American Theater History Research Articles

David Bisaha. American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism

Moving away from individual design practice to look at the institutional power structures that governed the flow of labour and capital in the theatre industry throughout the twentieth century, this well-researched examination of the movement toward professionalization in American scenic design adds an important new dimension to American theatre history.

Остров тоталитаризма: «Макбет» Орсона Уэллса

By the time of the eventual success of the premiere of Macbeth (1936) directed by Orson Welles as part of the Harlem Negro project by FTP, the African American theater already had its own small but remarkable history. However, this production received a tremendous response and is still the subject of controversy among scholars: evidence of this resonance is the appearance of the feature film Voodoo Macbeth (2021). All roles were performed by black actors, and the action was transferred to Haiti during the reign of Henry Christophe. Critics were disturbed by the disrespectful attitude to the Shakespearean text, modern researchers — by the exoticization of the African American cultural code. The reason for the discussion was (and still is) the director's radical interpretation, which shifted the semantic accents from Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to the witches. By increasing their role quantitatively and qualitatively, Orson Welles, a contemporary of the growing totalitarian regimes, created a piece about the all-pervading evil leveling the human personality. Having changed the chronotope of Shakespeare's tragedy and rethinking the principle of working with Shakespeare's heritage, Welles, for the first time in the history of American theatre, invited black actors to perform universal characters, to work with classical dramaturgy. Article is based on vast amount of archival materials, critical reviews and researches on Orson Welles and the Federal Theatre Project. Article examines the steps of the formation of the director's and set designer’s concepts, a reconstruction of the production is executed among other purposes.

Neil Simon’ın Brighton Beach Memoirs Adlı Oyununda Geleneksel Üç Mizah Teorisinin Etkileşimi

Humour/laughter is a human entity and activity. It takes place in almost all kinds of social interactions. Most of us cannot help laughing at something funny in our daily routines. Laughter is the fundamental mode of expression common to human beings. From this perspective, Simon is considered one of the most significant playwrights who uses laughter elements skilfully in his works. He is called a “laugh machine". Marvin Neil Simon (1927-2018) was an American playwright, screenwriter, television joke writer, and one of the most popular and successful dramatists commercially and artistically in the history of American theatre. This paper aims to explore how Neil Simon uses three traditional humour/laughter theories: The Superiority Theory, the Incongruity Theory, and the Relief Theory, in his Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983). It is an autobiographical play and one of Simon’s masterpieces in Simon’s BB Trilogy. This play is rich enough to explore three traditional humour theories. It deals with one family’s survival struggle just before the World War II during the Great Depression. It was a time of hardships for millions of people in the late 1930s. While Father makes all decisions, a passive-aggressive mother is self-sacrificing and manipulates his sons. The study adopts the qualitative analysis research method incorporated into analysis of dramatic texts.

Welded 2022: A Conversation

To say that the theater landscape shifted during the COVID era is an understatement. Yet, even during these trying times for the arts, and for theater in particular, productions of O’Neill’s plays have continued, often in bold and innovative ways. For example, there was a virtual production of the Irish Repertory Theatre’s A Touch of the Poet just as the pandemic was beginning and an Audible Theater production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night as the pandemic (hopefully) was winding down. In the throes of COVID, however, where any end point to the international nightmare remained nebulous, there was the Eugene O’Neill Foundation and, specifically, Eric Fraisher Hayes.Hayes, swiftly and successfully, pivoted to new modes of production and new ways of storytelling for the performances of the O’Neill Foundation. In 2020 he directed and filmed COVID-safe, script-in-hand performances of three of O’Neill’s early one-act plays: The Web, Recklessness, and Abortion. At the start of 2021 he and the Foundation launched “The Ghosts of Tao House,” a series of short films featuring actors performing monologues from O’Neill plays. These films drew on the beauty of the exterior and interior spaces of Tao House. In the fall of 2021 Hayes directed a film of Beyond the Horizon. While other theater companies recorded stage productions, Hayes conceived his Beyond the Horizon as a film, fundamentally distinct from the staged production that he and the Foundation would mount at around the same time. Compelling close-ups, integrated and original music, distinct camera angles, and wide-sweeping views of the gorgeous San Ramon Valley and Las Trampas Hills combined with first-rate acting make this Beyond the Horizon a highly successful film.Along with his exciting, artistic experimentations, Hayes used theCOVID moment to expand and enhance the scholarly presence for the Foundation productions. He oversaw the filming of nearly two dozen videos for the Foundation’s website in which scholars discuss various aspects of Beyond the Horizon, O’Neill’s “lost plays,” the playwright’s life, and American theater history. He also brought me on as the dramaturg for the Foundation’s fall and early spring productions (Beyond the Horizon, fall 2021; Welded, spring 2021). In addition to serving as the official researcher for these productions, I developed an interactive engagement guide for Beyond the Horizon and appeared with Hayes in a virtual, pre-show talk. The “ghosts” and the scholarly presentations are accessible, gratis, on the Foundation’s website (eugeneoneill.org), where one may also access the film of Beyond the Horizon for a modest fee.The production of Welded marked the return of live, in-person, and indoor theater for the Foundation. The production took place at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley in January 2022. In early February we chatted about Hayes’s bold choice to stage this historicallyneglected play, our long-distance collaboration, and Welded in a modern context.

군중 속의 고독: 투표와 1인극의 역사적 맥락에서 본 2021 오레곤 셰익스피어 페스티벌의 Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer

In this performance review, I reflect on the historical significance of Cheryl West’s bio-musical Fannie as a solo performance about a female African American activist and black enfranchisement. To begin with, the one-person musical showcases an alternative form of live performance in the age of COVID-19 since it requires a small group of people for production, thereby reducing the risk of virus infection. The solo performance also bears formal similarities with voting as a social practice, which happens to be the main theme of the play, as both are democratic media through which an individual voices their own opinion and are performed by one individual temporally isolated from other people watching them from a distance—thus, the irony of “solitude in public.” Thirdly, Fannie deserves special attention in American theatre history as it is one of the few solo performances that presents a black female historical figure as a hero rather than as a victim. Born as the last and twentieth child of her sharecropper parents in Mississippi in 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer devoted her life to promoting racial equality and securing the voting rights of African Americans. Although her dream of becoming a senator was not fulfilled, she played a pivotal role in raising awareness of severe racial discrimination in the South and encouraging contemporary African Americans’ participation in politics. Comprised of Hamer’s speeches and a dozen of freedom songs that she used to sing, Fannie turns out to be a moving tribute to her legacy and black pride. As a solo performance, Fannie demonstrates the resilience and power of live performance during the darkest period for theatre in the New Millenium due to the pandemic.

Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate, eds., Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage offers a vivid exploration of a key period in American theatre history. Editors Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate and the book’s contributors provide a rich portrait of how Progressive Era performances encapsulated the complexity of a changing nation.

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Uncommon Women’s Dilemmas in Wendy Wasserstein’s Quasi-Trilogy

Winning several important drama awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, Wendy Wasserstein (1950~2006) is one of the significant playwrights in the history of American theatre. Especially, Wasserstein stimulates the public’s attention to women’s issues by recording many successful female characters in her plays. Aware of the impact of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, Wasserstein describes how the social movement influences women’s personal life and depicts the joy and pain that feminism brings them. While the backlash against feminism is saturated in the 1980s, Wasserstein also discusses this anti-feminist force in society to see women’s struggles and their awakening. This paper deals with three of Wasserstein’s plays, Uncommon Women and Others (1977), Isn’t It Romantic (1983), and The Heidi Chronicles (1988), together as a quasi-trilogy to examine the development of feminism over three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s and to portray the women’s dilemma of marriage or career. Regarding the women’s predicament of being either “in” or “out” of the family, the paper argues that Wasserstein in the plays sketches different possibilities by emphasizing the diversity of women’s life experience and their autonomy.

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Post-World War II to the 1990s, Cambridge History American Theatre, Vol.3, Cambridge UP, 2000, xviii+582pp.

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Post-World War II to the 1990s, Cambridge History American Theatre, Vol.3, Cambridge UP, 2000, xviii+582pp.

LGBTQ Historical Scholarship: What Was It Like Twenty Years Ago?

LGBTQ Historical Scholarship:What Was It Like Twenty Years Ago? Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra Introduction We developed our project on gays and lesbians in American theatre history from two very different institutions and career stages in our home state of Iowa long before we ever dreamed that we would be able to marry our partners legally in our own backyards. The original catalyst came from what Bob Schanke, then professor and chair of the theatre department at Central College in Pella, Iowa, learned while on a coast-to-coast book signing tour for his 1991 biography Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne. People were really interested in how the same-sex sexual desires of this actress impacted her life, her art, and her career. He envisioned a collection of essays on other such figures that he would coedit as a gay male scholar with a lesbian scholar, hence his recruitment of Kim Marra, then a new assistant professor at the University of Iowa, whom he had met at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Although the University of Iowa in the early 1990s led the Big Ten in establishing health coverage for same-sex domestic partners, administrators were under fire by politically appointed regents for condoning the use of sexually explicit gay-themed materials in classes, which contributed to an anxious climate for untenured out faculty. Bob was long tenured, but he endured homophobic vandalism of his office multiple times on his small, religious campus as his scholarship made his personal proclivities more public. Thus, we both had to consider certain risks in pursuing this project, but those risks fueled our sense of need for such work ultimately to combat homophobia. When our original proposal for a single book was expanded into three books, as LeAnn Fields details below, we needed to bring on a third coeditor as point person for the final volume. The late Billy J. Harbin (1930–2004), professor and former chair of the theatre department at Louisiana State University, who also contributed essays to the first two volumes, took on that role. Whereas the two of us had both been out for nearly a decade, Billy had been deeply closeted for his entire career. This project, which he joined in his mid-sixties, marked his coming out. The contracts for the three books were rendered in the winter of 1994–95. At the ATHE conference in San Francisco the following summer, during sessions of the newly constituted LGT Focus Group led by Tad Currie and Willa Taylor, several of us appeared on a roundtable, “(Re)writing the Invisible: Gay and Lesbian Theatre History,” and we solicited many more of the fifty-eight authors who would ultimately contribute to this multivolume venture. It took considerable maneuvering over the next three years with LeAnn’s and Jill’s sagacious guidance to bring the first volume into print. Among many other revisions, we had to rewrite the introduction four times to justify the project. Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History finally appeared in October 1998. The second volume, Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History, followed in 2002, and the third, The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era, in 2005. [End Page 27] Billy did not live to see the publication of that last volume, whose compilation he directed. He suffered an embolism while leading a London theatre tour the previous summer. Just before the ultimately futile last-ditch procedure to save him, he handwrote us a fax from his overseas hospital bed with instructions about where to find the files in his house in Baton Rouge in case he did not return. He worked to the end on the project that had transformed his life. In the dedication to him at the front of the volume, which LeAnn personally helped us assemble, we quoted from Billy’s remarks at the first symposium on queer American theatre history, held at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) in New York City in 1998 to mark the publication of Passing Performances. These were words that at...

Conceptualizing Americanness: U.S. Drama in Spain, 1910–1930

This essay surveys presence of North American dramatic works (1) in Spain in early twentieth century, and seeks to investigate shifting conception of Americanness of audiences who consumed American plays, and critics who discussed, and companies which produced, them. While in an early moment being American was disconcertingly something that even a play not written by an American could be, throughout 1930s, coinciding with profound revolution in all orders of life which culminated in Spanish Civil War, American theater came to be seen more and more diverse; an American play was merely one written by an American, without that nationality precluding any kind of play. Such a truism was not easy to embrace, there were still those who believed America could only produce one specific kind of (highly successful and popular) commodity. This indispensable step toward a less univocal, more nuanced appreciation of American drama could not have been taken without work of theater critics. Whatever one is to think about job (not a few American playwrights have resented their power), Spanish critics of 1920s rendered an invaluable service of dis-essentializing Americanness in theater. popular perception for a long time was that American theater started with Eugene O'Neill, and we have all found him referred to more than once father of American drama, as though American theatre came into existence a sudden grace with Eugene O'Neill and his suitcase of plays its only begetter (Wilmeth and Bigsby, Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume Two xv). (2) Curiously enough, a Spanish history of American drama could never start by surveying O'Neill's work, latter was only culminating point of a long exposure to purely commercial offerings America (while more and more voices, nevertheless, claimed that another American drama existed). Thomas Postlewait, in The Hyeroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post-Civil War to 1945, posits Gilbert Seldes's 1924 volume Seven Lively Arts among first books to vindicate popular tradition of theater and entertainment, from minstrelsy, circuses, and vaudeville to popular entertainment of modern stage, screen, radio, and television the definitive achievement of American culture and failing to honor it not only incomplete but myopic (125). Postlewait goes on to object to realism and naturalism's being considered starting points of any worthwhile theatrical tradition, something which obviously marginalizes all other forms of theatrical expression, especially less logocentric ones (125-26). Spain, however, makes it possible to historicize American theater in a wholly different way. As we will promptly see, in matter of importations America, curtain opened on all more popular hits, with their panoply of tricks, stage effects, surprising plot twists and whatnot, while more serious drama would only come much later. It is not easy to pinpoint when exactly first American play was produced in Spain, but there is evidence that it was not before 1910s. Before this decade, shows derived some American novel or short story could be seen occasionally, but were so much tampered with that little of original (if anything) lived on in stage work inspired by it. Such is case of Lagricultor de Xicago, a Catalan playscript which opened in Barcelona in 1909, based on Gabriel Timmory's 1906 Le cultivateur de Chicago. Timmory drew inspiration Mark Twain's How I Edited an Agricultural Paper but moved in directions not distantly anticipated or suggested by American original. Even before that, Uncle Tom's Cabin had had a fruitful life on Spanish stages ever since its first occurrence in Madrid in 1853. Early in twentieth century playscript, based once more on a French version, went back to Spanish theaters for generally successful runs. …

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

Reviewed by: New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon Heather S. Nathans (bio) New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 elizabeth maddock dillon Durham: Duke University Press, 2014 368 pp. One of the strongest features of Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s award-winning 2014 study New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 is her knack for seizing on seemingly small incidents or details—such as the banning of a particular play in 1790s Charleston, South Carolina, or the appearance of a particular costume in Kingston, Jamaica—and using those moments to illuminate her larger discussion of the development of a new kind of audience in an emerging American polity. Dillon’s study surveys terrain familiar to scholars of early American theater history, including the strategic politicization of playhouse crowds; the judicious script edits implemented by theater managers anxious to avoid controversy; and the diverse ways that London and Anglo-American audiences engaged with a familiar repertoire increasingly unintelligible to a “New World” populace. In her six-chapter study, she limns the Atlantic circuit traveled by early British acting companies—a circuit that would pave the way for the establishment of post-Revolutionary theater culture, and that would also help to highlight the differences between British and American responses to explosive issues of race and slavery. As she notes in her introduction, Dillon turns to the theater to help redefine New World notions of representation, arguing, “I would contend that representation must be rethought in far broader and more complex terms than it often is within contemporary understandings of the political” [End Page 188] (9). For Dillon, theater offers a more expansive way to conceive of the public sphere as a “performative commons” where the “right of access” was not predicated on literacy (13). As Diana Taylor has observed, the tension between the archive and the repertoire often hinges on the tendency to privilege the written record versus ephemeral performance. By zeroing in on certain key moments and key cities, Dillon attempts to conjure back the repertoire of political behaviors enacted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American theatergoers. Odai Johnson has written movingly of the agonizing absences that plague theater historians—such as the vanished bodies of the crowds that once laughed at The Beggar’s Opera (1728) or wept at Oroonoko (1688) (two of the key dramas in Dillon’s study). Peter Reed, Jason Shaffer, Marvin McAllister, Jeffrey H. Richards, Bruce McConachie, Rosemarie Bank, Shane White, W. T. Lhammon, and others have examined the complex genealogies of race, class, and national identity that lie behind the development not only of American drama but of American audiences as well. Dillon seeks to extend the work of these scholars in probing the limits and potential of a performative commons. Chapter 1 outlines the parameters of her study, situating the geography of the emerging Atlantic commons alongside the geography of the eighteenth century playhouse. As theater scholars have noted, the layout of the typical eighteenth-century British and American playhouses explicitly encoded rigid hierarchies of class (and often race), but spectators frequently transgressed these boundaries either vocally or physically. Thus efforts to “enclose” British and Anglo-American audiences were often thwarted by traditions of “riot and debate” that reached well back into the sixteenth century (51). In chapter 1 and in chapter 4, Dillon examines what she terms “the colonial relation,” particularly in the context of Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko and Thomas Southerne’s dramatization of the novel, which held the stage well into the nineteenth century. For audiences in London living beyond the daily experience of chattel slavery, the play (which tells the tragic story of an enslaved African prince who leads a failed rebellion against his white oppressors before being tortured to death) held a different resonance than for those who found themselves increasingly outnumbered by captured African bodies. To see a heroic slave character “bodied forth” on the stage seemed incompatible with Americans’ emerging rhetoric about racial difference. [End Page 189] It defied the efforts of the “plantocratic authority,” which “sought to blacken New World Africans and to deprive them of...

Review: Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century , by Mary Simonson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. x, 278 pp. This book would make a great movie. With an impressive cast, celebrity cameos, tightly woven plot-lines, and scene-setting vignettes, Mary Simonson’s study is devoted to motion pictures—literally, to images that move. Her book embraces theatrical genres (opera, ballet, revue, musical comedy) and their musical, visual, and gestural aspects; the practical realities of stage performance and pageantry; dramatic impersonation and its opposite (acrobatic stunts, vaudeville skits, so-called “modern” dance); the influence of recording technologies; and the history and aesthetics of photography and cinema itself. A scholar of film and media studies, Simonson is primarily interested in the process of adaptation—ways in which performers, dramatic characters, narrative themes, musical extracts, song and dance numbers, and even paintings “turned up” in strange, new, and specifically American contexts in the years around 1900. In particular, Simonson describes slippage between genres incorporating dance; and she focuses on women—dancers, singers, and actresses turned political commentators, cultural arbiters of taste, model citizens, and masterminds of their own musical shows. To Simonson, these shows and the women behind them (not to forget those in the audience) open a new optic onto a “vibrant American artistic culture,” one both dependent on and resistant to European traditions (p. 199). Moreover, as Simonson states, female performance betrays a network of interconnections and exchange, not only between the arts and their related practitioners but between broader strands of cultural influence. The prologue offers a first example of what Simonson calls “intermediality”—artistic experimentation across genre boundaries, involving the dissemination of techniques, stylistic vocabularies, and aesthetics seemingly specific to different visual, musical, and performing arts (on which more later). Here we learn how numbers from the black musical comedy My Friend from Kentucky circulated in the early 1900s—evidence, to Simonson, not only of the legacy of minstrel theater but of “contemporary practices of artistic …

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre ed. by Harvey Young (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre ed. by Harvey Young Jennifer DeVere Brody The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. Edited by Harvey Young . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013 . Cloth $94.00 , Paper $30.99 , eBook $25.00 . 291 pages. This book serves as an innovative companion to African American Theater. It collates thirteen scholars in the field, each of whom provides, to quote the introduction, “an in-depth engagement with the history of African American Theatre” (13). The contributors are a mix of the best newly minted scholars, including Soyica Diggs Colbert and Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and established scholars such as Harry Elam and Sandra Richards. Together, the essays and their respective authors build a strong, if necessarily partial, vision of the field: one that begins with slavery on American shores and concludes with the unstable, but “fertile ground [that is supporting] the emergence of new plays and new debates around the notion of how, where, and what, as Suzan Lori-Parks says, Black theatre ‘IZ’” (276). In the concise introduction, Harvey Young, the volume’s wonderful editor, explains, “The book opens with August Wilson’s address in 1996 to demonstrate that the work of building African American theatre remains both incomplete and controversial. These themes—an ongoing desire to build and create spaces to stage African American experiences, and the challenges that attended these efforts—recur throughout” (original italics, 2). Thus, ideas of construction and reconstruction serve as a through-line for the book. The individual chapters are organized chronologically by historical period such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Black Arts Movement, and the Age of Obama. Young’s prose is clear and his arguments persuasive if not necessarily innovative. Attention to the construction of identity markers such as race, gender, sexuality, region, ethnicity, religion, and class do not appear in the index, but rather receive attention to varying degrees in the essays themselves (there are two essays on black women playwrights in different historical periods). One could, for example, take issue with the decision to include “mostly artists who worked to revise the stereotypes and negative images of blackness and to bring a more accurate and recognizable representation of African American experiences to the stage” (9). Such concepts that are wedded to ideas of experience and fidelity (not to mention reparation) might have been explicated with greater care, even though the editor suggests that, in addition to the chronological ordering, “exploring the book from the first page to the last . . . reveals a gradual shift from archive-based historical criticism to theoretically informed critical analysis” (13). DuBois figures prominently throughout the volume as do key playwrights such as the aforementioned August Wilson, as well as Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Alice Childress, and Amiri Baraka. The volume also contains a helpful, if highly abbreviated, chronology that begins in 1529 when the first African slaves arrived in North America and concludes with Audra McDonald’s winning of a Tony Award for Best Actress for [End Page 87] her performance in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 2012. So, too, the suggestions for further reading significantly help to round out the volume and give a sense of field. Such aids are presented without any belabored discussions of historiography and this kind of straightforward style actually appears in all the essays. This is another way of saying that the volume is well suited for undergraduate classroom use and, despite the range of themes covered and the varying areas mentioned, there is indeed an aesthetics (and also a politics) to the volume that can be characterized as solid, substantive, and sober. Readers can learn much about selected milieu (although less so about specific plays) and a number of articles in the volume provide open-ended contexts that would be useful for teaching different eras. For example, Soyica Diggs Colbert has a sweeping essay on “Drama in the Harlem Renaissance,” Aimee Zygmonski focuses on the Black Arts Movement, and Douglas A. Jones discusses “Slavery and the Design of African American Theater.” Jones’s ground-breaking essay draws on Saidiya Hartman’s work to flesh out the paradoxes of slave performance, and Harry Elam’s superb piece, “Black Theater in...

Irving Berlin's American Musical Theatre. By Jeffrey Magee.

The last decade has seen a much-needed movement in scholarship on American musical theatre in favour of exploring the archival evidence of shows and their creators from the so-called ‘golden age’ of Broadway and before, and Jeffrey Magee’s contribution on Irving Berlin’s Broadway career is a welcome addition to Oxford’s Broadway Legacies series in that vein. Drawing on relatively newly available material from the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, Magee is the first to produce a book-length study of the composer that draws on the rich archival legacy he left behind. The result is a careful and thought-provoking excavation not just of Irving Berlin’s contributions to the Broadway stage from 1914 to the early 1960s, but also of the larger trends in American theatre history in the early and mid-twentieth century. Magee shows Berlin’s career to be both indicative of, and exceptional to, the Broadway stage of his time.

“Danger: men not working.” Constructing citizenship with contingent labor in the Federal Theatre's Living Newspapers

Try to remember all you've seen here. Remember that every man … ought to have the right to work and eat. Every man ought to have a right to think things out for himself.– Hallie Flangan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, Can You Hear Their Voices? (1931)I don't know why I still hang on the idea that unemployed actors get just as hungry as anybody else.– Harry Hopkins, Works Progress Association Supervisor (1934)Theater critics and historians have done valuable work to canonize the scripts of Depression-era Living Newspapers. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the modes of contingent and affective labor that structured daily life for the Federal Theatre employees responsible for writing and staging those texts. This study examines a unique moment in American theater history in which discursive tropes of uncertainty helped to frame the dramatic arts as symbols of a patriotic work ethic and the American democratic ideal. An investigation of the classed and gendered labor discourses of New Deal Federal Theatre Project administrators from 1935–9 reveals the creative strategies that they used to cope with their own professional and economic precarity. Although Federal Theatre employees encountered these demands within the framework of government sponsorship, their responses to such pressures resonate with patterns in industry, non-profit, and academic settings in the twenty-first century. Producing affect, reviewing performance, re-framing goals, and justifying expenses are all part of today's late-capitalist rubric of professional contingency, just as they were under the Works Progress Administration.

Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company: Critical Analyses of 29 Plays (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company: Critical Analyses of 29 Plays Kelly Aliano Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company: Critical Analyses of 29 Plays. By Rick Roemer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010; pp. 198. In Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Rick Roemer brings increased critical attention to playwright/actor/director Charles Ludlam, hoping to solidify Ludlam’s place in American theatre history and to spark more productions of his twenty-nine plays. With this goal in sight, Roemer begins by interrogating the form of the Ridiculous, looking at influences ranging from comic books to opera to Hollywood B movies to Aristophanes to [End Page 623] Dadaism. He coins a new term—“ridiculosity” (7)—to describe the theatrical idiom in which Ludlam worked, considering the Ridiculous as a form of camp. This approach allows Roemer to argue that, by “incorporating discarded elements of culture [and] revamping them in line with [the] sensibility [of] an excluded caste,” Ludlam provided himself and other homosexuals “with a basis for an identity” in a moment when the gay rights movement was coalescing (45). For Roemer, this aesthetic of reappropriation positioned Ludlam among other 1960s and ’70s downtown artists whose work has been discussed in terms of the avant-garde. Despite Ludlam’s own distaste for the avant-garde label, Roemer notes key similarities: “Like Ludlam, each of these movements and their masters produced a manifesto, or doctrine, which they published as a blueprint for their style. Their theatres were not based on life events or situations, but rather employed distortions, dream-like visuals, and disconnected language in their theatrical visions” (24). Roemer sees Ludlam’s work as both a product of and voice for his own time. Roemer’s book is organized into seven chapters, the first of which is a condensed biography of Ludlam. His story begins at a fair in Mineola, New York, where, at age 6, Charles became enchanted by a Punch and Judy show. This formative moment was followed by another: Ludlam’s education at Hofstra University, where he was discouraged from appearing onstage because of his over-the-top style of acting. Despite, or perhaps because of, this failure, Ludlam “was truly at the right place at the right time” (15) when he moved to Greenwich Village after college. It was here that he first came into contact with the new wave of theatrical and artistic production that was taking place in the 1960s and that pushed him toward the Ridiculous style that he would later develop. In chapter 2, “The Roots of Ridiculosity,” Roemer builds an “impressive and influential lineage” (17) for Ludlam’s work, tracing its origins to Aristophanes, who deployed comedy as a means of social criticism, to commedia dell’arte, which emphasized the actor’s personality in performance, and to Moliere, who wrote his works for a specific company of players. Roemer then turns his attention to more recent history, drawing connections between the Theatre of the Ridiculous and forms of popular entertainment like music hall, burlesque, and vaudeville, seeing in Ludlam’s work a similar type of mass appeal. Roemer also offers a detailed consideration of the avant-garde movements that directly preceded Ludlam’s debut, suggesting that, like expressionism and Dadaism, ridiculosity was interested in “extreme artistic exploration” (25). For Ludlam, this exploration concerned gay identity through the use of drag. As Roemer notes, drag queens were important features of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s 1969 production of Big Hotel and of the Stonewall riots of that same year. In his estimation, “the extent of the visibility of the drag queen was responsible, at least in part, for the unleashing of gay power in 1969” (30). The third chapter, “Ridiculosity in Theory,” attempts to construct a theoretical lens for the book’s critical analysis of ridiculosity. Here, Roemer engages the writings of scholars like Judith Butler and Jill Dolan to emphasize the importance of gender performativity in Ludlam’s theatrical practice. Roemer also discusses theories of camp, tracing the history of the term from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” (1964) through its many iterations and revisions since then. Citing camp’s esteem for otherwise valueless junk, Roemer reads...

Fear Mongering, Media Intimidation, and Political Machinations: Tracing the Agendas Behind the All God's Chillun Got Wings Controversy

In this article, I will argue that one of the most controversial productions in American theater history, perceived largely as an event provoked by racial prejudice, ought be re-examined in terms of the savvy political agendas behind the text. History remembers the contention surrounding Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings as simple case of racial intolerance, bur the truth proves much different, involving personal threats, government action, and constant attacks from the press mounted by two political powers. Both participants feared political irrelevance, and the prospect of losing influence or prominence inspired them reassert their clout by intimidating O'Neill and his cast. An exploration of the context behind the Chillun controversy reveals story of hidden machinations concerning political ambition and desperate attempts retain power. In early summer of 1924, the Provincetown Playhouse premiered Eugene O'Neill's newest work, All God's Chillun Got Wings. While O'Neill originally wrote the piece as one-act play for George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken in the fall of 1923, he later expanded it into a drama in two acts and seven scenes set in lower New York at an unspecified rime. (1) O'Neill's racial theme is rather clumsily handled at the beginning and then powerfully at the end. The first act traces the development of the relationship between Jim and Ella, beginning as childhood playmates who tease each other about the color of their skin while playing game of marbles on the sidewalk. The act continues by charting fourteen-year period highlighting Jim's inability overcome racial barriers in order pursue his desired romance with Ella. O'Neill's racially charged dialogue during this opening act unfortunately fails provide an emotional or intellectual impact because the immaturity of the two major characters, combined with the simplistic depiction of the secondary characters who hurl racial epithets, weakens dialogue that is based on racial tension. When the act concludes with Jim and Ella emerging from chapel as wedded couple, O'Neill provides little indication of the serious issues he addresses in the second half of the play. O'Neill salvages All God's Chillun Got Wings with second act that shifts from storytelling emphasis an exploration of tenuous romance between two human beings fighting against lifelong prejudices that conflict with their quests for love and validation. Ella constantly berates Jim for his lofty aspirations become lawyer, fearing that he will no longer fit in the stereotype that allowed her feel superior. In addition suffering her brutal verbal attacks, Jim is harassed by his sister, who questions why he continues endure Ella's abuse in the name of undying love. With Jim's defiance (if not ignorance) toward the external forces aiming doom his relationship and his confidence, O'Neill presents man determined to become someone other than who he and both his black friends and his white wife try shame him into staying who he is, resulting in drama that demonstrates not only the trauma of race relations but of the human condition in general. (2) While this racial subject matter certainly raised eyebrows and kept conservative audience members away from the theater, the premiere production of Chillun is most often remembered for one single moment. Most references Chillun in theater history books are accompanied by brief recounting of the controversial staging at the play's conclusion, when Ella kneels on the floor and kisses Jim's hand. It is this moment--when the white actress Mary Blair kissed Paul Robeson's hand--that sparked an incredible controversy that captured headlines and evoked vitriolic responses from all over the country. (3) Those who denounced O'Neill's work as an explosive face play ignored the many complex issues raised during the second half of the script. The concluding moment of the play involves not white woman's submission black man but, instead, tearful plea return their innocent childhood, when they treated each other with greater respect and dignity. …

Sharuk and Shylock: The creation of a South Asian American aesthetic

South Asian diasporic theatre in the Americas, unlike its counterparts in other regions such as the UK, has only recently begun to develop its own aesthetic voice and tradition of dramatic literature and theatrical production. This essay examines the landmark play, Shishir Kurup's Merchant on Venice and its premiere production in Chicago in 2007, in order to initiate a historical discussion of South Asian American theatre history. Through an examination of this adaptation of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, its relationship to the original together with its distinctive literary qualities and a consideration of its performative manifestation, this essay argues that Kurup's play heralds the coming of a South Asian American theatre aesthetic through engagements with language and inclusion of South Asian American cultural and historical specificity into the American theatre.