Public Theatre Research Articles

The Rhetoric of Healthcare and the Moral Debate About Theatre-Funded Hospitals in Early Modern Spain.

While early modern Spain may seem a world away, it is an extremely rich and relevant context for gaining a better understanding of the Rhetoric of Health, specifically the power of metaphor, in the related spheres of policy-making and public debate. It was a time and place in which the urban populace's physical well-being depended upon the fortunes of theatrical performances due to a system of alms for hospitals driven by ticket receipts. Anti-theatricalists argued that the immoral nature of theatrical performances made them spiritually and medically detrimental to society. Pro-theatricalists argued that plays were always a public good on balance because they raised much-needed funds for hospitals. Instead of producing a conflict between morality and public health, each side reinforced their connection until the two topics became nearly inseparable in the sphere of public debate. While pro-theatricalists mainly stayed with their arguments about funding hospitals, anti-theatricalists developed a new strategy of literalising the metaphor of theatre as a "plague of the republic" and arguing that immoral entertainment brought literal disease to the populace as a punishment from God. This exemplifies Stephen Pender's observation of how, in an early modern medical context, "Rhetoric as a way of perceiving probabilities and adjusting one's argument to the audience and circumstance offers a model of ethical action and interaction". This article is organised chronologically to track specific adjustments to a specific public-health debate that rely upon moral metaphors of medicine. Each side wrangled over these metaphors in an effort to break a deadlock in a public-health policy debate with entertainment, finance, and morality at its centre. By the end of the seventeenth century, anti-theatricalists finally found their best rhetorical weapon in the literalisation of the "plague of the republic" metaphor, but it only offered a short-term solution to banning theatre contingent upon the ebb and flow of epidemics. Simultaneously, the finance structure of funding hospitals began to erase the role of hospitals from the longstanding debate about the morality of public theatre. The case of early modern Spain provides valuable lessons about the power of metaphor in the Rhetoric of Healthcare that are still applicable today.

‘Imitate the Motions of Those that are Infected’: Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure

Abstract Despite a Restoration vogue for adapted—or ‘improved’—productions of Shakespeare’s plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost (c.1594) fell out of the theatrical repertoire after 1660. The play’s immediate afterlife exists solely in Margaret Cavendish’s inversion of the play in her closet drama The Convent of Pleasure (1668). This essay argues that both plays respond to the virulent plague outbreaks which immediately preceded them in their depiction of single-sex cloistering, and engage with contemporaneous debates around the efficacy of household quarantine as a public health response. Love’s Labour’s Lost offers a complicated defence of public theatre in the face of quarantine restrictions which saw the playhouses forcibly closed for 11 months. Convent repurposes Shakespeare’s portrayal of infection risk in a public theatre for the closet environment. But transferring a play predicated upon the fear of contagious bodies from the commercial stage to the ‘Stage of Imagination’ has potentially dangerous consequences for its readers. Cavendish’s vitalist materialism renders the recreation of the public stage within the mind an act of potential self-harm. Yet Cavendish’s adaptation of a Shakespearean play preoccupied with plague allows her to think through her own theory of imitation as the driving force behind both contagion and sympathetic inclination.

استخدام العناصر الواقعية في هنرك ابسن بيت الدمى

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is considered Norway's most distinguished playwrights, besides being the father of modern drama. He started handling realistic themes around the last quarter of the nineteenth century after he had given up writing romantic plays. He turned to the problem play with The Pillars of Society (1877) and kept tackling realistic subject-matters especially in A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), and The Wild Duck (1884). In these particular plays, he relentlessly attacked the false values of society which made many people suffer. He used the prose dialogue in his realistic plays to replace the unrealistic elements of the previous romantic plays. In the realistic plays, Ibsen also subordinated action to thought since ideas are more important than action in this kind of drama. Thus, the action is more psychological than physical in A Doll's House, which is the central notion in this article. At the same time Ibsen's realistic plays came as a surprise to the people who were influenced by the existing conventions. It is no wonder that such plays were not appreciated by the censors and banned in some European countries, especially at the first time of their appearance. Ibsen surprised Europe when he volunteered to speak of subjects no other playwright dared to speak so openly and fearlessly. Thus Ibsen's Ghosts could not be staged in England until 1891, ten years after its introduction in Norway. It was J. T. Grein who helped to stage the English version of Ghosts in The Independent Theatre, a private theatre, in order to escape the censorship imposed on the public theatres. The play was already translated into English by William Archer. The subject-matter of Ghosts revolves on a hereditary issue when a son inherits a venereal disease from his father, and also on a conventional situation when a wife is forced to remain with an immoral husband whom she hates.

공연장 재무적 성과의 연구현황과 방향성 고찰 -공공극장을 중심으로-

공연장 재무적 성과의 연구현황과 방향성 고찰 -공공극장을 중심으로-

“Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors

Abstract Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2010, explores the history of Black representation in the theater and, subsequently, the performance of Black identity in the US through its depiction of a complex and contradictory minstrelsy that cannot easily be classified as satirical or subversive. Generating what Jacobs-Jenkins has called “wrong laughter” through contradiction, ambiguity, and ambivalence, Neighbors engages the unstable space of the comic grotesque in order to open up pathways for something new to emerge. In this play, the figure of the clown – a grotesque outlaw who moves between, within, across, and beyond boundaries – becomes a key destabilizing figure as the grotesque body becomes a site for transformation through its contradictions, oozing inconsistency and excess, and allowing a potential space for regeneration and renewal through instability and failure when the stable and the rational have failed. In its embrace of clowning and the comic grotesque, Neighbors questions the stable notion of “community,” particularly in terms of racial and historical identity, and exposes the contradictions of closed constructions, creating a space beyond the boundaries of rational discourse that may begin to engage a more complex reality.

Applied Theatre: Research-Based Theatre, or Theatre-Based Research? Exploring the Possibilities of Finding Social, Spatial, and Cognitive Justice in Informal Housing Settlements in India, or Tales from the Banyan Tree

This article draws on a twenty-year relationship of short-term interventions with Dalit communities living in informal settlements, sub-cities and urban villages in Mumbai, that have sought to create public theatre events based on research by and with communities that celebrate, problematise and interrogate sustainable urban living. In looking back over the developments and changes to our working methods in Mumbai, I explore how the projects priorities the roles of the community as both researchers and artists. I consider where a specific applied theatre project, which focuses on site specific storytelling with Dalit communities in Worli Koliwada and Dharavi, functions on a continuum of interactive, participatory, and emancipatory practice, research and performance. Applied Theatre practices should not and cannot remain static, they need to be constantly reformed and as practitioners and researchers we need to constantly re-examine the ways in which we work. This chapter poses two central questions: firstly, can this long-term partnership between practitioners, researchers and artists from the UK and India working with community members genuinely be a space for co-creating knowledge and theatre? And secondly, if so, is this Theatre-based Research or Research Based Theatre? I interrogate Applied Theatre’s potential to create a space of cognitive justice, which must be the next step for applied theatre, along-side its more widely accepted aims of searching for social and spatial justice and which places the community as both artists and researchers. The Dalit social reality is one of oppression, based on three axes: social, economic and gender. The chapter explores how working as co-researchers and the public performance of their stories has been a form of ‘active citizenship’ for these participants and is a key part of their strategy in their demand for policy changes. In looking forward I ask how working in international partnerships with community members can promote cognitive justice and go beyond a merely participatory practice. I consider why it is vital for the field that applied theatre practice includes partners from both the global south and north working together to co-create knowledge, new methods of practice to ensure an applied theatre knowledge democracy. In doing so I will discuss if and how this work might be considered to be Theatre-based Research.

Staging Presence for Spatial Dignity

Abstract In exploring the figuration and physical presence of Little Amal, a 12-foot Syrian girl puppet and main character in a moving piece of epic public theater titled The Walk, I consider the dueling realities of welcomeness and unwantedness, hypervisibility and invisibility, spatial dignity and spatial denial faced by refugee girls, real and represented. Accessing a feminist refugee epistemology, I position Amal in contrast to yet another symbol of refugee girlhood—popstar M.I.A.—to move away from the typical simultaneously superfluous and stunted representations of sanctuary-seeking girls and toward a provocation that accepts their creative and complex lifeworlds.

‘Changed to another form’

Abstract This article demonstrates how dramatic censorship in London's public theatres necessitated a kind of collaborative playwriting with extra-authorial labourers. In the playbook manuscript of Sir John van Olden Barnauelt, the Master of the Revels, Sir George Buc, and the playhouse scribe, Ralph Crane, engaged in a collaborative process that resulted in the most censored extant dramatic document of the early modern English theatres. The censorship is revealing of how political drama was interpreted by its first readers – it was Buc's exegetical interpretation of Barnauelt as anti-monarchical that led to his collaborative revisions and the play's restructuring. This style of censorship also has wider implications. If almost every play was read and revised by the Master of the Revels and perhaps edited by a scribe, then most early modern drama was collaboratively written.

Viral Interstitiality and Unlikely Resources: Gender and Labour in Turkish Public Theatre During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The growing literature on Covid-19 and theatre has demonstrated how the pandemic has intensified gendered precarities in theatrical labour.1 However, the pandemic has also provided feminist theatre makers with unexpected or unlikely resources, albeit with limitations. The Istanbul Municipal Theatre's (İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Şehir Tiyatroları or İBBŞT) production of Melek that premiered in 2020 is an indicative example of such rare and largely invisible cases of pandemic theatre. Critically engaging with the archives and repertoires of tuberculosis (TB) melodrama and the Turkish lives of the genre, Melek conducts an experiential mapping of the performativity of death and the porous borders between everyday performance and artistic performance. The production offered independent feminist theatre practitioners, who otherwise maintain a precarious existence in Turkey's theatre world, access to new spaces, resources and audiences. Combining archival with ethnographic research, I will demonstrate how, in the case of Melek, the intersections between actual and fictive viral contagion – what I define as viral interstitiality – constitute inclusive economies amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. In somatics, the interstitial is theorized and enacted as suspensions of static schisms that shape relational empowerment.2 Drawing upon this grasp of the interstitial as connective thresholds, viral interstitiality sheds light on the practices and the economies of care that emerge from the porous dynamism between the viral and the theatrical.

Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue. By Julia Prest

<i>Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue</i>. By Julia Prest

The Public Theater and WNYC Studios, producers; Saheem, Ali, dir. Romeo y Julieta

The Public Theater and WNYC Studios, producers; Saheem, Ali, dir. Romeo y Julieta

Encountering Road Show

The author considers her experience as the lighting designer for John Doyle’s production of the Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Road Show at the Public Theater in New York City in 2008. She reflects on the experience of her life and career as an immigrant designer in the American theatre in relationship to the story of the musical, and relates her experience of the rehearsal and technical process of the production. The author considers her relationship to the American musical through the experience of designing this one particular Sondheim musical and explores various relationships to America, to the musical and to theatre in capitalism in the context of particular songs from the musical.

Арбузовская студия (1938–1945): гайдебуровский след

This research focuses on the influence that the pedagogical work of P.P. Gaideburov and N.F. Skarskaya, the directors of the Peredvizhny Public Theatre, had in the 1920s on the activities of the Moscow State Theatre Studio run by Aleksei Arbuzov and Valentin Pluchek (or, as it is more informally known, the Arbuzov Studio). The Peredvizhny Theatre existed in St. Petersburg — Petrograd — Leningrad for 23 years. During this period, its directors Pavel Gaideburov and Nadezhda Skarskaya trained many students, including the playwright Aleksei Arbuzov. At the age of 17, he was trained at the Palaestra, a studio of the Peredvizhny Theatre, in the socalled “Skarskaya method”, a system of developing creative thinking in actors through improvisation. In the late 1930s, A.N. Arbuzov and V.N. Pluchek reproduced this method in their own way while working with the students of the Arbuzov studio. The result was the play A City at Dawn, telling the story of the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, written collectively by the students on the basis of improvisational etudes. The article is the first to publish the exercises of N.F. Skarskaya’s method, practiced in the Palaestra, as well as the sketches of the Arbuzov studio. This allows us to analyse how the memory of the destroyed culture was preserved in the USSR during the period of the Great Terror (both the Peredvizhny Theatre and the Palaestra were liquidated in 1928), as well as to build a sequence from the theatrical experiments of the Silver Age to the playwrights of the Thaw.

An Outsider's Inside Notes on the New York Public Theater's Romeo Y Julieta

Abstract: Early in the COVID-19 lockdown, my 2017 translation of Romeo and Juliet was used by the New York Public Theater for a bilingual podcast called Romeo Y Julieta that made no linguistic or ethnic distinctions between the households. As a stage translator, my work is generally informed by the Mexican praxis of Spanish. However, providing the Spanish text for more diverse audiences made me both a distant and a close agent in projects approaching Shakespeare in unorthodox fashion within swiftly mutable identitarian contexts. Moreover, I was the only agent not working in/from the United States. This essay discusses the demands that this multicultural endeavor, its diverse performers, and its potential publics made on my craft, and addresses the outcome and its public reception in a context where my native and acquired tongues operate at once in loving sync and conflict—a world in which I do not belong, and yet I do.

"A Fair House built on another man's ground": Public Shakespeare at Seneca Village

Abstract: Though scholars have sought to highlight how artists employ Shakespeare as an instrument of radical resistance, this essay reconsiders the relationship between Shakespeare and artistic subversion. We use Anna Watkins Fisher's concept of parasitic resistance to frame our analysis of the Public Theater's 2021 adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor . Rather than advocate for Shakespeare as either complicit or resistant to the corporatization of public theater, we suggest a spectrum of possibilities within this binary, possibilities which operationalize tactics that strategically place complicity and resistance in relation to one another. Merry Wives thus illuminates how performance can subtly subvert the intertwined pressures of capitalism and white patriarchy by appropriating and wielding the tools of performance itself, the specific cultural authority of the Shakespeare system, and the linguistic and artistic cultural capital imagined as inherent to that system, in order to lay bare some of the palimpsest historicities of settler colonialism.

Teatro San Cassiano in Opera History

The study is devoted to the first publicly accessible opera house Teatro San Cassiano (Venice, 1637), the establishment of which became a cardinal factor in the transformation of opera from aristocratic court entertainment to creative industry. The author considers the issues related to the history of the theater’s construction and the actions of its owners, the Venetian nobles, the Tron brothers, aimed at turning opera into a profitable business. The article reveals possible prototypes and reasons for the constructive solutions in the theater, in particular the boxes and the U-shaped audience hall. The author gives the parametric characteristics of the components of the Teatro San Cassiano building — the stage, the audience hall, and the boxes. It is noted that the tiered Theatro San Cassiano became a prototype for other theatres not only in Venice, but also in other cities of Italy and Europe. Thus, among the Venetian theaters of the 17th century, the public theaters, such as SS Giovanni e Paolo (1638), Novissimo (1640), San Moise (1640), and San Giovanni Crisostomo (1678), were inspired by San Cassiano; outside Venice there were Teatro Falcone (Genoa, 1652) and Teatro Tordinona (Rome, 1671). The article emphasizes market competition that was one of the key factors in the dynamic spread of opera and the formation of opera infrastructure in Europe. After the establishment of San Cassiano, the development of opera acquired a clearly defined vector: from elitist entertainment to creative industry.

Staging Theatre Historiography: The Afterlives of Ottoman Armenian Drama in Contemporary Turkish Public Theatre

In the last twenty years, memory has gained broader attention in Turkey's social, cultural and political arena. In line with this movement, independent and subsidized theatres produced plays engaging with Armenian history through diverse political and aesthetic agendas. Among these works, public and state theatre productions remained mostly invisible in theatre scholarship due to their ambiguous position that does not directly align with the framework of political theatre. This article examines the adaptation of the Ottoman Armenian playwright Hagop Baronian's Adamnapuyj aravelyan (1868) as Şark Dişçisi (The Oriental Dentist) (2011) by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality City Theatres (İBBŞT). While promoting confrontation with the past, Şark Dişçisi eliminates the crucial political insights of its source text and their ramifications for contemporary demands for historical justice regarding the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The intersection of revisionist theatre historiography and broader political dynamics in the adaptation process reveals the ambivalences of post-Genocide memory work in Turkey.

The Efficiency of the Performing Arts: Evidence from Data Envelopment Analysis for Russian Theaters

This article addresses the problem of efficiency measurement in the performing arts by investigating the highly heterogeneous Russian theater market. We adopt data envelopment analysis and explore efficiency drivers, focusing on two groups of public theaters, classical academic and leading regional theaters. The scope of programming, observed through touring and new productions, is shown to have a negative impact on efficiency. The implications highlight the importance of accounting for the sector’s heterogeneity for more accurate and meaningful measurements of efficiency. The results can inform decisions on programming and resource allocation to optimize both artistic and financial goals.

Re-Imagining Euripides’ Medea : Pre-Colonial Indigenous Elements in Alfaro’s Mojada

Abstract: This essay examines pre-colonial Mesoamerican elements in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada , highlighting significant differences between the recently published script of the play and a version produced at the Public Theater in New York City, which I attended in summer 2019, to argue that the Public Theater production questions whether Indigenous myth and ritual can persist and function effectively in the United States in the face of the brutal and dehumanizing forces of capitalism and racism. This essay contributes to discussions of the ways in which theatrical representations of Indigeneity function across different Latinx cultures and even different versions of the same play.

“Sailing in this salt flood”: The Fluid Dynamics of Affect in Shakespeare’s Public Theaters

“Sailing in this salt flood”: The Fluid Dynamics of Affect in Shakespeare’s Public Theaters