Play's Action Research Articles

دور الحكاية في مسرحية عشوائي للكاتبة ديبي تاكر جرين

Storytelling is a theatrical method employed by playwrights to delve into the profound aspects of a character's psyche. It allows characters to directly communicate with the audience serving multiple functions within the play. Moreover, this task can be executed by a protagonist or multiple characters, and occasionally even by actors who are not directly engaged in the play's action. Playwrights have employed this form in different periods throughout the history of drama. Debbie Tucker Green, A Black British playwright, employs the technique of storytelling in her play random to engage the audience in responding to street violence in London. The present paper aims to focus on this play, particularly on the act of storytelling, as the researcher observes that existing studies often discuss Tucker Green's plays solely within the context of her identity as a Black writer addressing issues within Black communities, neglecting to explore her unique stylistic approach. So, this study aims to fill in this gap. Tucker Green , unlike other Black playwrights, portrays traumatic experiences of loss and violence through her distinctive style of writing. By utilizing storytelling, she effectively depicts the feelings and thoughts of her characters, thus raising awareness among the audience about the vulnerability of Black citizens.

‘A Voice Amidst Mine Ears’: Silent Angels on the Early Modern Stage

AbstractUnlike the carts that crawled with angels in the medieval pageant plays, angels of the early modern stage were a rare breed. Eventually they disappeared from the stage altogether; they did not, however, disappear all at once in a puff of celestial smoke. This article reveals a pattern of suppression in the representation of angels on the English stage, ranging from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in 1592 until 1645, three years after the closure of the theatres in England. This study examines plays that present angels as characters who contribute to the play's action and denouement; however, by noting plays that include allegorical and decorative angels too, it comprises the most comprehensive survey of angels within plays from the period to date. Angels do not appear in many plays performed at the commercial playhouses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; but when they do, it becomes clear that early modern playwrights gradually developed more calculated ways of staging these controversial creatures. As stage angels assume more silent roles, but before angels leave the stage entirely, human characters begin to communicate with these celestial figures differently and encounters with angels become a far more intimate experience.

THE THIRD LIFECYCLE OF PHILOKLEON IN ARISTOPHANES’ WASPS

The mutability of Philokleon's generational identity in Aristophanes’ Wasps is well established. Critics routinely write of his ‘rejuvenation’ in the second half of the play, and it is in the scene with the αὐλητρίϲ (‘aulos-girl’), Dardanis, that the old man most explicitly plays the part of an irresponsible youth waiting for his son (in the role of father) to die. However, inversions and perversions of generational identity pervade the whole play. Even before Philokleon has undergone his liberating transformation at the symposion, the educational roles of father and son are reversed as Bdelykleon schools him in the proper way to behave in polite society. More subtly and extensively, Bowie has shown how the three agones in which Philokleon unsuccessfully engages during the first half of the play correspond to the three stages of an Athenian male citizen's life: ephebeia, maturity in the hoplite phalanx, and old age in the jury. However, critics have not observed that Philokleon goes through another, parallel journey from youth through maturity to old age in the three ‘iambic scenes’ where he is confronted by the victims of his outrageous behaviour on his way home from the symposion. This article will show how Aristophanes constructs this third lifecycle (counting Bowie's agones and his literal maturation before the play's action begins) before considering its implications for the wider characterization of Philokleon and in particular the final scene.

AmericCamus 1959: Albert Camus en Amérique maccarthyste par Alek Baylee Toumi

Reviewed by: AmericCamus 1959: Albert Camus en Amérique maccarthyste par Alek Baylee Toumi E. Nicole Meyer Toumi, Alek Baylee. AmericCamus 1959: Albert Camus en Amérique maccarthyste. L'Harmattan, 2020. ISBN 978-2-343-20398-0. Pp. 102. Given Toumi's five previous plays featuring Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, the latter being the topic of the author's research, the reader understands this play is imaginary, albeit containing factual links to Camus. Toumi sets up the play's action through three constructs. First, several quotes orient our reading of the play. This highlights Camus's appreciation of humour as well as his distaste for contemporary intellectual society "où le réflexe a remplacé la réflexion, où l'on pense à coup de slogan et où la méchanceté essaie de se faire passer trop souvent pour l'intelligence" (7). Second, the cast list includes well-known scholar, Germaine [End Page 266] Brée, and Camus, as well as Gerry and Judy, two former colleagues of the author. Inconsistencies appear. For instance, Toumi mentions that Brée arrives in 1960 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his alma mater. However, the action of the play occurs there in November 1959. Third, the "présentateur" sets up the premise of the return of La peste "Trumpism" as a parallel to McCarthyism of the era represented in the play. Toumi argues that Camus's joy, sense of humor, and passion for life remain the ultimate form of pacifist Resistance. Constructed in four "Tableaux," the first and by far the longest, is composed of four scenes, the others each of two. The first Tableau shares Camus arrival, banal exchanges, and quotidian details (sandwich, shower, unseasonably warm weather). Certain recognizable details add veracity—the location of a now defunct train station, the Italian deli where Brée buys her bread. Within a few pages, the character Camus and Brée chat. Camus critiques mediocre, mean intellectuals. An interesting, albeit wide ranging discussion ensues; topics include Algeria, Spanish fascism, his Nobel Prize, and various authors they have read. The rapid jumps in subjects might appear more an exercise in namedropping to some. Clever wordplay will appeal to others. Central themes include Camus's passion for writing, family (especially his former and now current partner, Maria), and his love for Algeria despite his prediction that in becoming an "Algérie arabe, d'exclusions et de haines" (42), it will autodestruct. Lacking transition, scene 4 commences with Camus singing Georges Brassens's songs to Brée, who criticizes American conservatism and their lack of appreciation. The second Tableau brings both to campus. Scène 2 introduces Gerry and Judy who dine with the duo that evening. They barely speak—Gerry tells several "Frenchie jokes," while Judy comes off as silly. Of all of the named characters, she is the only one still living, and in November 1959, was a high school freshman. One wonders why these characters are named at all. The last two Tableaux leave politics aside and are the most successful. A conversation with students and professors in the penultimate is followed by a job interview in which Camus hides his identity. Toumi's affinity for Camus, and their mutual love of Algiers and Algeria come through well, helping the reader to understand an era of the past, as well as its link to our current times. E. Nicole Meyer Augusta University (GA) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell

Reviewed by: Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell Frank Swannack Trudell, Scott A., Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 272; R.R.P. £63.00; ISBN 9780198834663. Recent scholarship has focused on the disparity between what early modern texts signified at the time of composition and postmodern critical assumptions. These studies counter theoretical thinking that considers a progressive literary history at the expense of early modern innovation. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England discovers critical oversights through privileging 'a bibliographic fantasy' (p. 210). The book reveals how the modern notion of multimedia is already prevalent in early modern England, as poets and playwrights combine music, song, poetry, and theatrical bodies to startling, often puzzling, effect. Trudell challenges critical thinking that regards early modern texts as preserving a rigid historical literary imagination. His book examines how early modern poets and playwrights not only considered different forms of communication, but also the lingering emotional effects of their work on their audience. Thus Trudell finds fresh insights in Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (1595). His argument highlights Sidney's practical approach to music. Trudell even speculates that Sidney may have been a musician himself, as Sidney conceived poetry by embracing all forms of musical composition and performance beyond a bibliographic circle. The appearance of songs in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Trudell asserts, indicates Sidney's notion of poetry that is not simply [End Page 265] to be read. With the emergence of printed songbooks, Trudell also entertains the intriguing notion of Sidney's poetry being experienced 'in domestic settings across England' (p. 29). He suggests the possibility of illiterate households enjoying Sidney's poetry through music and song. Another overlooked aspect of early modern life is the teaching of drama in English grammar schools. Trudell surmises that because Sidney was a student at Shrewsbury School, he would have been made aware of drama from a young age. The Elizabethan poet even performed in Accession Day tilts. The crux of Trudell's argument is how dramatic performance is ensconced in Sidney's poetic imagination to become fused with literary endeavours. Within the theatre, Trudell tackles pederasty surrounding boy actor-singers. His first important point is to differentiate early modern pederasty from the modern psychological disorder of pedophilia. Rather than being an aberration, pederasty refers to an established practice of eroticizing women, servants, and children. It is a practice, Trudell argues, the theatre uses to capture audiences in pederasty fantasies. The mediation of poetry through a boy's singing and sexualized body objectifies them, conversely, as monstrous receptacles encouraging abuse. Trudell also unearths a musical pederasty in Shakespeare's plays. With Twelfth Night, Trudell implies that the play's music functions like bawdy 'muzak'. Its miscellaneous frivolities create tension by often impinging on the play's action. Trudell's thesis finds a rich source in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The eroticized infantile musical fairies provide historical detail on how childhood could last into an actor's twenties. While contemporary media theory, particularly how information encodes messages deciphered by modern communication systems, is already present through how the disembodied changeling transmits sexual fantasies. A similar analysis of Hamlet's Ophelia leads Trudell to reconsider her mysterious feminized madness as an effervescing multimedia presence. In a fascinating discussion, Trudell asserts that her melancholic songs are derived from the popular anonymous ballad tradition. Her transformative singing and subsequent drowning combine the environment, the sexual violence of Ovid's Orpheus in the Metamorphoses, and music's lingering aftertaste to communicate emotive meaning. Finally, Trudell charts John Milton's love–hate relationship with song. Although present in Milton's work, singers haunt his texts as subdued voices. Ironically, Trudell also identifies Milton's removal from printed songbooks in the late seventeenth century. Milton's conspicuous absence from the period's musical community inspires Trudell's investigation of songbooks featuring the music of Milton's collaborator Henry Lawes. Trudell uncovers 'intriguing echoes' of Milton's A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637 and 1645) in Lawes's songbooks and in three editions...

La cisma de Ingalaterra by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Reviewed by: La cisma de Ingalaterra by Pedro Calderón de la Barca Roy Norton Pedro Calderón de la Barca. La cisma de Ingalaterra. Edición de Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán. cátedra, 2018. 309 pp. calderón's la cisma de ingalaterra has provoked a flurry of interest in recent years, having long suffered relative neglect. Its characters were the subject of Braulio Fernández-Biggs's 2012 monograph, Calderón y Shakespeare: los personajes en La cisma de Ingalaterra y Henry VIII (Iberoamericana / Vervuert). An adaptation of the play was staged by Spain's Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) in 2015, and in April 2018 La cisma was the focus of an international symposium co-hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Asociación Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro (AITENSO), and organized by Susana Hernández Araico. It is to be hoped that the publication of Escudero Baztán's Cátedra edition will help sustain the momentum of critical and artistic engagement with Calderón's Henry VIII play, a work that might easily strike a chord with twenty-first-century readers and spectators. La cisma nicely illustrates the wisdom of the author of Ecclesiastes that "there is no new thing under the sun." It depicts a society that is deeply divided, where long-standing dispensations are being painfully overthrown. Under the leadership of a man prone to acting impetuously and capriciously, confident that his cynical motivations will remain opaque to his subjects, the English court begins to subscribe to alternative truths: Enrique's realm is a universe with two suns, where to fall is to rise and where men publicly deny the faith that, privately, they profess to love. Escudero's edited, annotated text is accompanied by an introductory study divided into five sections. These deal, in turn, with the play's structure, its source, its characters, and—the subject of the final two sections—the play's textual history. In addition, following the well-established template for critical editions of Golden Age comedias, the book contains a synopsis of versification, a list of variants, and an index of footnotes. An appendix reproduces selected extracts from the first part of Pedro de Rivadeneyra's Historia eclesiástica del cisma del reyno de Inglaterra (1588), from which Calderón drew the historical content of La cisma. [End Page 223] The introduction's first section emphasizes the importance of "el Hado" as the play's major structuring device. Enrique's dream, Volseo's horoscope, and Pasquín's prophecy regarding Ana Bolena all point from an early stage to the seemingly inevitable tragic denouement, so that, as with many history plays, the locus of interest is not the what of events but the how. Escudero shows that many of the concerns so central to Calderón's mature cosmology are present in this early play (ca. 1627): he highlights the opposition between passion and reason and between moral freedom and determinism, as well as the heavy price characters pay for errors of judgment. This section of the introduction also incorporates a plot summary that usefully shows how, through careful control of the character combinations present on stage in successive scenes, Calderón neatly reveals distinct facets of his characters' personalities as, at times, they allow the masks of their charades to drop. Also useful here are Escudero's comments on the playwright's modulation of dramatic pace, in particular the acceleration of the play's action towards its climax through the division of the third act into six blocks (the first two acts are split into just two blocks each). The editor's analysis draws fruitfully in this introduction on the scholarship of one of the most insightful critics to have worked on La cisma to date, the late Francisco Ruiz Ramón. Escudero's discussion of the dramatic treatment of the Rivadeneyra source underlines that the play is very much a "reescritura" (45) of the rather shrill, moralizing Historia, undertaken with a full measure of poetic licence. It is helpful that Escudero draws together here extracts from the works of Golden...

The theatrical adaptation of Merry More

The early modern play Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, takes an ecumenical viewpoint of the play's Catholic hero in order to conform to the expectations of the Master of the Revels and to appeal to a cross-confessional audience. The playwrights carefully construct the play within the confines of censorship by centering the play's action around More's dynamic personality instead of giving a full exposition of historical plot. More's personality and famous wit function together as a means for diverting attention away from the controversy surrounding More's silent opposition to Henrician policy while subtly validating his martyrdom. The argument of this article examines the adaptation of the play's ideologically diverse source material, the playwrights’ use of martyrological conventions, and the subtle traces of Erasmian allusion and recusant rhetoric in its reading of the play.

‘There's ropes and there's ropes’: The Moral and Textual Fibre of Martin McDonagh's Hangmen

Martin McDonagh's Hangmen (2015) is concerned with the moral question of justice. Set in a northern English pub run by a former hangman, the play's action takes place in 1965, on the day capital punishment is abolished in Britain. Combining (meta)fictional elements with details from actual criminal cases (in particular the so-called A6 murder, for which James Hanratty was hanged in 1963), Hangmen weaves three potential plot lines around its enigmatic central character, Peter Mooney. These conflicting narratives highlight that justice and punishment always exist as stories embedded in a context, which are invariably partial, composed for a purpose, and open to interpretation. Incorporating ideas from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Hangmen suggests that any justice system reflects the implicit biases of the society in which it operates.

Taking Liberties: The Influence of the Architectural and Ideological Space of the Hope Theatre on Jonson's Bartholomew Fair

The performance of Bartholomew Fair at the Hope Theatre in 1614 was the play's first and only recorded public performance in Jonson's lifetime, and the playtext still bears the stamp of this theatrical debut. Using the spatial theories of Foucault, de Certeau, and Lefebvre, I suggest that Jonson takes advantage of the liminal spaces of his performance venue, the ideologically ambiguous space of the Liberty that contained it, as well as his play's fictive setting (the Fair itself), to pass comment on the more ideologically solid and austere environment of the City of London. I also argue that in some ways this first performance can be read as ‘proto-site-specific,’ inasmuch as the play relies on the particularities of its environment to achieve Jonson's aim—to exhort his audience into a more sophisticated ‘understanding’ of the play's action—an understanding that he hoped would, in turn, affect their reading of the real urban space outside the playhouse. The Jonsonian ‘third way’ between represented and representational spaces takes advantage of the heterogeneous environment of the playhouse and elides together the heterotopian environments of Fair and Liberty to invite a correspondingly unstable interpretive response from its audience. This experiential division is enforced in the space of the stage and auditorium, with Jonson's use of inductive techniques, staging, and direct address—which frequently privileges some groups of spectators, to the detriment of others—helping to enforce divisions within the audience. The interpretive openness of Jonson's spatial practice becomes in effect a microcosm for the vast number of spatial practices performed by the inhabitants of the real city beyond the Hope's walls. However, in his emphasis on ‘understanding’ spectators Jonson provides his audience with the cognitive tools to be the actors rather than the acted-upon in the dog-eat-dog environment of London's urban space, and it is within the triangulation between text, playhouse and suburban environment of the play's first performance that this effect is most pronounced.

Betrayal

Betrayal

2016 International Siglo de Oro Drama Festival

2016 International Siglo de Oro Drama Festival THE 2016 INTERNATIONAL SIGLO DE ORO Drama Festival ran from March 30 to April 2, and, while similar in scope to that of years past, this year's festival was distinctive in that it featured the American debut of recently discovered play by Lope de Vega (Mujeresy criados) and marked the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes with bilingual presentation of selected entremeses (Entremeses cervantinos). A new theatrical adaptation of La Celestina and unique staging of Lope's lesser-known El principe ynocente, featuring the naque style of theater, rounded out the festival's program. The performing troupes hailed from Spain (Madrid), Mexico (Ciudad Juarez, Mexico City), and the United States (El Paso), performed in both Spanish and English, and contributed meaningfully to Chamizal's efforts to promote and understand a culture which has had significant impact on our own (About the Festival). The following reviews reflect the diversity of staging, acting, and texts that make Chamizal's annual Siglo de Oro festival perennial favorite among community members, academics, and theater practitioners alike.Mujeres y criados: Lope's Recovered Comedy at ChamizalIn January 2014, Spain's National Library and the Grupo de Investigacion PROLOPE of the University of Barcelona announced the discovery of Mujeres y criados, long-lost comedia by Lope de Vega. (Lope most likely wrote the play in 1613 or 1614, almost exactly 400 years before its rediscovery.) The following month, Alejandro Garcia-Reidy's article, which described the process of finding and authenticating the work, appeared, and in May of the same year, Garcia-Reidy published the first edition of the play with Editorial Gredos. Sometime during those exciting months, Rodrigo Arribas received phone call asking if his theater company, Fundacion Siglo de Oro, would consider bringing the newly discovered work to the stage. Arribas and Laurence Boswell (Royal Shakespeare Company) directed the production, which premiered at the Teatro Espanol in Madrid on April 29, 2015. The troupe gave their 45th performance of the play in El Paso, Texas at the Chamizal Siglo de Oro Drama Festival on March 30, 2016.The play opened on dark stage. A church bell rang three times and then an acoustic guitar played few bars of baroque music, which suddenly sped up and merged into rock music on an electric guitar. Throughout the show, the music, composed for this production by Xavier Diaz Latorre, surprised the audience and made it difficult to locate the work solely in the seventeenth century. Most frequently, music served to keep scene changes from dragging, and in his conversations about the play, Arribas revealed that the group intended to use the music to make the sets dance. Sometimes the music reflected the mood of scene. Slow, deep, descending notes built suspense during night scene and then became animated during sword fight. When all turned out well, guitar strummed happy notes, accompanied by castanets. At other times, ceremonial music marked significant moment in the play and added comic effect. Before the scene in which Florencio tried to force his daughters to drink acero (medicine to help with anemia), an almost sacramental music played as the servant Lope pushed onto the stage small cart with the vials of medicine covered by domed lid. As the sisters stepped slowly toward the dreaded potion, drum beat the rhythm of an execution. Similarly, whenever Count Prospero entered the home of Florencio, fanfare music to announce the arrival of dignitary heralded his visit.Karmen Abarca designed the sets that danced to the music and all of the play's action developed in front of them. Her design, reminiscent of Golden Age trastos and bastidores, consisted of flexible set of interconnected frames with double curtains hanging from each section of the framework. Three frames unfolded across the stage with the center frame decorated by large, slightly nebulous family crest represented the count's palace. …

Performance Anxiety and the Passion in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament paradoxically enacts anxieties about the propriety of Passion drama. Framing the play's central action—the Jews' testing of the Communion wafer in a parody of the Passion—with the story of a Christian merchant who enables or even sponsors those acts, the Croxton play provides critical distance on the very performance it enacts. Ultimately, it replaces the Passion play with, and judges it inferior to, a more decorous and authoritative processional ritual. Moreover, in presenting a Christian merchant as the catalyst for the Jews' actions, the play not only reinforces the anti-Semitic association of Jews with commerce, but also directs part of its antiludic anxieties at Christian mercantile culture, thus deploying its anti-Semitism to criticize the culture that largely underwrote late medieval drama. In all of this, the play participates in an antiludic discourse that may be broader and earlier than previously supposed.

Passports and the Locations of Sovereignty in The Reign of Edward III

This article provides a critical analysis of the language and dramatic action of the anonymous 1590s play, The Reign of Edward III, alongside a discussion of Edward III's reputation in the Elizabethan period. Through this, it emerges that the play is more searchingly engaged with questions of sovereign power than has usually been argued in its critical reception. The idea of the “passport”, a relatively new concept in sixteenth-century Europe, is handled interestingly in the play. This and other representations of sovereign agency (warrants, oaths, even sonnets) are mobilized in the play's action and dialogue to interrogate a central question of sixteenth-century political thought and practice: where is sovereignty located, in the body of the monarch or in the workings of the state?

Urban Drama: The Metropolis in Contemporary North American Plays by J. Chris Westgate (review)

Reviewed by: Urban Drama: The Metropolis in Contemporary North American Plays by J. Chris Westgate William Storm (bio) J. Chris Westgate . Urban Drama: The Metropolis in Contemporary North American Plays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. x + 239. $85.00. Linkages among literary works, authors, and urban settings are in numerous ways familiar. One might easily be reminded, for instance, of the Paris of Henry Miller, the Los Angeles of Joan Didion or Raymond Chandler, the Venice of Henry James—or, in the movies, the New York of Woody Allen. In drama, compared with the novel or film, such connections are rarer, perhaps, although they have existed for centuries. What would Restoration comedy be, after all, without its ties to the truewit culture of seventeenth-century London, including the particular locales where figures such as Mr. Dorimant or Mr. Horner live, dine, and go to the theater? More recently, playwrights such as Luis Valdez, David Mamet, and David Lindsay-Abaire, in dramatizing the environs of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, have offered dramatic angles of vision that, along with those in cinema [End Page 121] and narrative fiction, assist in providing readers and audiences with the cultural, architectural, tonal, and political perspectives that to some degree compose our imaginative conceptions of such cities. In Urban Drama, J. Chris Westgate adopts a perspective on the relations of theater to cityscape that is not as familiar or culturally ingrained as the examples above. Westgate sets out to characterize what he calls the "sociospatial ambitions" of a selection of fairly recent plays that for the most part are set in the embattled, fractured, or ghettoized urban situations of Los Angeles and New York City. Thus the book has a set of potentially important premises, and it does offer some keen perceptions. Westgate's methodology, in brief, is to read his case-study plays against a range of theory (cultural, sociological, and architectural, for the most part) while considering background on the plays themselves—initial and subsequent productions, authorial conversations, and a selection of reviews. His aim is to look closely at the drama of the urban setting in connection with the sorts of disruptions that have characterized American (for the most part) cities in recent decades, upheavals that often have to do with race or, in direct relation, the fragmenting of cities into nationalized neighborhoods demarcated by privilege (or lack of same) as well as by racial identity or status. The result is a mix of perspicacity and laboriousness, as the writing provides enlightened perspectives but is at the same time mired in its own processes, especially in the sort of background (and for these purposes, unnecessary) research that one associates with a dissertation's regulated thoroughness. Urban Drama could, in short, be lighter on its feet and smarter in the bargain. Jose Rivera's Marisol and Tony Kushner's Angels in America are assessed vis-à-vis the implications of their respective urban contexts in the first chapter, with particular attention to homelessness and resonances around the early AIDS crisis, reflected in New York City as well as nationally in the 1980s. Here and elsewhere in the book, Westgate is skillful in depicting how schisms in urban space are reflected dramaturgically in the structures of plays. He does well, too, to emphasize how contestation of urban geography plays out in the lives of characters as well as in the organization of a particular play's action. With respect to Marisol, and with the political (mayoral) campaign against the homeless as background, the author supplies a particularly pointed inquiry into how "[i]deology, geography, and epistemology converge in and about the urban landscape of New York City" (31-32) and of how control of public spaces often reflects violent oppositions. While New York, with its economic strata and heterogeneity, is unlikely ever to become a "tidy" city in the sense of conformity to any shared sense of what is in or out of place, there is pointed commentary here on how drama can reflect powerfully the situations of individual lives in the face of a city that is monolithic in both size and agency. [End Page 122] In the case of Angels in America...

<i>Henry VIII</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Henry VIII Helen L. Hull Henry VIII Presented by the Folger Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. October 12–November 21, 2010. Directed by Robert Richmond. Composition and Sound design by Anthony Cochrane. Scenic Design by Tony Cisek. Costume design by William Ivey Long. Lighting design by Klyph Stanford. Resident Dramaturg Michele Osherow. Production Stage Manager Che Wernsman. Assistant Artistic Producer Beth Emelson. General Manager Giuseppe DeBartolo. Theatre Production Manager Charles Flye. With Ian Merrill Peakes (King Henry), Anthony Cochrane (Cardinal Wolsey), Naomi Jacobsen (Queen Katherine), Karen Peakes (Anne Boleyn), Louise Butelli (Will Sommers playing the role of Surveyor, Cromwell, Old [End Page 242] Lady and others), Lawrence Redmond (Duke of Norfolk), Todd Scofield (Duke of Suffolk), Nathan James Bennett (Secretary to the Cardinal, Lord Chamberlain, Cranmer), Megan Steigerwald (Lady of the Court), and Michael Glenn (Lord Sands, Earl of Surrey, Gentleman). Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII has long been associated with spectacle and pageant. Samuel Pepys, upon watching William Davenant's Restoration staging of the play, noted that he was "mightily pleased, better than [he] ever expected, with the history and shows of it." By 1910, Henry Beerbohm Tree's production necessitated an ensemble of 172 people to enact the play's "shows." The Folger Theater's production also created spectacle, but of an altogether different nature. Rather than emphasize the pomp and circumstance associated with courtly life and politics, Robert Richmond's production dramatized the ways in which courtly life and politics makes a spectacle of the monarch's most intimate relationships—with his family and his closest advisors. Using an expanse of metallic-looking gratework with a patterning that was suggestive of a fleur-de-lis, Tony Cisek's striking set evoked gothic, medieval austerity. The gratework provided a backdrop, and panels of it created walkways upstage left and right. Cisek literally encased the stage's wooden support pillars with the gratework. The set made the most of available space by creating a balcony of sorts; a semi-circular platform extended over the stage, suggestive of a room in a castle's turret. The steely tone of the gratework, along with Klyph Stanford's lighting, which created at times a smoky or hazy effect, evoked the cold, foggy, damp, dimly lit interior of a medieval castle where intrigue and desire would play a part in important affairs of state. At the same time, William Ivey Long's sumptuous costumes conveyed a sense of wealth, calling attention to the superficiality of appearance—all may not be "true," but all certainly was well with the king and the nobility. The rich, muted hues of the gowns worn by Katherine, Elizabeth, and Mary, and the garb worn by Henry VIII and his noblemen were in keeping with a Holbein-esque portrayal of Henry's era, representing the wealth and power of the English monarchs and nobility. The colors contrasted starkly with the brilliant scarlet robes worn by Wolsey and Campeius, which represented wealth and power of a different sort. Robert Richmond's direction attempted to make the play as accessible to a modern audience as possible. He focused the production on the interaction between Henry and Wolsey, Katherine, Anne Boleyn, and [End Page 243] Cranmer, cutting the more marginal roles, such as that of Sir Thomas More. He took us through the play's action—and gossip—at a suitable pace, lingering appropriately for a few moments of grandeur in scenes like Anne's coronation, but generally moving things along quickly. Click for larger view View full resolution (L-R) Anthony Cochrane (Cardinal Wolsey), Ian Merrill Peakes (King Henry VIII), Lawrence Redmond (Duke of Norfolk), and Naomi Jacobson (Queen Katherine) in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, on stage at Folger Theatre through November 21, 2010. Photo courtesy of Carol Pratt. Henry VIII depicts a King who is educated over the course of the play. While trusting of Wolsey in the beginning, Henry is, by the end, disillusioned as to his advisor's motives, and he has claimed the full authority of the monarchical role: it is he who out-maneuvers his advisory council in regard to Cranmer. Ian Merrill Peakes stepped ably into the role of...

A Diasporic Reading of <i>Nathan the Wise</i>

A Diasporic Reading of Nathan the Wise Ned Curthoys (bio) In this essay I analyze the continuing controversy surrounding Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous 1779 drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), an emblematic Enlightenment-era play whose evaluation has been drastically affected by the appalling history of the twentieth century. I argue that the Nazizeit and the Holocaust have produced a caesura in Nathan criticism, a dramatic reversal of the play's critical fortunes. A play that was once celebrated as a harbinger of German-Jewish emancipation, promising the creative participation of Jews in German society, is now harshly criticized and repudiated for the failure of that promise. Recent interpreters of Nathan the Wise, both scholars and playwrights, have been lugubriously mindful of the Nazi assault on the German-Jewish community that was launched in the early 1930s and of the subsequent European Jewish genocide.1 They read the play through the prism of the anachronistic stigma that attaches to German intellectual history, a stigma that has long encouraged post-Holocaust criticism to discuss German literature and culture in teleological ways, mining eighteenth and nineteenth century texts and discourses for attitudes and mentalities that prefigure the disaster of Nazi Germany. As I argue, this reversal in the critical fortunes of Nathan the Wise is by no means a salutary development, inasmuch as it has diminished our ability to appreciate the play's aesthetic merits, the cross-cultural friendship and creative collaboration that helped to produce it, the fertile intellectual milieu that informed it, and the significance of its historical setting in late twelfth-century Jerusalem, a Jerusalem under the benign Muslim sovereignty of the famed Egyptian sultan Saladin. In order to interpret Nathan the Wise, I suggest, a cosmopolitan sensitivity to world-historical time is required, a genealogical sensibility that reads the play as an enthusiastic commentary on the pluralistic and polyglot societies of the Levant and [End Page 70] Moorish Spain, in which a convivencia, a sometimes fragile but productive coexistence of Muslim, Jew, and Christian, was capable of provoking and edifying Christian Europe. Nathan the Wise Lessing's Nathan the Wise is set in approximately the year 1192 CE in Jerusalem during an uneasy peace in the Third Crusade, a peace engineered by the wise sultan Saladin, a much-lauded historical figure who regained Jerusalem from Christian crusaders in 1187 CE. Saladin invited Jews to resettle in Jerusalem under his protection and guaranteed freedom of pilgrimage and worship to Christians. The play's chief protagonists are the wise, generous, and humane Jewish merchant Nathan; the initially anti-Jewish but brave and honorable Christian Knight Templar who, just before the play's action begins, has saved Nathan's adopted daughter Recha from an inferno; and Saladin, the noble-minded ruler of Jerusalem who fears crusading Christians and is tempted to financially exploit Nathan's wealth and credit. The play has an episodic narrative structure and is difficult to classify; it is a "problem play" that is neither comedy, drama, or tragedy. What the play does enact is a sometimes meandering journey toward the reconciliation of three characters, a Muslim, a Jew, and a Christian, whose real human virtues threaten to be overwhelmed by the historical and institutional realities of religious hatred. Nathan the Wise is most famous for the parable of the rings in act 3. The profligately generous Saladin, after successfully waging war to recapture Jerusalem, is heavily in debt and needs credit from the famously wise, humane, and financially astute Jewish merchant Nathan. The parable is Nathan's artful response to Saladin's attempt to put pressure on him by asking him the most fraught question of all, which is the one true religion, and why has a wise and independent man capable of choosing what is best chosen to remain a Jew? Nathan's initial panic articulates the profound dilemma of how to defend one's position in the world in an age that inhibits individual and secular conceptions of identity: I must be on my guard. But how?I can't insist that I'm a Jew; but to [End Page 71] Deny that I'm a Jew would be still worse.Then he...

Revenge of a King (review)

Revenge of a King Presented by Black Theatre Troupe and Blackpoet Ventures at Playhouse on Park, Phoenix, Arizona. January 8-25, 2009. Conceived by Herb Newsome. Music by Derrick Walker. Additional music and lyrics by Jason Yee, Steve Broadnax, Leia Scott and David Mobley. Directed and choreographed by Steve Broadnax. Music directed by Jason Yee. Set by Jeff Lemire. Lighting by Michael J. Eddy. Costumes by Mario Garcia. Sound by David Temby. Scenic art by Ernie Perazza and staff of Just Blaze. With David Tinsley (Hamilton King), Jade Alexis Johnson (Aft Parker), Atllas (Ray, Charles King), Litisha Chappell (Dominique), Lavelle Claiborne (Jean Claude Rameau), Divine (Lady D), Reggie Powell (Lee Parker), Leia Scott (Gertrude), Roosevelt Watts Jr. (Mr. Parker), Hersley Alexander (Bernard), Ricky Araiza (Francisco), Jason Yee (DJ Son), and others. Herb Newsome's Revenge of a King is most easily described as a hiphop adaptation of Hamlet. However, term musical does not fully capture variety of Hip-Hop Theatre, a genre that Steve Broadnax identifies in his program note with the use of graffiti art, deejaying, emceeing or spoken word and dance. Observing power of hip-hop to influence lifestyles, fashion, politics, religion, and theory, Broadnax referred to production as a call out to Hip-Hop generation to take responsibility for its voice. As Black Theatre Troupe's production demonstrated, though, voice of hip-hop generation is really a multiplicity of different voices. Indeed, production was successful precisely because it was truly collaborative: starting from a script that Newsome first wrote in 2004 and subsequently revised, cast members contributed original poetry, music, and lyrics, and Newsome further revised script during rehearsal process. The result was both a celebration and a critical examination of various art forms that constitute hip-hop culture. Revenge of a King's Hamlet character was Hamilton King, a college-aged youth living on Denmark Avenue. In a quick, tense scene that started play's action, Hamilton's father was murdered by Jean Claude Rameau while trying to stop Jean Claude's gang from raping a young girl. Jean Claude quickly married Hamilton's mother, Gertrude. In addition to revenge plot, play gave equal weight to Hamilton's conflicted relationship with sixteen-year-old Aft Parker, who had aborted their unplanned child without consulting him. In first act, characters were busy in preparation for a block party, which would feature dances choreographed by Aft and a freestyle MC battle (an improvisational rap competition). The second act opened with Hamilton asking his friend Ray to incorporate verses accusing Jean Claude of murder into MC battle. This emphasis on block party set up expectation (familiar from mainstream hip-hop movies such as 8 Mile [2002], Drumline [2002], and Step Up [2006]) that narrative would culminate in a virtuoso competitive performance. Instead, Jean Claude fled MC battle, and remaining scenes resembled their analogues in Hamlet much more closely than those of first act. As a result, parallels to Shakespeare felt more forced in these scenes. Hamilton mistakenly stabbed Afi's father, prompting Afi's suicide and her brother Lee's quest for revenge. In climactic confrontation, Lee shot Hamilton through Gertrude, who was trying to break up fight. The wounded Hamilton then stabbed Lee and shot Jean Claude. Some aspects of plot were left vague. For example, set, costumes, and references to pop culture in dialogue sometimes suggested New York in 1980s and sometimes suggested a present-day metropolis. Also, Jean Claude was identified as a Councilman, but relationship between his political career and his role as a gang leader was unclear, as was his relationship with Hamilton's father. Ultimately, though, such questions were beside point as pleasure of watching Revenge of a King did not derive primarily from its mimetic realism but from its self-reflexive showcasing of hip-hop art forms. …

"Impoveryshyd and mad a beggar": Poverty and Widowhood in John Bale's King Johan

In King Johan, John Bale adopts the convention of the widow as member of the deserving, loyal, and obedient poor, staging Ynglond as a destitute widow in need of poor relief. In doing so, Bale has Ynglond deploy a powerful contemporary discursive strategy contingent on her status as petitioning widow. Johan's ultimate recognition of Ynglond as a member of the deserving poor and his dismissal of Sedicyon's attempts to discredit the integrity of Ynglond's poverty is thus central to the play's action. By grounding Ynglond's supplication to Johan in an ethical and moral appeal for the material relief of the deserving poor, Bale posits Ynglond's widowhood as a recognizable model of political subjectivity which rejects armed insurrection and rebellion.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (review)

Reviewed by: A Midsummer Night's Dream Lawrence Manley A Midsummer Night's Dream Presented by the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut. September 14–October 9, 2005. Directed by Kim Rubenstein. Designed by G. W. Mercier. Lighting by Joel Moritz. Original Music and Sound by John Gromada. Dramaturgy by Beatrice Basso. With Christina Rouner (Hippolita, Titania), Tom Nelis (Theseus, Oberon), Mia Barron (Hermia), Markus Potter (Demetrius), Jason Denuszek (Lysander), Stephen Lee Anderson (Egeus, Peter Quince, Fairy), Bill Raymond (Bottom), Raymond McAnally (Snug, Fairy), Carman Lacivita (Flute, Fairy), Brad Love (Puck, Philostrate), and Diane Mair and Jenny Weaver (Fairies). A Midsummer Night's Dream is a notoriously sturdy play, rich in possibilities for a wide range of interpretations and effects. This recent Long Wharf Theatre production, part of the Shakespeare for New Generation series sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, ambitiously took on the difficult challenge of making the play accessible to audiences through broad humor while striving to summon to the stage the heavenly influences through which, the play's poetry suggests, love draws its power to transform. Director Kim Rubenstein (whose previous credits include Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar for the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre) collaborated with designer G. W. (Skip) Mercier on a concept that situated the play's action in a magical universe. In Mercier's design, an enormous circular cutout in the rear wall of the stage was combined with an even larger circular stage which, seeming to have fallen from heaven to earth, opened a portal through the sky to worlds beyond. Into this portal, actors rolled the oversized disc of a brilliant full moon. All of these circular forms suggested analogies among, and possible unities within, the play's different worlds; but the play's action and movements traversed the spaces between these forms—the void beyond and behind the moon out of which the fairies emerged, the airy space in front of the moon's face where the fairies passed in "E.T."-like silhouette, and the foreground forest of the stage, illumined by the changing colors and intensity of moonlight. [End Page 96] The spatial possibilities for interaction among the play's worlds were reinforced by this production's imaginative doubling, which was superbly executed by the relatively small cast of 14. The doubling of Hippolita/Titania (Christina Rouner) with Theseus/Oberon (Tom Nelis) followed a fairly common practice, but to exceptionally fine effect. As the stiff and strained relationship of Hippolita and Theseus in the play's opening scene gave way under moonlight to the wilder and weirder pairing of fairy queen and king, love's magic began to work its charms. But this doubling worked most powerfully in the second shift of roles, as the brilliantly played reconciliation of Titania with Oberon helped to carry the night's magic into the morning hunt of Hippolita and Theseus. Under the spell of the fairy reconciliation, Theseus' praise of the "musical confusion" of his hounds was answered not (as is often the case) by the edgy defiance of Hippolita's memory of hunting with Hercules and Cadmus, but by her rapturous account of the "musical . . . discord," the discordia concors that turns mere confusion into "such sweet thunder." Supporting the production's own discordia concors was the doubling of the mechanicals as fairies, which created an amusing contrast between these oafs in diminutive wings and the more fantastic dancing and graceful acrobatics of their two petite companions, played by the non-doubling Diane Mair and Jenny Weaver. The finest of the mechanicals (and fairies) was the outsized Snug (Raymond McAnally), an innocent giant whose meek manner, shamefast gestures, and soft, lisping Tennessee twang made him an endearing joiner and a pussy-cat lion. Somewhat less successful were Brad Love's Puck, lacking in both animation and mischief, and Bill Raymond's Bottom, played with an energy and crazed abandon that fully exploited the role's broad humor but failed to rise to the more delicate moments of Bottom's night with Titania or his recollection of his "most rare vision." Revved up by Bottom from the beginning of the play, the mechanicals did not have quite enough left in...

Then and Now: Staging Violence in Times of War

Then and Now:Staging Violence in Times of War Sharon L. Green (bio) When I decided to direct Timberlake Wertenbaker's play The Love of the Nightingale at Davidson College, I knew that the production would open two weeks before a presidential election, but I did not think the United States would still be at war. Wertenbaker's play, first produced in 1988, is a feminist retelling of the Greek myth of two sisters, Procne and Philomele, and uses various meta-theatrical devices to remind the audience of the contemporary relevance of this ancient myth. At its core, this play admonishes those who remain silent in the face of violence, horror, and tyranny. At a moment in our nation's history when blind faith in both the war and the U.S. president defined patriotism, the play's message seemed eerily timely. Nightingale is a beautiful, brutal, and complex play. Based upon the myth of two Athenian sisters, one of whom marries Tereus, the king of Thrace (depicted as a strange and distant land) and the other of whom is raped and brutalized by that same man, the play weaves together various dramatic devices that yield a story too complex to be reduced to a single theme. As I did my preparatory work for rehearsals in the summer of 2004 and sought unifying images, ideas, and themes that would resonate with the mostly undergraduate student audience, I found myself returning to the urgency that Wertenbaker placed on the simple act of asking questions and the culpability of those who remain silent when violence whirls around them. These are exactly the things that Americans are being encouraged to do right now, I thought to myself. Those who ask questions regarding the justification of going to war are being demonized as un-American. The environment this play suggests is the breeding ground for escalating violence is exactly the environment our nation is being encouraged to create. This prospect frightened me and I saw an opportunity to problematize it in the production. Borrowing a convention from Greek theatre, Nightingale includes two choruses. The male chorus never becomes explicitly involved in the action of the play, but rather behaves like "embedded reporters" ostensibly removed enough from the action to comment upon it but never empowered to intervene. The female chorus consists of the women of the northern city of Thrace, who are integral to the play's action, but who also seem incapable of affecting the outcome of events that are deemed inescapable. Because the chorus in Greek theatre is traditionally situated as the "ideal spectator" reacting to events as the playwright hopes the audience will, it was here that I felt the play's radical political potential lay. [End Page 159] The political events swirling around us as we rehearsed—the war, the U.S. presidential election, and the way in which the rhetoric of both intertwined—prompted my directorial choice to focus the audience's attention on the ways in which blind faith in leadership and the failure to ask questions can beget horrific violence. My work with the actors in the "male" chorus was most affected by these events. First, I cast two male and one female actors as the revamped "fe/male" chorus to prevent making a gendered commentary on the dangers of remaining silent. To emphasize the ways in which violence is perpetuated by silence, the fe/male chorus remained onstage throughout act one, often lurking in the shadows of the stage, peering around the scenery, passively watching the events taking place around them. During one scene a member of the chorus left the stage and descended the stairs that led to the auditorium. He spent the rest of that scene walking, slowly, from stage left to stage right through the auditorium, watching the scene taking place before him from the same perspective as the audience; for a few moments they shared the same gaze. While the set and costume design evoked a timeless mythological place, the fe/male chorus was dressed in contemporary urban garb. The goal was to make them look hip but not flashy. They are intended to be the intermediaries between the action onstage and...