Domestic Drama Research Articles

Literary Translations: From Novel to Film, from Australia to Europe

On 24th May, 2012, 1 sat down to talk with the producer Emile Sherman and script writer Louise Fox about the process of adapting Dead Europe to the big screen. Emile won the Academy Award for Best Picture for his production of The King's Speech (2010), and Louise has written extensively for radio, the theatre, and television, including being one of the key writers on Love My Way.The film departs substantially from the novel. While the novel switches between the present-day narrative of Greek-Australian Isaac Raftis' sojourn across Europe and that of his grandmother, Lucia, growing up in a small village in Greece in the early twentieth-century, the film discards Lucia's narrative completely in favour of Isaac's. This change is accompanied by a shift in focus from Isaac's mother in the novel to that of his father who, played by William Zappa, has a pivotal role in the film. In the novel, Isaac's return to his family village re-activates the ancient family curse placed upon his grandmother. But in the film, the family curse seems to be re-activated in the lead-up to Isaac's planned departure for Europe: we see his father fill his mouth with soil, then commit suicide by deliberately crashing his car. Isaac's trip to Europe thus inadvertently becomes a pilgrimage to put his father's ashes to rest in their ancestral Greek village. He feels a connection to his ancestral homeland despite having gimvn up on another continent, but the land itself infects him and soils him spiritually. Europe in this film carries within it fertility and potential for grcnvth, but also all the dirt, waste, and remnants of the past that his family wanted to bury and forget.LYNDA NG (LN): Emile, hmv do you pick your projects? You've produced several successful films that were adapted from literary texts (Disgrace, The King's Speech, and Dead Europe). What is it about a novel or-in the case of The King's Speech, a play-that tirtnslates into a good film?EMILE SEIERMAN (ES): Well, The King's Speech wasn't a produced play, so in a way it was more like a screenplay that I read. I'm conscious that novels are very different from films, and often very good novels-literary novels-don't make good films because films essentially need story. Novels work very well for the internal world but film is much more an external world. Often, in terms of what I'm interested in-it's something that has-it takes on something interesting-it takes on a big topic or it's something that takes on an interesting angle-something different. I'm often not drawn to normal drama books that are just stories of families or whatever. It needs to have some element that makes it different and that you can almost talk about and people go-oh, that's the thing about that. I think that can be important when you're trying to make a film that's going to have to cut through in a crowded film marketplace and you'll have to get it financed and you'll have to get audiences to want to go and see it. There'll always be a brilliant movie that's just a lovely domestic drama, but that's very hard to actually pull together. So, in the case of Dead Europe it felt like it was making a really quite bold statement about how the past is so pressed against the present, and what lies beneath the surface of contemporary Europe, and on the fringes of contemporary Europe. Disgrace, obviously, was making quite a big statement about race relations in the state of South Africa. But sometimes it might be an amazing actor or amazing director who is interested in a book. But I think that finding something that is a little bit extraordinary is the key for me.LN: Where did the idea for the project originate?ES: It was a synchronicitous originating process. I read the book-I actually read about it in-I subscribe to Booksellers and Publishers, that magazine. And I read about a review in it. I read the book and I thought, wow, this would be incredible, and I started negotiating the rights with Christos. …

Little Red Lies by Julie Johnston (review)

Reviewed by: Little Red Lies by Julie Johnston Elizabeth Bush Johnston, Julie Little Red Lies. Tundra, 2013 340p ISBN 978-1-77049-313-1 $19.95 E-book ISBN 978-1-77049-314-8 $10.99 R Gr. 7-9 Adolescence isn’t sitting well with Rachel, whose drama-queen propensities amplify her reaction to every perceived trouble or slight—and life isn’t particularly trouble-free in her family at the moment. Her beloved brother Jamie is just home from World War II, recovering well from his physical injuries, but he’s jobless, at odds with his girlfriend, and now diagnosed with leukemia. While the family turns the lion’s share of attention to Jamie, Rachel tries to establish herself in the school drama department, where she proves to be ineffectual as an actress. She does, however, catch the attention of the young teacher/director, Mr. Tomkins, who seems to know just which girls are in distress and preys on their vulnerabilities. Although this Canadian import is a work of historical fiction, readers who favor domestic drama will be the audience most appreciative of Rachel’s social missteps. Driven by her own over-emotional nature and casual attitude toward deceit, Rachel is often as shameless as the Little Red Lies crimson lipstick she sports to make herself appear sophisticated. Her mistakes have a way of making her sympathetic, though, and by the end, she’s a bit more self aware; her growth—and potential for further wising up—is credibly portrayed. Secondary characters are robustly drawn, and the unpredictability of the plotline should keep readers engrossed through each of Rachel’s cringe-worthy blunders. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

2013 Stellar Series

2013 Stellar Series Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Cooper, Michelle. A Brief History of Montmaray. Knopf, 2009. Gr. 7–10 (BCCB 11/09) Cooper, Michelle. The FitzOsbornes in Exile. Knopf, 2010. Gr. 7–10 (BCCB 4/11) Cooper, Michelle. The FitzOsbornes at War. Knopf, 2012. Gr. 7–10 (BCCB 11/12) Lynch, Chris. I Pledge Allegiance. Scholastic, 2011. Gr. 6–9 (BCCB 12/11) Lynch, Chris. Sharpshooter. Scholastic, 2012. Gr. 6–9 (BCCB 5/12) Lynch, Chris. Freefire Zone. Scholastic, 2012. Gr. 6–9 (BCCB 12/12) Lynch, Chris. Casualties of War. Scholastic, 2013. Gr. 6–9 (BCCB 1/13) Marchetta, Melina. Finnikin of the Rock. Candlewick, 2010. Gr. 9 up (BCCB 3/10) Marchetta, Melina. Froi of the Exiles. Candlewick, 2012. Gr. 9 up (BCCB 5/11) Marchetta, Melina. Quintana of Charyn. Cancdlewick, 2013. Gr. 9 up (BCCB 4/13) We’re pleased this month to bring to print our annual Stellar Series list, a previously online-only feature that highlights notable series. While the multiple-volume boom is certainly popular with readers, it has presented a unique challenge to reviewers. The individual books that make up a series are parts of a greater whole, often relying on the previous and subsequent installments to inform their plot, character development, themes, etc., yet such literary achievements do not translate easily into an individual volume’s inclusion in an annual best-of-the-year list. Our Stellar Series list recognizes those books that collectively achieve the level of excellence that our Blue Ribbons salutes in individual titles. The series listed here have at least three volumes, the most recent of which has been published in the last twelve months. While some of these series are a completed trilogy, tetralogy, etc., others may not have concluded, but their existing volumes nonetheless constitute a series achievement worth recognizing. Political conflict seems to be the theme of this year’s group, as it includes two works of historical fiction set during war, one a captivating portrait of a family of exiled royals during World War II, the other a tightly focused look at four teens changed forever by their service in the Vietnam War. The battle between two fictional lands in our third series is no less powerful, although it is especially suited for those readers who like their fantasies epic and their heroes flawed. Just in time for the lazy days of summer, this list gives readers plenty to keep them entertained and absorbed as they while away those long, sunny afternoons. The Montmaray Journals Narrator Princess Sophie relays her family’s struggles as they try to hold on to their tiny, island nation during World War II through Nazi attacks, political exile, and wartime losses. Blending political intrigue and domestic drama, Cooper offers readers an eminently readable slice of historical fiction with rich characterizations and authentic details that convey the despair, boredom, guilt and hope of living through a war. [End Page 489] Vietnam Veteran chronicler of the American guy experience, Lynch here examines the profound and life-changing experiences four best friends have when they pledge to serve in the Vietnam War together. Each book focuses on one of the four: Morris chooses the Navy; Rudi, the eldest, is called up and joins the Marines; Ivan, always the most belligerent, can hardly wait to get to the Army recruiter; Beck, the brainiac, withstands his family’s disappointment as he abandons his college plans and joins the Air Force. Readers are forced into the thick of the action, but it’s the devastating emotional impact and the realistic portrayal of a friendship changed forever that will stick with readers long after the last shot is fired. The Lumatere Chronicles This stunning and epic series follows the conflict between Lumatere and Charyn, two fictional lands trapped under two horrific curses, brought on by the sins of their former rulers. Australian author Marchetta seamlessly weaves together the personal and the political, exploring the larger societal implications of her characters’ actions while keeping a tight focus on their emotional lives. The obstacles in their relationships mirror the tensions built by prejudices and ignorance throughout their lands, and the setbacks they experience as they work toward...

Domestic Dramas

Mexican women’s working and romantic lives were frequent subject matter in early-twentieth-century Mexican American music. Surprisingly, this trend is rendered nearly invisible by the corpus of scholarly work that focuses on the male-centered “heroic corrido,” particularly the class and race conflicts represented in that “masculine” genre. This interdisciplinary analysis reveals that the music of what can be called “domestic drama”—popular Mexican American folksongs that comment on women, work, and marriage—offers rich evidence of how Mexican communities debated immigrant women’s increased personal freedoms in the United States. Beneath the songwriters’ often humorous language and playful melodies lies tremendous anxiety about women’s sexuality and growing visibility in the larger Mexican American community. This essay explores the challenges of using the music of domestic drama to understand immigrant women’s experiences from the 1920s to the 1950s. It demonstrates that lyrics centering on romance and cultural assimilation can be read politically as metaphors for Mexican communities’ economic concerns.

Fools for Love

Fools for Love Ivan Rodden (bio) Married but Looking. Daniel S. Libman. Livingston Press. http://www.livingstonpress.uwa.edu. 222 pages; cloth, $27; paper, $16.95. In Daniel S. Libman's collection Married but Looking, the recognition of desire in oneself is a powerful thing. When Boze from the story "Best Man" realizes that Elizabeth, another guest at the wedding, is coming on to him, he concocts a fantasy that requires her to drive home with him through the fog-covered, winding roads of Pennsylvania. Like many of the characters in the book, Boze stumbles upon his desire and has no emotional or linguistic tools capable of encapsulating, incorporating, or controlling it. Boze is traveling in the dark here. The stories in this collection are of marriages and couplings gone wrong. While having something in common with the suburban domestic drama, Libman focuses on the frustration of desire and the dislocation and confusion it causes. The stories are, for the most part, grounded in realism but include a macabre whimsy that often comes out of nowhere. The structure reflects the subject well. Although hopeful, the characters are incapable of parsing and controlling their desires and it often leads them careening wildly into danger, whether physical, emotional, or fantastic. Often, this same emotional and intellectual movement happens in the reader. We are unsure where the narrative will move next. Several of the stories make you think you are in familiar territory until the story dips and turns and he's taken you somewhere you never predicted. In the most pleasurable way, the stories are unexpected but inevitable. Libman's characters are masters at deflected responsibility, allowing themselves to be caught in situations that are plausibly not of their making. Or at least they try to master this. The problem is that the insight and understanding the characters think they have is often based, as is Boze's impression of Elizabeth, on fantasy. Fantasy plays a large part in the collection. Many characters disengage from the one they are with to emotionally or intellectually live in a (mostly) sexual alternative that grants them the power and engagement they think they deserve. Libman masterfully and playfully uses epiphany to trip up those coddled fantasies. In "Tantric Butterfly," Todd finds himself snowed in with his wife, three daughters, and the Internet prostitute, Megan, he's fixated on. After his wife falls asleep, Todd sneaks downstairs to assert or engage or enact something. Anything to relieve his frustration. ("You're all over the place, dude," Megan points out.) Megan challenges Todd to answer the "call from the universe" and reach his epiphanic moment. However, the fantasy and the epiphany are at odds, and Todd ends up cold and alone, literally. Characters like the husband in "Tandem" and Gloria in "New Pueblo, New Mexico" claim deep understanding as their own too, only to be disappointed when realization trumps epiphany. Libman doesn't present fantasy as sublimated desire so much as the inability to make a choice. In "Lemons," Miller, a corporate accountant for a fast food seafood chain, faces a long line of personal surrenders that have led him to a lonely and defeated place. When a young coworker serendipitously presents herself in his hotel room, he has the opportunity to fulfill his sexual appetite and assert his personhood. At first, the "little ping—a sexual charge that he knew would amount to nothing" gives Miller the courage to verbalize his desire. When the coworker responds, removing her dress and offering herself to him, Miller withdraws to his familiar place. "The ping was gone, replaced by fear pecking like a little bird at the lining of his stomach. This was another feeling he was comfortable with." Unable to cope with the reality of his desire, Miller rejects it because he realizes that what he desires could be a substitute for what he really wants, but could also be far scarier than the familiar. "Lemons" is also a good example of the restraint that Libman shows in populating his book with complicated and interesting people. These are not outsized personalities of hyper-realized reality television but carefully observed and, occasionally, quirky people you pass on the street...

Josephus on Herod’s Domestic Intrigue in the Jewish War

Abstract This article argues that women and domestic intrigue are prominent within the Herod narrative in Josephus’ Jewish War for a specific rhetorical reason. While the first half of the narrative presents the famous king in encomiastic terms, using him to illustrate Josephus’ contention that Jews generally were content to remain loyal to Rome, the second half of the account subtly presents a rather different thesis. Attention to domestic drama allowed Josephus to suggest that Herod was a man who was unable to control either his own emotions or his turbulent family, and so was unfit to rule. Ultimately for Josephus, the ideal constituency for Judaea is not monarchy (as represented by Herod) but the theocratic reign of priests.

Ibsen's Unexpected Triumph: Peer Gynt at the Seattle Repertory Playhouse

Ibsen's Unexpected Triumph:Peer Gynt at the Seattle Repertory Playhouse Victor Holtcamp (bio) One woman came a thousand miles from San Francisco just to see it. They came from all classes and walks of life—fishermen from up north, lumberjacks from the Grays Harbor Region. I recall seeing a day laborer, who had been working in the rain all day repairing the cartracks in front of the theatre, go to the box office of The Playhouse at quitting time to buy a pair of seats. The same people came twice, some three, four and more times to see it. Albert Ottenheimer, "Seattle's 'Peer Gynt,'" June 1941 It is commonplace to consider Henrik Ibsen as one of the fathers of modern drama. Realistic pieces like A Doll's House and Ghosts practically defined the plays of the art theatre movement and linked him to box-set realism. Their subsequent widespread inclusion in dramatic literature anthologies further paints Ibsen as the playwright of the middle-class domestic drama. But before Nora and Torvald, Ibsen had written theatre pieces more closely akin to epic poetry. Brand (1866) tells the story—in verse—of a man of God who brooks no compromise from himself or others, and who dies, onstage, being crushed by an avalanche. Theatrically, Peer Gynt is even more challenging. Published in 1867 but not receiving its first production until nine years later, Peer clocks in, uncut, at five acts and thirty-eight scenes. It managed to put even Ibsen himself to sleep during an unedited performance of it in honor of his birthday. "I shall be satisfied," he is reported to have said, "as long as the piece is reduced to a proper length. Not to do this would spoil everything."1 Peer Gynt is enormous, covering the picaresque wanderings of its titular hero as he runs from his village in the Norwegian hills, woos the daughter of the Troll King, sails the world as a slave [End Page 165] trader and merchant, meets madmen and fools, comes face to face with his own mortality, and returns home as an old man to the woman he has always loved and who has always loved him. Like Goethe's Faust (one of Ibsen's inspirations), Peer Gynt focuses on a strong central character, addresses weighty issues of morality and identity, and blends the natural and the supernatural in a theology that is anything but orthodox.2 Both Peer and Faust held (and continue to hold) fascination and dread for theatre producers. As such, despite Ibsen's own significant popularity among the theatre cognoscenti of the early twentieth century, it did not have much of a life outside of Norway, and even there only received a major production once every ten years.3 Vast in scope, difficult in staging, demanding in technical requirements, poetic in timbre, and lengthy in performance, Peer Gynt was enough to daunt even the most enthusiastic of theatre-makers. Infrequent might be too weak a word for the production history of Peer, which had somewhere between four and six U.S. productions prior to 1930, including a production by the Santa Barbara Community Players in the late 1920s and a rumored staging by a "Norwegian Workingman's Society" in Seattle sometime between 1890 and 1893.4 Yet it is Peer Gynt that Albert Ottenheimer describes in the above epigraph as one of the most popular shows he had ever been a part of. Peer Gynt was not only a landmark production for the Seattle Repertory Playhouse in the 1930s but also one of their biggest moneymakers, responsible, according to one account, for saving the fledgling theatre company from bankruptcy and dissolution.5 Originally mounted in 1931, the play would be revived four times over the course of the next decade, earning notices in national publications as it enticed locals and visitors alike. Peer Gynt became one of the longest-running shows in Seattle until after World War II, seen by over twelve thousand people in its initial nearly three-month run; it had a rare combination of theatrical artistry and popular appeal, earning lauds in multiple papers and rave reviews in four languages. How did it happen...

Mourning for Papa. A Story of a Syrian-Jewish Family in Mexico (review)

Reviewed by: Mourning for Papa. A Story of a Syrian-Jewish Family in Mexico Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez Jacobo Sefamí . Mourning for Papa. A Story of a Syrian-Jewish Family in Mexico. Mountain View, CA: Floricanto Press, 2010. Pp. 239. Paper $26.98. Softcover. $26.98. ISBN: 9781888205299. Not often does one get invited into the sometimes uproarious, other times uncomfortable world of another's painfully personal family experiences. But Jacobo Sefamí's Mourning for Papa, skillfully translated from the Spanish by Kay S. García, does just this. In its absorbing 239 pages, the novel invites readers into a complicated web of woes. A family is torn by the loss of its affable patriarch, and individual family members and friends struggle with the clash of tradition and modernity regarding everything from how to bathe, eat, and pray. Despite the gravity of its context, and the intense weeklong shiva period that delimits the plot's timeframe in which the book's actions take place (which is actually prolonged and made worse because the patriarch's death occurs exactly on the eve of the Jewish New Year, and ends by Yom Kippur), Mourning for Papa dispels any possible doubt one might have for its ability to thoroughly humanize and even find humor in what are very quickly revealed to be convoluted and simultaneously hilarious and poignant family tensions. It contains discussions about conflicted marriage arrangements, failed joint family business ventures, obliged good behavior with disliked relatives, and even 'haraam' [religiously prohibited] sexual liaisons. Fleeting flashbacks, exacerbated family discord, and rehashed failures and triumphs often punctuate what begins as a very personal perspective on what should be a somber week of reflection and mourning. Such domestic drama reflects how large family gatherings, celebratory or mournful, often bring out the many layers of complexity that families often ignore in favor of socially acceptable outward appearances. Such is the world of indecision and confusion to which Sefamí introduces us. Cleverly placed headers at the beginning of each chapter remind us of the multiple worlds that either collide or coexist in his novel. Each one begins with the day's date from the Jewish calendar, the Western calendar, and [End Page 131] special information and instructions meant for the immediate family of the deceased. As readers advance through the days, they are challenged by the restrictions placed upon the bereaved family members and other mourners—as if they were mourners themselves. Readers can grieve, but also enjoy the all- too descriptive flashbacks that effortlessly connect past and present. However, the novel also successfully introduces us to the world of Mexico City's Syrian Jewish population, a place that will no doubt be rather unfamiliar to at least some percentage of its readers. By virtue of this invitation, we are quickly plunged into a context that at once challenges many common perceptions about Jews, Hispanic or not. It may be intriguing enough for many readers to 'discover' a world of Sephardic Jews in Mexico, but then to additionally lead them to realize that these are Spanish- and Arabic-speaking Jews from Syria, or their first- and second-generation descendants, is yet another edifying displacement the readers must endure. They are then able to immerse themselves in a place impregnated with the sound of Arabic blessings and terms of endearment, the dulcit tones of Arabic music, the pungent smell of culinary delicacies that we learn are as 'Jewish' to these children of Abraham as gefilte fish, blintzes, and bagels to their Ashkenazi brethren. Furthermore, the members of the Galante family, the principal mourners, are as comfortable eating kibbe, pita bread and hummus, as they are savoring chilaquiles, roscas, and tacos. Both cuisines 'nourish' the Galante family; both represent them as Syrian-Jewish-Mexicans. Don Simón Galante, the deceased, has left behind a large family: a beleaguered wife, Rebeca, seven sons, their past and present spouses, their children, and myriad aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins-in-law, religious acquaintances, non-Jewish friends ex-girlfriends, and even a number of paid and unsolicited mourners. Missing from this list of the living is Raquel, the Galantes' little girl who was killed tragically in a pedestrian accident while in...

The Trinity River Plays (review)

Reviewed by: The Trinity River Plays Colleen Daniher The Trinity River Plays. By Regina Taylor. Directed by Ethan McSweeny. Dallas Theater Center and Goodman Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Chicago. 16 January 2011. The search for rootedness links the three plays that comprise Regina Taylor's The Trinity River Plays: Jarfly, Rain, and Ghoststory. Centered on the psychic and physical separation from and eventual return of Iris Spears to her family, Taylor's trilogy uses roots as a central metaphor to understand the cyclical yet sustaining role that family plays in the life of an individual. At a combined running time of over three hours, Taylor's digging spreads itself wide, but perhaps not deep enough. And yet, in its refusal to conceptualize "roots" beyond the myopic world of the Spears family unit, the trilogy speaks to a political present that is increasingly unwilling to address race as a framework that continues to structure everyday life, including the everyday experience of family relations. Set in the declining years of the civil rights and Black Power movements and in the long shadow of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's pathologizing condemnation of the black family in 1965, the Click for larger view View full resolution Karen Aldridge (Iris) in The Trinity River Plays. (Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux.) [End Page 642] Click for larger view View full resolution Karen Aldridge (Iris), Jacqueline Williams (Daisy), Jefferson A. Russell (Ray Earl), and Christiana Clark (Jasmine) in The Trinity River Plays. (Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux.) Goodman production staged a strange elision of race politics, even as it took the black matriarchal family as its central focus. What resulted was a production caught between performing a multigenerational story of black women's struggle and continued survival and insisting that this story transcend race. As staged by director Ethan McSweeny, this latest offering from Taylor, one of the nation's leading African American playwrights and performers, thus provoked critical reflection on the influence of colorblind thinking on contemporary African American theatre. The three plays follow Iris (Karen Aldridge) for seventeen years, from the morning of her seventeenth birthday in 1978 (Jarfly) to her return visit home to Oak Cliff, Dallas in 1995 (Rain). Upon the discovery of her mother Rose's diagnosis of terminal ovarian cancer, Iris's visit turns into an extended stay that carries over into the aftermath of her mother's passing (Ghoststory). Two major occurrences punctuate the extended narrative as it unfolds over the three plays: the rape of Iris by her uncle Ray Earl on her seventeenth birthday in Jarfly, and the aforementioned diagnosis of Iris's mother with advanced-stage ovarian cancer seventeen years later in Rain. The last play in the trilogy, Ghoststory, sees Iris reconcile with her ex-husband Frank, as well as come to terms with her mother's death with the help of her Aunt Daisy and cousin Jasmine. The seventeen-year chronology of the plays reflects the seventeen-year lifespan of the cicada, or jarfly, whose symbolic death and rebirth is mapped onto the "bug-eyed" Iris. Guided by Taylor's script, the Goodman production exhibited the realist aesthetics of the self-contained domestic drama; the set design by Todd Rosenthal was meticulously detailed, from the downstage garden in which Iris and Rose actually dig up soil, to the unanswered whistling kettle that signaled the decline of Iris's mother. This realism highlighted the almost tyrannical ordinariness with which Taylor and McSweeny imbued the Spears family. As necessitated by the physical environment, Aunt Daisy (Jacqueline Williams) was forever cooking or washing in the kitchen, while Rose (Penny Johnson Jerald) seemed to spend her days playing the piano and gardening. While the sustained focus on domestic rituals effectively established the Spears family as one "like any other," the relentlessness of the generic quotidian threatened to overshadow what was most compelling about the Goodman production—namely, the particular ways in which race informed the Spears family's relations and traumas. Indeed, the most moving moments of the evening occurred when the production engaged the cultural [End Page 643] specificity of its themes, as, for example, when the gospel rounds punctuating the scenic transitions sounded the bond among Iris, her mother, her cousin, and...

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

Zooming In, Gazing Back: Don Giovanni on Television

Few opera productions look as good on television as the 2006 Don Giovanni directed for the Netherlands Opera by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, and for television by Misjel Vermeiren.1 With the stage divided into modestly sized bedrooms, the big-stage/small-screen problem of televised opera disappears, and the bedrooms themselves, decorated à la 1960s suburbia, look manifestly appropriate in a medium famous for middle-class domestic drama (fig. 1). So does the plot, transformed into a clash between the sexual revolution (a.k.a. Don Giovanni) and the nuclear family (everyone else) and played out like a soap opera with minimal action and a surfeit of neuroses, notably repression, which afflicts even the hero. Foes of Regietheater will balk—audiences in Amsterdam booed2—but the production fits the medium to a tee. In a world of psychologized agents and familial dysfunction, the very world of television drama itself, all the zooms and cuts and close-ups that so often attract criticism in televised opera look entirely natural.

Modernist Indexicality: The Language of Gender, Race, and Domesticity in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism

By focusing on what Michael Silverstein calls nonreferential indexicality—those “features of speech independent of any referential speech event” that point to the “sociological relations of personae in the speech situation” and “accomplish socially constituted ends”—this essay challenges received understandings of the linguistic purchase of modernist innovation. The author examines Hebrew and Yiddish modernist literary texts by Devorah Baron and Dovid Bergelson that employ nonreferential indexicality in order to chart the ruptures in two textual communities, in two particular historical and literary moments when gender norms, alongside racial and ethnic identities, underwent abrupt and vexed change. In these stories, scenes of domestic drama are transformed into modernist narratives of social and cultural transformation. The article contends that a pragmatic linguistic approach to literary texts illuminates how minor language modernist writing contains a self-awareness that not only addresses a cosmopolitan audience but also preserves the contingent and shifting parameters of local linguistic communities.

The Eco Show

In Daniel Brooks' complex and nuanced play, ecological crisis finds expression in the daily struggles of a peculiar yet familiar household. The performance depicts domestic drama at the tipping point.

The Eco Show

In Daniel Brooks' complex and nuanced play, ecological crisis finds expression in the daily struggles of a peculiar yet familiar household. The performance depicts domestic drama at the tipping point.

Victor Hugo's Notre‐Dame de Paris on the Nineteenth‐Century London Stage

Victor Hugo's Notre‐Dame de Paris (1831) was translated for English readers as The Hunchback of Notre‐Dame in 1833. One year later, Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Frollo, and the rest of Hugo's cast of characters appeared in London theaters. This article is the first to discuss three nineteenth‐century English stage adaptations of Hugo's novel: two adaptations penned by dramatist Edward Fitzball – Esmeralda; or, The Deformed of Notre Dame (1834) and Quasimodo; or, The Gipsey Girl of Notre Dame (1836) – as well as Andrew Halliday's Notre‐Dame; or, The Gypsey Girl of Paris (1871). These adaptations rewrote Hugo's historical romance into domestic dramas that eschewed the novel's tragic ending in favor of a happy ending. They also erased Hugo's political commentary and social critiques from the drama. Overall, the essay demonstrates that although these changes kept Hugo's story in mass circulation for almost two centuries, they have done so at the expense of the novel's republican politics and social commentary.

May in January's Tree: Genealogical Configuration in the <i>Merchant's Tale</i>

May in January's Tree:Genealogical Configuration in the Merchant's Tale Alcuin Blamires The episode of copulation between May and Damyan in a fruit tree at the end of the Merchant's Tale has by no means been neglected by critics, though they have often been reduced to coyness in writing of it. For instance, they soften the brazenness of sex in a tree with periphrases, writing obliquely of "arboreal activity" and "arboreal exploits."1 Other beguiling euphemisms in print include "treetop tryst" and "coitus al fresco."2 Indeed, something about the episode encourages conspicuous academic witticism—as in the self-conscious doubles entendres in the titles of a brace of articles in the early 1970s. The first (by Emerson Brown, Jr.) insinuated that Damyan does not have time to reach ejaculation with May (or rather, to "bring his arboreal activity with May to a completely satisfactory conclusion"). The alleged coitus interruptus appears in Brown's title under the punning guise of "Hortus Inconclusus." A response to Brown by Peter Beidler, not to be outdone, resolutely reinstates what Beidler's own article title calls "The Climax in the Merchant's Tale."3 Perhaps Chaucer may be said to have started all this by having May refer to her coupling with Damyan as a "strugle with a man upon a tree" (IV 2374).4 [End Page 106] One might well feel that enough has been written in Chaucer criticism about that "struggle," and about symbolic trees and sexual "fruition" in the tale.5 Yet I believe there is still room to consider an aspect of the episode that has, perhaps, been staring us in the face during several decades of discussion, without being acknowledged. Specifically, pondering January's pear tree as a site for sexual coupling, should we be thinking also of a genealogical tree? And if so, how might we reflect on the genealogical space that Damyan and May appropriate when they climb into it? To substantiate the suggestion that the horizon of expectation for the episode should include the concept of the family tree, it might be helpful briefly to recall salient allusions to that concept in medieval literature. Two examples should suffice. One is William Langland's panoptic idea of a tree that is simultaneously many kinds of tree, in Piers Plowman B, Passus 16. It is a fruit tree, variously pear or apple; it is the tree of knowledge in Eden; and a tree growing in the human heart whose fruit is charity, protected from the biting winds of the devil's attack by the power of the Trinity. Yet it is also a tree of three sexual options for humanity—marriage, continent widowhood, and virginity.6 When the dreamer asks to taste an apple and Piers shakes the tree, what rains down (in one of Langland's boldly imaginative transitions) is nothing less than a mass genealogy of pre-Redemption humanity, a veritable "hoard" of human fruit for the devil to gather up, from Adam to Abraham to Samuel to John the Baptist.7 The family tree of the whole of humankind under the Old Law is, as it were, systematically stripped of offspring, pending the Crucifixion. Elsewhere, family tree symbolism enters into a narrative of domestic drama that takes us particularly close to the specific genealogical imagination deployed by Chaucer. I am thinking of the twelfth-century lai of Le Fresne by Marie de France, a short narrative that subsequently became available in a Middle English rendering. Here the plot hinges on a noblewoman's envious [End Page 107] calumniation of a neighbor who has borne twin sons. Alleging that a twin birth implies impregnation by two men, the noblewoman thereby tries to cast doubt on the pedigree of the mother's boys. This is the trigger for a story intensely focused on legitimate family pedigree. When the calumniator goes on to bear twin girls herself, she feels potentially trapped in self-defamation. (Her situation is the worse, perhaps, in that she tacitly anticipates a social stigma for producing double daughters as against the more desirable objective of male offspring.8) One infant girl is therefore removed and abandoned close to an abbey, though...

Kipps, Belsey, and Jegede: Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty

Kipps, Belsey, and JegedeCosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty Kanika Batra (bio) Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith's first novel White Teeth.1 The status of Smith's fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of On Beauty, encourages an analysis of disciplinarity and institutionalization. Recent criticism has directed attention to Smith's portrayal of the American academy in passing. In a review of Elaine Showalter's Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Alan McKenzie points to "complacency both in the novels and campuses" that Showalter examines and concludes by commenting on Smith's On Beauty as a "strange" and "wonderful" novel which he is "not certain" would have benefitted from having been run through the "very fine mill" of Showalter's critical exegesis (759). Examining a set of novels that he calls "academic satires," Charles Green briefly discusses On Beauty as Smith's attempt to bridge "a deeply emotional domestic drama with the public performances of the so-called culture wars" (183). Green critiques the novel's "limp" treatment of the culture wars but commends "how Smith successfully treats race" (185). Kathleen Wall reads Smith's On Beauty and Ian McEwan's Saturday through a theoretical framework derived from Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, which provides the title to the novel. Wall's reading is a curiously apolitical treatment of Smith's trenchant critique of racial and economic disparities. Taking my cue from these critical opinions, I offer a reading of Smith's representation of blackness in its institutional, social, and aesthetic dimensions. Marking a shift from White Teeth, which documented multicultural Britain through Archie Jones's and Samad Iqbal's British-Jamaican and British-South Asian families, On Beauty is set largely in America, though it briefly references England as well. Presenting the lives of two families, the Kippses and the Belseys, in the college town of Wellington, the novel foregrounds the transnational dimensions of the black diaspora that is the subject of Black Studies as an academic discipline. Smith details a year in the life of Howard Belsey, English by birth, American by residence, art historian by profession, and liberal multicultural by choice. Howard's marriage to Kiki, his "American wife," and his life in the safe environs of Wellington comprises Smith's narrative. This marriage between an Englishman and an African American woman, and the lives of their children, Jerome, Zora, and Levi, are the lens of Smith's ironical explorations of race, class, and gender relations in idyllic Wellington. The idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Sir Monty Kipps, neo-conservative Trinidadian British art historian, housed in the Black Studies Department. The Department [End Page 1079] is home to Howard's closest friend, Nigerian émigré Erskine Jegede, Soyinka Professor of African Literature and Assistant Director of Black Studies, previously a fellow student with Sir Monty at Oxford. The vagueness of Sir Monty's job profile at Wellington or the nature of his duties at Black Studies is in contrast to the neo-conservative anti-affirmative ideas he propounds. Douglas Davidson and Frederick Weaver, writing in the Journal of Black Studies in 1985, wrote that "a central education mission of Black Studies at White institutions is to enable students to see that the rest of the curriculum is White Studies" (344). This utopian hope is unfulfilled at Wellington; in addition, the author's deliberate lack of explanation of Sir Monty's duties as a Visiting Professor as well as Erskine's position indicate that both serve as token additions to the cultural diversity in the Wellington faculty and course offerings. Such tokenism casts doubt—as the author presumably intends—on the very nature and purpose of Black Studies at Wellington. While analyzing Smith's representation of Black Studies it is useful to consider the history of the discipline. Most accounts emphasize that black identity politics and institutional racism were factors contributing to demands for curricular revisions (Hall; Huggins). This article...

Dido, Queen of Carthage (review)

Reviewed by: Dido, Queen of Carthage Peter Kirwan Dido, Queen of Carthage Presented by the Royal National Theatre, at the Cottlesloe Theatre, London. March 24–June 2, 2009. Directed by James MacDonald. Associate Director Cordelia Monsey. Set designed by Tobias Hoheisel. Costume by Moritz Junge. Lighting by Adam Silverman. Music by Orlando Gough. Sound by Christopher Shutt. With Anastasia Hille (Dido), Mark Bonnar (Aeneas), Siobhan Redmond (Venus), Susan Engel (Juno, Nurse), Stephen Kennedy (Achates), Obi Abili (Iarbus), Siân Brooke (Anna), Alan David (Jupiter, Lioneus), Kyle McPhail (Mercury, Hermes), Ryan Sampson (Gaynmede, Sergestus), Garry Carr (Cloanthus), Jake Arditti (Singer, Lord), Ceallach Spellman/Theo Stevenson (Cupid), and Freddie Hill/Thomas Patten (Ascanius). What is the responsibility of a director to a rarely performed play? For the critics who savaged Tim Carroll's 2003 resurrection of Dido, Queen of Carthage for Shakespeare's Globe, the production's failing was in not providing a straight and sympathetic reading that would have allowed Marlowe's words to be tested fairly on the twenty-first-century stage. Instead, Carroll's high-concept, playground-set production caused considerable anxiety: critics were terrified that their only opportunity to [End Page 656] experience the play had been wasted by a production that was unrepresentative of Marlowe's conception of the play. The mounting of a second major revival only six years later on the same bank of the Thames was unanticipated, and James MacDonald's production would have come as a relief to those critics more concerned with a conservative, respectful reading than Carroll's playful approach. Reverent to the text and to the play's origins, this Dido expertly (and perhaps deliberately) delivered the production that critics had wanted the Globe's to be. This production largely eschewed gimmickry, trusting Marlowe's text to hold the audience's attention. This was most obvious in Aeneas's long recounting of the fall of Troy. Sat among the rest of the company on cushions at a low banqueting table, his lament for home was delivered simply, holding both the on- and off-stage audiences in rapt silence with the power of his words. By allowing actors to explore the dignity and pathos of the verse, the production successfully evoked the story's epic quality, its classical weight and significance. While the epic was implied in verse, however, this production's primary triumph was in unearthing the domestic drama at the play's core. In Dido and Aeneas, Anastasia Hille and Mark Bonnar played out the slow breakdown of a mature relationship, transforming the classical icons into contemporary lovers whose differing priorities eventually destroyed even the strongest emotional connection. Following Cupid's intervention, Hille's Dido was fixated exclusively on Aeneas whenever they shared the stage. Increasingly, though, Aeneas's eyes were drawn to a point in the far distance, his mind and attention consumed by destiny and the work given to him by the gods. This simple difference in focus lent great pathos to Dido's situation, and her actions became a desperate plea for his attention and love to which he barely responded. These diverging priorities were occasioned, of course, by the gods. Jupiter's palace, in accordance with his status, was on a raised level high above the main stage, a luxurious and colorful world with deep cushions and sofas on which the fat, balding god dandled Ganymede. From this privileged and detached position, decisions were made which took no account of the concerns of individual humans. Dido, on her first appearance, was a regal and formal figure, entering in full headdress and finery to greet the newcomers. By contrast, the ragged Aeneas was naturally inclined towards the domestic, ready to fall in love with Dido and make a home in Carthage. The meddling of the gods, however, imposed restrictive social conventions on the pair. [End Page 657] Aeneas became restless and mobile, but the most painful change was that on Dido. Her regal duties forgotten, her one obsession became the man in her life, without whom she struggled to define herself. In love she became whiny and irrational, forced to conform to external conceptions of how she should act, but that were unnatural and damaging in...

Echoes of Strindberg in Contemporary Chile

Once in a while, an obscure play has its moment: a time when, after languishing in libraries and on university syllabi, it makes an unlikely reappearance and touches a cultural nerve. Santiago, Chile?a noisy, smoggy city sandwiched between the towering Andes and the sea?might seem like a less-than-obvious place to stage August Strindberg's post-inferno chamber plays of the early-twentieth century. And The Pelican, a domestic drama with apocalyptic overtones, is certainly a less-than-obvious selection from his works. But in July 2008, a century after it was written and half way across the world from Strindberg's native Sweden, two productions?one an adaptation of The Pelican, the other a new play on similar themes?remade that play as an allegory for cultural forces long at work in Chilean society, revealing historical shifts and condensing social fears.

Rural and Suburban Adaptations for the 21st Century Home: Seven Desires for an Uncertain Future

In 'The Place of Houses', Charles Moore, Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon wrote: 'Rooms are empty stages for human drama-ritual and improvisation. Nowadays, ritual is not as important as improvisation, therefore shapes become more casual. Spanning spaces grows easier. Now space costs more, we require a room to be versatile in its functions.' Rapidly-changing contemporary family and social needs and aspirations are placing considerable demands on existing developer-built residential fabric from the 19th and 20th century. While on the one hand, some building stock may boast strong existing external character yet suffer from rigid internal arrangements, others may display spectacular architectural mediocrity but be located on sites of high quality. Most will perform poorly environmentally on any recent sustainability criteria. Spatial, social and energy issues all impact the 'host' structure in ascertaining its potential to be the stage set for a new series of domestic dramas in the 21st century. Individual clients have often informed attitudes to what will be their single biggest investment. Through a series of built projects, existing domestic buildings from a variety of periods are explored to establish to what extent their new role in people's lives demands them to be 'sets' or 'players' in a contemporary performance where script and players are being engaged simultaneously. Particular focus is given to the exploration of spaces which accommodates several places at once (inclusive rooms) and the edge condition of any space (the inhabited perimeter).