's task is a heavy one: The goal of the OSF project is translating Shakespeare's plays in a way that requires examining the language "with the same kind of rigor and pressure that [Shakespeare] did" and keeping in mind the poetical, metaphorical, and thematic elements of the original text while rediscovering the play in contemporary language.1 Dramaturg Martine Kei Green-Rogers is assisting Slover in an experiment that involves students in the Theatre Department at the University of Utah in pursuing that goal, and already the artists and students are discovering the difficulty of accomplishing this paradoxical task. For example, if the point of the project is to leave as much of the play intact as possible, do precedents such as trimming Shakespeare for time still apply when a production is attached to the commission (and if so, at what point does it venture out of the realm of translation and into the world of adaptation)? In addition, what techniques do actors use to help them determine the meaning and intention behind a line when the verse and punctuation is, for one reason or another, not reinstated in a section of text in the translation? These kinds of dilemmas demonstrate the nuts-and-bolts decisions facing artists at work on Play on! commissions, and they carry particular weight because of...

Messy and Tidy

Messy and Tidy Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) It is tempting to pass off one’s impressions of this year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, as a take on the Current State of the American Play. But they aren’t. When you compare this season to past seasons, two of which (2012 and 2014) have been discussed in these pages, it’s clear that CATF changes each year. Artistic trends change, too, but not that quickly. In reality, those differences are just results of the new golden age of American playwriting in which we live. With golden ages, you get lots of talent and lots of diverse work. And that’s the only generalization I care to offer this year. No racial diversity this time around, though. I remarked, a year ago, on how the Festival had featured three black playwrights among the five showcased, and on the large number of African American performers. This year, all the plays were by white authors, and there were no African American performers at all. This had the secondary effect of taking race completely out of the thematic interplay among the works on display. But that left plenty else: mental illness, creativity, repression, rebellion, the twisted bond of parent and child, extreme fashion, and the nature and durability of marriage. And we had a wide range of genres and emotional temperatures. Not quite the range of the players in Hamlet (“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral” etc.) but close. Two of the shows were about artists—of sorts. One concerned artists of the imagination. This was Johnna Adams’s World Builders: A Love Story. Adams is hardly the first playwright to experience at firsthand the connection between mental illness and creativity. She acknowledges her bipolar disorder but says she would not have had a playwriting career without it. She is hardly alone; O’Neill, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Williams were all bipolar. Nor is she the first to suggest that madness may be inspirational to an artist. DeQuincey, Poe, and Coleridge, among others, have drawn that connection. But surely few have painted the connection in quite the bright colors that World Builders does. Both the characters in World Builders, Whitney (Brenna Palughi) and Max (Chris Thorn), have been distracted by their disorder from the real world and the actual human connections available to them with friends and family, and obsess instead about imaginary worlds of their own making. Whitney’s world is a dynamic, bustling science fiction epic with, as she brags, “seven colony worlds that Earth’s survivors fled to,” which now contain “seventy-two alien-human hybrid races.” Her fantasy embraces “forty-seven major characters and one hundred and thirty minor characters.” In particular, she revels in the love story of Mikor and Selestina, a prince and princess who meet when his pirate flagship encounters her intergalactic space yacht. In other words, in her mind Whitney is helming a fictive universe even more complex than that of Game of Thrones (a comparison Adams herself draws in an interview in the program), though it seems a happier and more swashbuckling place than Westeros. [End Page 124] Max’s fantasy world is quite different and far more ominous, clearly owing much to the disturbing material of Silence of the Lambs. But their worlds, however artistic and creative, are also places of some danger, because for their creators they have supplanted the real world, to the point where mere human contact is of next to no interest to either of them. Hence their families have forced them into a locked ward at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where they are on a controlled trial of a medicine that will rid them of, in Whitney’s words: “[O]ur schizoid personality disorders. Anti-social tendencies. Brief reactive psychoses. Autoerotic fixations. Dissociative and narcissistic behavior.” The trouble is, the medicine is working, simultaneously freeing them up to fall in love and sundering them from their fantasy worlds. Thus the second half of the (intermissionless) play is taken up with a number of questions that boil down to comparing the value of a sane life with love but without creativity and an insane...

Academic Dystopia: Teaching Incompetency and Sex in Contemporary American Drama

This paper explores the negative patterns of dramatizing academic professors in two American plays: David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992) and R. A. Gurney’s Human Events (2001). My research considers the adaptation of professors and the way they are represented through their actions, behaviors, and relationships with students, friends, and the surrounding comunity in the two aforementioned plays. It seems to me that sex, alcoholism and teaching incompetency might be the major attributes related to male and female professors in recent and contemporary American theater.

Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater by Jacqueline O’Connor (review)

Jacqueline O'Connor. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater. Theater in the Americas. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 225. $40.00. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater constitutes a welcome addition to the growing body of research concerned with forms of documentation in the theater. By investigating what she calls the trial O'Connor sets out to explore complicated questions ... about law and the execution of justice, about art and the resolution of emotion (21). Through theatrical reenactment of the procedures of justice, she argues, communities of performers and spectators can symbolically re-open the cases, and can debate their cultural and social ramifications in ways legal proceedings cannot. In close readings of nine such documentary trial plays, first produced between 1970 and 2000, O'Connor deliberates and interrogates the boundaries that (often very tentatively) separate fact from fiction, the courtroom from the theater, and the individual from the social. The documentary trial play, O'Connor states in an initial definition of the genre, comes about through the blending of verbatim excerpts from legal transcripts, media coverage of the events, and first-person interviews, the last compiled either at the time of the trial or, in some cases, months or years later (4). Not all of the trial plays analyzed in the book are concerned with trials in a strictly legal sense; some also deal with judicial hearings such as the infamous congressional investigations conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era. Moreover, O'Connor's notion of the contemporary in her title is relatively broad and reaches back to the 1970s; while the trials that precede the plays even date back as far as the 1890s, the historical, political, and aesthetic territory covered by the book can be roughly delineated as the post-World War II United States. In four main chapters, O'Connor discusses nine plays and the courtroom proceedings they are based on. Importantly, she points out, documentary trial plays hardly ever focus on ordinary trials, but instead dramatize legal action in which broader cultural, social, and political issues are negotiated. In these cases, the rationality of the law is often doubtful, and reflection on it determined to a large extent by political and ideological considerations. This focus on exemplary cases also explains why at times O'Connor seems to say more about the trials themselves and their historical circumstances than about the aesthetics of the trial plays she purports to analyze. The strong emphasis on the historical bases of her theatrical archive is also evident in the larger structure of Documentary Trial Plays: its four chapters are structured along thematic lines (chapter 1 deals with Vietnam War protests, chapter 2 with the McCarthy era, and so on) rather than in terms of formal, aesthetic, or theatrical considerations. While this is not necessarily a flaw, it points to the complexities of writing about documentary art, which is so explicitly entangled with larger historical realities that it is often difficult to foreground aesthetic and production processes and decisions. In the first chapter, Judicial Identification, O'Connor examines two documentary trial plays related to illegal forms of protest against the Vietnam War: Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), about Catholic activists (of whom Berrigan was one) burning draft cards, and Ron Sossi and Frank Condon's The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1979), about protesters who refused to exit public parks during the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago. In her reading, O'Connor focuses on the relationship between law and morality, and the tricky question of the extent to which laws are reflective of moral considerations at all. How can we assess the role of the legal system, she asks, in matters of political dissent? …

The Quixotic Template in Contemporary American Theater

The Quixotic Template in Contemporary American Theater

The Real and Its Outliers (review)

Reviewed by: The Real and Its Outliers Carol Martin (bio) Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama. By Jenn Stephenson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013; pp. 212. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater. By Jacqueline O’Connor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013; pp. 226. Testimonial Plays. Edited by Alison Forsyth. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; pp. 330. Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990–2010. By Liz Tomlin. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; pp. 226. In preparation for reading Jenn Stephenson’s Performing Autobiography, I decided to engage in high-risk, twenty-first-century ways of knowing by asking my much-maligned friend Siri: “What is autobiography?” Siri responded with a yellowing image of a cover of the first English edition of Benjamin Franklin’s 1793 autobiography The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D. “originally written by Himself,” followed by an entry from her equally libeled buddy Wikipedia (as of 30 September 2014): “An autobiography is a written account of the life of a person written by that person.”1 Wikipedia subheadings for “Autobiography” include “Origin of the Term,” “Autobiography through the Ages,” “Nature of Autobiography,” and “Fictional Autobiography.” Under “Origin of the Term,” there are some factoids that may be partly or entirely wrong, but are nevertheless interesting. The word autobiography, Wikipedia says, was first used derogatorily as a “hybrid [End Page 135] term” (auto/biography?) in a 1797 issue of the English periodical Monthly Review. In 1809, the Romantic poet Robert Southey used the term in its present sense: writing based on the writer’s memory and thus closely related to memoir. The Wikipedia entry also includes mention of autobiography being related to apologia, in the sense of self-justification. Of course, St. Augustine’s Confessions makes an appearance, as does Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s similarly titled Confession. Other luminary autobiographers mentioned in the Wikipedia entry via Siri include Charles Dickens, Henry Adams, John Stuart Mill, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and finally P. T. Barnum, a man after my own heart. Today, life narratives and narratives taken from life are proliferating at an unprecedented pace. They help candidates get elected, feature on daytime television shows, are used in self-help groups and group therapy, are often employed as an element of actor training, and appear as a literary form. Digital technology is partly responsible both for the proliferation of new forms of autobiography and for the blurring of fiction and nonfiction, as print-based, private journals and diaries yield to virtual versions featuring prose and pictures on a variety of open data platforms, such as Twitter, blog sites, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and, yes, Wikipedia. Social media provide the opportunity for reimaging, rewriting, and reimagining in the form of mash-ups, wikis, folksonomies, and tag clouds. Former definitions of autobiography, as well as documentary, do not account for what is going on now. The movement away from theatre about real events as a stable enactment of offstage worlds has generated new structures and styles, especially when media are employed. The lens of the authors is as much a part of the subject of the performance as the real-world stories that are told. This postmodernist turn toward complex, multivalent, and contradictory ways of seeing informs how we experience both reality and theatre and can include a critique of postmodernism itself. Some theatre of the real is connected, at least ideologically, to the historical avant-garde, while other takes the form of orthodox contemporary realism. The articulation of a defined and knowable truth in theatre of the real has given way to works like those of Rabih Mroué, which stage a radical uncertainty about understanding and the actual occurrence of events. The only consensus about the real is that the current fascination with it is in the context of abiding simulation and the similarities and differences between fiction and nonfiction in live performance. Even as the field has shifted from assertions of stable and knowable truth, some artists and theorists continue to make claims for experiential testimony. There is a move to sort theatre of the real into a precise nomenclature of kind and type and to parse its appearance into historical...

Race at This Stage: Shepherdstown 2014

Race at This Stage: Shepherdstown 2014 Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) Race at This Stage: Shepherdstown 2014 It has been two years since the last mention in these pages of the Contemporary American Theater Festival, held each July at Shepherdstown, West Virginia. But I had a chance to see it in 2013 as well, and again this year. This year broke from earlier patterns. The saying goes that if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. Shepherdstown had a mostly winning formula; I’m not sure the tampering was a good thing. [End Page 119] The underlying model has not changed: CATF stages five legitimate dramas with small casts by contemporary American playwrights. The casts are largely interlocked, so that there is in effect one small company presenting five shows. But this year CATF did a couple of things differently. In each of the two previous years, there had been one play by a big name (Neil LaBute in 2012, Sam Shepard in 2013) and four plays by lesser-known playwrights. And I thought in each of those years that the big-name plays were the runts of very strong litters. This year, there were no big names, and in a departure from former practice, of the five playwrights, three were African American, and in addition the “company” was predominantly African American. And, sad to say, there were only two real successes among the plays and two failures—although I should hasten to add that both success and failure here were color blind: black and white playwrights numbered equally at both ends of the quality range. The acting of course was superb, as always at Shepherdstown, regardless of race. Nonetheless, race was a constant undercurrent at this year’s edition, and one worth addressing explicitly. And let me start with what may be paradoxical, in light of the things I have just said: it was striking how unstriking the un-whiteness of the casts often was. There still exist certain irrational assumptions at the back of our theater-going minds, whether we like it or not. One is that the default setting for any character is white, and that if the part (and hence usually the actor) is anything else, there must be a reason for it, while no reason is required to make a character white. Yet in one of these plays, Charles Fuller’s One Night, a play about our military—an institution which seems to have attained the greatest color-blindness of any in our society—the script says (with justification) that the characters can be “of any color or ethnic group.” What dictated the racial composition of the Shepherdstown cast for this play, then, was the more race-specific casting in other plays coupled with the need to limit the size of the overall company. In consequence, despite the race of its author and that of most of its cast, the play simply was not about race, and could have been written or played by anyone. Instead, One Night was about the complex of issues surrounding rape in the military. This is a huge and important subject and we need dramas about it. And one of the many reasons it is an important subject is that it often brings lifelong consequences in its train. But these things must be handled carefully. The act of rape itself and the consequences of rape are inherently melodramatic, and a playwright must take care not to overplay them. Too much melodrama can distract attention from the subject to the treatment of the subject, and not in a good way. And that unfortunately appears to have happened in One Night. I remarked, when I wrote of CATF 2012, that it seemed to have been drilled into contemporary playwrights that the de rigeur form of exposition is the revelation of the characters’ secrets. That standard operating procedure is on full display here. [End Page 120] There is nothing wrong with making a secret at the outset the rape of Alicia G, the former servicewoman at the center of the play (Kaliswa Brewster), since rape is the kind of thing a victim might wish to conceal, even as her life...

Documentary trial plays in contemporary American theater

Documentary trial plays in contemporary American theater

Shepherdstown 2012 and the Rise of the Rolling Premiere

Shepherdstown 2012 and the Rise of the Rolling Premiere Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) Take a healthy organism, deny it the environment in which it grows, and it may seek a new environment and new ways of propagating. Serious American theater has negotiated that kind of change. Once upon a time, plays were nurtured to maturity in a system of tryout houses in places like New Haven and Philadelphia. But those showcases largely disappeared over the second half of the last century. Even for musicals, the tryout theater system has largely been replaced. This does not remotely mean that most new plays are, out of the box, "ready for their closeup," i.e., the Broadway or Off-Broadway production that garners a review in The New York Times, a sort of stamp of approval that then makes the play marketable for production in regional theater. Rather, new plays are apt to run through a more complex system of developmental venues that seems to be still evolving. One sort of venue that lends itself to this purpose is the theater festival (for example the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville each year). Another is regional theater itself, although regional theaters are more apt to be the places where new plays are transplanted, after having successfully blossomed in the nursery of New York. It is uncommon, however, for seedling plays to pop up just once in one of these locations and then go direct to New York. Rather, the tryout seems to have been replaced by what Ed Herendeen, Producing Director of the Shepherdstown (West Virginia) Contemporary American Theater Festival, described to me as a rolling world premiere. The rolling premiere differs from tryouts because the former involve a single creative team (playwright, actors, directors, tech people) honing a play, whereas the latter typically involves different productions of the same play at different places around the country, timed closely together. The creative teams may be collaborating to some degree, but the productions will remain separate. However, the playwright and the play benefit from being able to build on what works and what does not. Shepherdstown, which this last summer presented its twenty-second season over four July weeks, typifies the "rolling premiere" approach. Five new plays appeared there, all of major league caliber, unexceptionably acted and directed. This was the first production of Johnna Adams's Gidion's Knot, the second of Bob Clyman's The Exceptionals, the second American production of Neil LaBute's In a Forest, Dark and Deep (after a 2011 West End production), the second of Evan M. Wiener's Captors; and Bess Wohl's Barcelona, which premiered here, will go next to People's Light & Theatre in Malvern, Pa. It is likely that each play will end up in New York, but equally unlikely that most if any of them will go there directly. At Shepherdstown, the plays are timed so that a theatergoer can take them all in over one weekend, and experiencing the plays that way is highly recommended. As we shall see, a picture emerges, not only of the [End Page 118] plays chosen, but perhaps of the state of serious American playwriting at this point. The strongest of this year's entrants was Barcelona, which takes two characters from completely different worlds and frames of reference, united only by a hollow core in each of their lives. In little more than a stage hour, each has put a name to the other's problem, has challenged the other to surmount it, and has met the challenge received in return. At the end of this luminous play, the stage is, fittingly, flooded with light. The miracle that each has wrought in the other's life is tiny and deliberately underplayed, it is interesting, and it is believable. At the same time, it is quite possible to believe that by forcing the other to make an important alteration in plans, each has fundamentally saved the other. A playwright who can pull off something this wonderful deserves all the stagings I predict this play will receive. The two initially lost souls are Irene (Anne Marie Nest), a Colorado real estate agent who has come...

Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced (review)

Min Tian. Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Pp. xi + 298. +12 illus. $95.00. Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) is indisputably China's greatest jingu (Peking Opera) actor. His prolific fifty-year stage career and personal life have been well documented in autobiography, biographies, personal and professional correspondence, diaries, news clippings, and manuscripts, along with audio and video recordings. His life has been adapted on screen and stage. His former residence is now a memorial museum with extensive archives in photographs, calligraphy, collections, and playbills. Interestingly, he lived through both the old and the new China, transitioned from the relic of the Qing dynasty to the innovation of the Republic of China to the People's Republic of China, and survived the Boxer Rebellion, the Long March, and the Great Leap Forward. Mei is a cultural icon who has undergone significant cultural, political, social, and aesthetic changes in his times, while maintaining his supreme artistry as a female impersonator in Peking Opera. unrivaled fame and influence also can be attributed to the favorable geographical and social conditions of his era as well as the support from the political, literary, and artistic circles that made him into the rock star of his day. Nevertheless, Min Tian attests in Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage that Mei's art is subject to the and displacement of the perceived other which led to the various contests and constructions and reconstructions of theatrical forces (222). Specifically, international tours from 1919 to 1935 helped achieve international acclaim, cemented transnational relationships, and elevated the status of Peking Opera as Chinas national cultural heritage. A study in only five chapters, the first three essays focus on the placement of Mei Lanfang on the international stage with detailed descriptions of his tours to Japan, America, and the Soviet Union. In each of these three chapters, Tian lays out the historical background of how the Chinese prepared and managed the tours. He then juxtaposes them with the international reception and perception of performances. Tian's greatest strength is his ability to draw our attention to a balanced history with his comprehensive summary of conflicting views of tours. Chapter 1 offers possibly the most valuable insight, as it might well be the first in-depth examination of 1919 and 1924 visits to Japan written in English. Tian contests that the classical versus modern theater struggles in Japan contributed to success, and that visit indirectly helped Japan reposition its reform of classical theater. Specifically, Tian believes that art as nandan helped legitimize the continued standing of onnagata on the kabuki stage. In chapter 2, Tian argues that the success of 1930 tour to the United States was attributed mostly to the opportune conditions of the contemporary American theatre (such as Robert Edmond Jones's and Norman Bel Geddes' new stagecraft designs and Eugene O'Neil's expressionistic playwriting) (216). As the title suggests, chapter 3 presents the The Chinese Debate on Soviet Visit centering on how the ideological content of traditional Chinese theater is placed in relation to Soviet socialism. Tian asserts that the Soviet establishment was interested in using visit to strengthen Soviet-Sino political and cultural ties, and to provide its theater practitioners an opportunity to appropriate Chinese theater for its investigation (121). …

Historical dictionary of contemporary American theater, 1930-2010

Historical dictionary of contemporary American theater, 1930-2010

No safe spaces: re-casting race, ethnicity, and nationality in American theater

No Safe Spaces opens up a conversation beyond narrow polemics . . . Although cross-racial casting has been the topic of heated discussion, little sustained scholarship addresses both the historical precedents and theoretical dimensions. Pao illustrates the tensions and contradictions inherent not only in stage representations, but also in the performance of race in everyday life. A wonderful book whose potential readership goes well beyond theater and performance scholars.---Josephine Lee, University of MinnesotaNon-traditional casting, increasingly practiced in American theater, is both deeply connected to our country's racial self-image(s) and woefully under-theorized. Pao takes on the practice in its entirety to disentangle the various strands of this vitally important issue.---Karen Shimakawa, New York UniversityNo Safe Spaces looks at one of the most radical and enduring changes introduced during the Civil Rights era---multiracial and cross-racial casting practices in American theater. The move to cast Latino/a, African American, and Asian American actors in classic stage works by and about white Europeans and Americans is viewed as both social and political gesture and artistic innovation. Nontraditionally cast productions are shown to have participated in the national dialogue about race relations and ethnic identity and served as a source of renewed creativity for the staging of the canonical repertory.Multiracial casting is explored first through its history, then through its artistic, political, and pragmatic dimensions. Next, the book focuses on case studies from the dominant genres of contemporary American theater: classical tragedy and comedy, modern domestic drama, antirealist drama, and the Broadway musical, using a broad array of archival source materials to enhance and illuminate its arguments.Angela C. Pao is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.A volume in the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance

The War against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre (review)

The War against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre (review)

The Wooster Group Work Book (review)

Reviewed by: The Wooster Group Work Book Jennifer Parker-Starbuck Andrew Quick. The Wooster Group Work Book. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. 287, illustrated. $140.00 (Hb); $38.00 (Pb). Much like a Wooster Group production itself, The Wooster Group Work Book is made up of multiple layers, stories, and documents. It also explores the archive and the process of documenting performance, focusing on the Group's source materials for, voices from, and memories of five later productions. In his attempt to "locate and juxtapose the multiple languages (textual, physical, aural, technological, anecdotal, filmic, televisual and so forth) of the Wooster Group's practice and history" (11), Andrew Quick allows readers unprecedented access to the Group and its archive, resulting in a deeper historical understanding of their work. As only the second full-length monograph dedicated to the Wooster Group's work, The Wooster Group Work Book starts where David Savran's seminal Breaking the Rules leaves off, beginning with Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Anthony, working through Brace Up!, Fish Story, and House/Lights, and ending with To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre).1 The intentional omission of the Group's productions of O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Hairy Ape makes sense given the logic and space constraints of the book; these productions, often considered more straightforward, may have been identified as having a less obvious intertextuality. However, their exclusion may frustrate those theatregoers whose first exposure to the Group was provided by these popular productions. (Each received widespread critical notice: Hairy Ape was the Group's first production on Broadway, and Emperor Jones brought Kate Valk to the attention of a wider public, since critics so lauded her performance as the title character.) The book is divided into sections for each of the five productions, which are presented through a variety of archival modes. For example, the section on St. Anthony contains director's notes, scenarios, transcripts, story boards, an actor's performance score, and video stills, while that on Fish Story contains a full score, meticulously adapted by Group archivist Clay Hapaz, marking the various "texts" within the piece: the last pages of Chekhov's Three Sisters, directions for the dances inspired by a Japanese Geinin troupe documentary, sound effects, and video shots. The House/Lights section is the most actor-focused, providing Valk's script notes as well as detailed actor scores for each character, all invaluable resources for actors seeking to document devised performance. These scores reveal much about the actors' individual interpretations of movement: contrast, for example, Suzzy Roche's note to "make soft curve to bending shot at the green line" (189); Ari Fliakos's reminder to "mimic Roy's position at mike, do two 'horse shit shuffles"' (196); and, in Valk's hand-written score, the many edits and deletions of the palimpsest that records her process. The wide range of documentation throughout these five sections is one of the key successes of the [End Page 427] book, which serves not only to re-animate the productions for those who have seen them but also to point both to the complexities of documenting and to the multiplicity of layers captured through the Group's process. The inclusion of then assistant director Marianne Weems's Brace-Up rehearsal notebooks and performance score is not only an added bonus for scholars and fans of her company, the Builders Association, but it also demonstrates the Wooster Group's legacy in shaping contemporary American theatre. Additional documents from associates – such as Birdie! assistant director Richard Kimmel (Cannon Company and director of New York's The Box) and popular actress Frances McDormand – display the Group's wide web of connections. The formally typed rehearsal logs and stage-manager rehearsal reports in this final section also point out the increasing professionalization that characterized the company's development. The book's success is galvanized by the many interviews with LeCompte and Valk that Quick intersperses thematically. LeCompte foregrounds the Group's collaborative process, stating, "I wouldn't be doing all this if people didn't say 'I want to do this.' I would be drawing alone in a studio" (268); however, the interviews showcase...