Regional Theatre Research Articles

The O'Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater

The O'Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater

Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater As Seen by “Chicago Tribune” Critics by Chris Jones

Reviewed by: Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater As Seen by “Chicago Tribune” Critics by Chris Jones Stuart J. Hecht Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater As Seen by “Chicago Tribune” Critics. By Chris Jones. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 357 pp. + 16 illustrations. $27.50 cloth. Chris Jones’s anthology may not be scholarly, but it is valuable to theatre scholars. The lead theatre reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, Jones was able to plumb that newspaper’s archives in search of landmark reviews from the paper’s mid-nineteenth-century beginnings to the present, from which he selected one hundred and one, most not seen since their original publication. Jones’s collection includes reviews of both homegrown and touring productions, representative reviews from several generations of Tribune critics, and long-forgotten accounts of performances by prominent theatre artists and even some celebrities better known for their film and television work. (Imagine seeing Waiting for Godot with Harvey Korman as Didi and Mike Nichols as Lucky!) Jones includes vivid accounts of key events, most notably the 1904 Iroquois Theatre fire. Unlike many historical accounts of theatre in given cities, here the reader sits right beside the critic, experiencing memorable moments up close. Jones’s book serves as a nice companion to Richard Christiansen’s A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago, much as a baseball color commentator complements the ongoing spiel of a play-by-play announcer: Jones’s book is like the former, providing contextualizing anecdotes that enliven and heighten the stakes of Christiansen’s narrative. Combined, the two books trumpet the theatrical highs and lows of the proverbial “Second City.” Chicago has long been a generator of noteworthy theatre, sending its artists and productions off to the East Coast hub for national consumption and cultural [End Page 343] validation. For example, Chicago Little Theatre artists Susan Glaspell and husband Jig Cook subsequently migrated east to help found the Provincetown Players. Similarly, Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht relocated to New York City to extend his playwriting, and later screenwriting, career. Chicago nurtured Tennessee Williams, invented Second City improvisation, generated the satire Chicago and the musical Grease, and still later birthed the imaginings of director Robert Falls and the acting ensemble Steppenwolf. In the last three decades, no fewer than five of Chicago’s roughly three hundred theatres have won a Tony Award as best regional theatre. Despite its prominence, relatively little has been written about Chicago’s profound theatrical contributions. Beyond Richard Christiansen’s aforementioned history, Harvey Young and Queen Meccasia Zabriskie coauthored Black Theater is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater and Dance, a collection of interviews with some of the city’s most notable modern black theatre and dance artists. The story of Second City’s improvisational comedy has been well documented by Jeffrey Sweet and Janet Coleman. But Bigger, Brighter, Louder still fills an important historical niche. Jones organizes his reviews chronologically, bringing to light a progression of memorable events in Chicago theatre history. It opens with an 1853 notice of a show at Mr. Rice’s theatre and follows that with an 1868 review of Joseph Jefferson III as Rip Van Winkle—though still fledgling, nineteenth-century Chicago was a destination for touring stars. Subsequent reviews then chart major Chicago theatrical activity up to the 2012 Robert Falls production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, restaged in the spring of 2015 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Intriguing nuggets are found along the way: the 1890 Chicago debut of A Doll’s House; the original (Chicago-generated) production of The Wizard of Oz, from 1902; pans of both Tobacco Road and Waiting for Lefty; first looks at The Glass Menagerie, All My Sons, Waiting for Godot and Long Day's Journey into Night; debuts of American Buffalo and Working, The Grapes of Wrath and Gem of the Ocean, Clybourne Park and many more. Here is indeed a firsthand account of American theatre as seen through Midwest journalistic eyes. Jones’s book also accounts for several generations of noteworthy reviewers. Percy Hammond started off at the Tribune before heading...

The Long View of World Theatre History

The mere chronicling of events is the barest sort of history, for it makes little effort to understand why those events happened when and as they did. This chapter explores world theatre history’s temporal dimension by using Fernand Braudel’s concept of the longue duree. Given that this concept might seem to render human actions irrelevant, the chapter also takes up the issue of agency, arguing that although people operate within the historical contexts of the longue duree, they are the makers of theatre history. As aspects of the longue duree, the chapter discusses three kinds of structures that provide long-lived contexts in which theatre artists work: theatre forms themselves; theatrical structures within regional theatre complexes; and structures of the societal context such as language, religion, and ethnicity/race. It then discusses three long-term historical trends that have directly and indirectly impacted theatre history: technological expansion; increasing societal interactions; and accelerating urbanization.

On Practicing an Independent African American Cinema: An Interview with Kevin Willmott

On Practicing an Independent African American Cinema: An Interview with Kevin Willmott De Witt Douglas Kilgore (bio) During the past two decades Kevin Willmott has occupied a unique place in independent filmmaking, as an African American writer and director. His work is guided by the idea that cinema can inform as well as entertain, illuminating our world in ways that are both unexpected and pleasurable. He believes that filmmaking can do good by allowing us to remember what we may have forgotten, changing how we see the world, and making it a better place in which to live. As a maker of independent feature films Willmott’s approach is to use familiar film genres such as the western, comedy, science fiction, and the sports film to tell stories driven by the perspectives and experiences of African and Native Americans. Thus he has created a body of work that establishes a space in which American visual culture is diverted from its persistent emphasis on celebrating the political and social investments of deracinated white men. Films such as The Battle for Bunker Hill (2008), The Only Good Indian (2009), Destination Planet Negro (2013), and his best-known work, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004), demonstrate both his range and his commitment to reclaiming American history through the actions and voices of its minority actors using the traditional storytelling strategies of mainstream cinema. This interview took place following the 2013 retrospective “An African American Independent: The Films of Kevin Willmott,” presented by the Black Film Center/Archive and the Indiana University Cinema. In it, the film-maker discusses the nature of his work and why it emerges from locations and commitments largely foreign to Hollywood. Removing himself from the film industry’s institutional constraints has freed him to nurture an alternative supported by his residence in Kansas as a film professor and his history as a native of the state. As a result, his films may be seen as the cinematic equivalent of a regional theater, using local artistic and technical resources [End Page 95] to create stories that reflect perspectives and experiences immediate to the people of his state. Willmott sees his regional aesthetic as part of an active conversation about race and history with his colleagues. This exchange prioritizes the challenge of creating feature films that can attract audiences poorly served by more orthodox motion pictures. An additional challenge, Willmott notes, is both seeking and creating those audiences. That has meant making movies that mount serious engagements with the pattern and texture of black lives within the conventions that mainstream filmmaking have made both familiar and pleasurable. It is a strategy that leverages the popular forms American filmgoers share and makes them fit containers for the actualities of American political and social life. The experiences recalled and the lessons learned are thereby made attractive and, possibly, more effective than the straightforward social problem or message film. Thus Willmott’s broader ambition is to make the conversations about race that are a part of his production process an entertaining element of what an audience will enjoy. Since this interview was conducted, Willmott has released Jayhawkers (2013), a sports drama focused on the University of Kansas men’s basketball team in the civil rights era, and Chi-raq (2015), a Chicago-based comedy, co-written with Spike Lee, that uses Aristophanes’s Lysistrata to mount an incisive critique of American gun violence. De Witt Douglas Kilgore: Most of your films use Kansas, its physical and visual presence and its history, as a place worthy of interest. Could you tell us about why you decided that Los Angeles or New York wasn’t the best venue for your work? Kevin Willmott: For me it was a question of productivity. I think that a large part of the decision to go the path I chose was based on my vision; whether my idea of things would ever become real in motion pictures. It didn’t seem to me like it would, and you know one thing I really kind of believe in a lot is that you have to at some point in your life figure out: “OK, so if I’m...

A Conversation with Brooke Ciardelli

Brooke Ciardelli was the founding artistic director of Northern Stage, a regional nonprofit theater located on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, where she directed over sixty productions. Brooke has been honored by the New England Theatre Conference's Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater three times, for All My Sons (2004), Les Miserables (2008), and Hamlet (2009). She directed a staged reading of Arthur Miller's then-unpublished Resurrection Blues with the playwright himself in residence. She has directed Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and worked with playwright Sonja Linden on the American Premiere of The Strange Passenger.Ciardelli has also directed regional premieres of Wit, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Pride's Crossing, and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, as well as a significant number of large-scale musicals. As a creator, Ciardelli has adapted a number of classical pieces for the stage including Ovid's Metamorphoses, O Myths, and The Shrew Tamer by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She is working on a stage adaptation of Boccaccio's Decameron for international production.Ciardelli received the Miller Estate's permission to create and direct a Muslim/Syrian version of A View from the Bridge. The production received its world premiere in a staged reading on Saturday evening, October 17, 2015, at the Arthur Miller Centennial Conference at St. Francis College. This interview took place February 6, 2015.Stephen Marino: Welcome. On behalf of the readership of The Arthur Miller Journal, I would like to thank you for your willingness to be here today to discuss your insight in directing Miller plays, particularly this exciting, new version of A View from the Bridge.I would like to start with your experiences as the founding artistic director at Northern Stage. You certainly cast a wide net in the plays you selected up there. I don't know if eclectic is quite the right word, but you staged classic tragedies from Agamemnon to Macbeth; many other plays are drawn from the twentieth-century dramatic repertoire, and you have done a fair share of musicals. I would like to know how, as an artistic director, you select those plays. Then how does that affect your work as a director working in such a mixture of styles and genres?Brooke Ciardelli: I do plays that I love. What I call great plays. If you are an artistic director, you are hired for your taste, your personal taste. So you have to start there, read the plays, and wow-give this as a present to the audience every night. It's a feeling of when you buy someone a really special birthday gift and it's wrapped up in the box. You know what's in it; you know how much they're going to like it, but they haven't opened it yet. So that's what I want to find in a play. To have that feeling about it. I ran the company for sixteen years and we did between seven and eight shows every year.SM: That is a lot of shows.BC: Yes, that is a lot of shows. They all ran three weeks; some of them ran as long as five. The area where the theater is located is fairly rural with a very large subscriber base. It is only one of four theaters in America that has such a small population density yet produces its own work at this level, which some may argue doesn't work. You don't have quite enough people.SM: So how do the preferences of your rural, but engaged, audience affect your choices?BC: It's a very smart community. My audience base did not grow up in the area. They maybe went to Dartmouth; maybe they wintered and did ski vacations in Vermont. They went out, lived their lives all over the world, and chose to come back and retire. Many of them are fairly young. It meant that they had seen world-class culture offerings and had established levels of expectations. When you deal with a subscriber audience-we had a very large subscriber base-that is very good for a theater. One person buys every show in the beginning of the season so the plays are not reviewed. …

Crowdsourcing Penelope: Margaret Atwood, the Coen Brothers, Richard Linklater

Beginning with Margaret Atwood's novella The Penelopiad and its staging in regional and experimental theaters in Canada, the U.K., and around the world, this essay traces a long history of network mediation for the Odyssey, beginning with the performative decisions made by itinerant rhapsodes, who variously selected, arranged, and circulated the Homeric epics in ancient Greece, and extending well into the twenty-first century, in the self-conscious invocations of the Odyssey by filmmakers such as the Coen Brothers and Richard Linklater. Crowdsourcing, the unruly and never-ending input from masses of people, is the morphological ground of the epic, an art form energized by its downward percolations. Penelope, that infinitely patient and longsuffering wife, becomes a variety of things as a result, much changed since Homer's times. In the hands of Atwood, she shares the stage with her twelve maids.

Redefining America, Arena Stage, and Territory Folks in a Multiracial Oklahoma!

In 2010, Arena Stage, the pioneering regional theatre of Washington, D.C., celebrated its sixtieth anniversary and new theatre complex with a multiracial production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! This production helped to rebrand the company as “Where American Theatre Lives” by mobilizing a popular musical of American nation-formation populated by multiracial territory folks on the frontier and in the nation’s capital. This essay argues that Arena’s production stages a utopian performative of inclusion and harmony, but that utopia troublingly rests on indigenous genocide and elision of racial difference and inequality. Both parts of this argument are crucial when many Americans openly celebrate diversity, but deny the structural significance of race and racism despite vast disparities. To understand how bodies become variously interpellated and interpreted into existing racial projects and the shifting (re)productions of Americanness, the essay theorizes three terms for the production and consumption of this Oklahoma! : multiracial-conscious , whitened , and post-racial . Spectators could view the territory folks as people of color, whites, and/or beyond race. The casting, marketing, and critical reception reveal the struggles for defining race and American identity at a moment when people of color appear to have significant representation, enabling a post-racial project in which many with privilege disavow that privilege and perpetuate existing inequities.

Deprovincializing Brian Friel's Drama in America, 2009 and 2014: Dancing at Lughnasa in Fort Myers, Florida, and Faith Healer in Houston, Texas

While American regional theatre has flourished for decades, hardly any critics with a national profile pay attention to it, but theatre critic Terry Teachout has recently argued that criticism must catch up with this ‘deprovincialized’ drama, drawing upon his viewing of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa in a memorable 2009 production by the Florida Repertory Theatre in Fort Myers. I tentatively explore through that production of Lughnasa what implications its staging in a locale with a strong Hispanic concentration might have for American theatre and for its growing immigrant population as the United States becomes ever more divided, yet still idealizes plurality and immigration. I then assess the Stark Naked Theatre Company's stirring 2014 production of Faith Healer in Houston, Texas. Actors and local critics mostly neglected Irish aspects of the play – unlike their supposed more enlightened New York critics and audiences, who tend to read Irish drama through outmoded stereotypes – and instead privileged its spiritual qualities and its potential for showcasing theatre as an art form.

Foreword

With the revival of The Iceman Cometh with Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015, New York City becomes, once again, the epicenter of Eugene O'Neill productions. The theater capital has figured prominently in the success of O'Neill's plays, from the early days in the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street to the landmark production of Long Day's Journey Into Night in 2003, with Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy, to this summer's The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill, Volumes 1 and 2 from the NeoFuturists and Theater for the New City, which reimagines early plays (Recklessness, Warnings, Fog, Abortion, and The Sniper) without dialogue, as stylized gesture. New York's Lincoln Center was the apt place for “Launchpad of American Theatre: The O'Neill since 1964,” an exhibition reviewed here as part of an effort to extend the O'Neill Review's notion of performance and the performativity of space.Yet the attention surrounding the revival of The Iceman Cometh should not obscure the success of O'Neill's other dramas, which have been performed with increasing frequency in regional theaters across the United States. Suddenly in high demand, Desire under the Elms showed up at the Raleigh Little Theater in North Carolina and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater in Rockville, Maryland. The Ensemble Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio, continues its prolonged exploration of the plays of O'Neill with Beyond the Horizon and “Anna Christie” this season, while Bayou City Concert Musicals presents George Abbott's musical adaptation of the latter play, New Girl in Town, in Houston, Texas. Affirming the appeal of O'Neill's plays in the South, The Hairy Ape was staged at the Itinerant Theatre in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Across the country the same is true, with productions of A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, California; The Iceman Cometh at the O'Neill Festival in San Ramon, California; and Long Day's Journey Into Night next season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.Likewise, O'Neill's plays continue to enjoy international success beyond the traditional locations like London. Two productions, in fact, exemplify the global reach of O'Neill's plays, starting with Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Teatro Marquina in Madrid, Spain. More intriguing is the adaptation of Desire under the Elms at the Baxter Theater in Cape Town, South Africa (reviewed here), which suggests, ironically considering the subject of this play, new and fertile ground for O'Neill's plays around the world.

Scholar Dong and Madam Li Step Out: Are There National Audiences for Chinese Traditional Regional Theatre?

Increasingly, the administration of Mainland Chinese performing troupes, including xiqu, is focusing on audiences. Xiqu troupes are undergoing systemic reform (tizhi gaige), during which troupes are increasingly expected to adopt a commercial model (zhuanqi gaizhi). This requires a paying audience. Yet for decades, urban establishment xiqu troupes, as state entities, depended on governmental support and approval, not on self-selecting audiences or independent criticism. One new national initiative, intended to identify and protect core repertoire and broaden audiences nationwide, has been the Grand Prize for Outstanding Repertory Piece (youxiu baoliu jumu dajiang). Drawing on field research conducted during the tour of such a work, this study suggests that there is an institutional will to change performance models, as well as a paying audience for xiqu, even outside their immediate cultural areas. The emergence of a small, traditional-minded, highbrow, affluent, national theatre-going audience is noteworthy; what scope of performances it might sustain without government support is open to debate.

Widening Participation in Theatre through ‘Relaxed Performances’

In this article Andy Kempe discusses how a nationwide project has marked a significant step forward in improving access to the theatre for UK audiences who have hitherto felt largely excluded from theatre by mounting a number of ‘relaxed performances’. He makes particular reference to autistic spectrum disorders to illustrate how, in order to widen participation, theatres need to cater for a diverse range of individual needs. The article explores the challenges of catering for children and young people who may be, variously, under- or over-sensitive to sensory stimuli, in both the way performances are adapted and how the front-of-house is organized. A case study is offered of how one small regional theatre sought to address these challenges by giving a ‘relaxed performance’ of its annual pantomime. The impact of the production is considered as well as insights that have emerged from the enterprise. Andy Kempe is Professor of Drama Education and a Teaching Fellow of the University of Reading. His work with students of all ages and abilities has informed his numerous publications on a variety of issues in drama and arts education, including Drama, Disability, and Education (Routledge, 2012).

Liz Gorrie and the Kaleidoscope Alternative

The alternative theatre movement in Victoria tends to be associated with the tenure of Don Shipley at the Belfry Theatre (1975-80), but it was arguably by Liz Gorrie and the Kaleidoscope Theatre Company, a Theatre for Young Audiences, that the alternative theatre movement was first brought to the provincial capital. Starting in 1974 and during its first two decades under Gorrie’s artistic directorship, Kaleidoscope was as politically and aesthetically radical in its objectives and practices as such better-known 1970s companies as Tarragon, Tamahnous, Passe Muraille, and Toronto Free Theatre. Kaleidoscope not only created work that bears comparison with that of contemporary alternative theatre for adults, but thanks to the purity of Liz Gorrie’s theatrical vision, and her deep respect for young audiences, it developed a style of TYA that “changed the face of children’s theatre in Canada and around the world” (McLauchlin “Interview”). Recognizing Kaleidoscope’s contribution to the alternative theatre movement in this country will require a look at the many ways in which the company earned its alternative credentials—even while addressing audiences made up of children. Jennifer Wise and Lauren Jerke look first at the company’s genesis as a progressive alternative to the city’s mainstream regional theatre, then consider its indigenous and collectively created material, its Grotowskian and Brechtian objectives, its anti-illusionistic Asian aesthetic, and its use of masks, puppets, transformation, and abstraction. As Wise and Jerke show, Kaleidoscope in the 1970s and 1980s utilized a virtual encyclopedia of alternative theatre techniques, earning a national and international reputation within five years of its founding and, the authors argue, meriting a permanent place in the history of the alternative theatre movement in Canada.

Foreword

It seems fitting that during the year of the Ninth International Conference on Eugene O'Neill, O'Neill's plays have enjoyed a remarkable season in terms of international productions. Naturally, O'Neill plays were well represented in London, with Long Day's Journey Into Night staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Ah, Wilderness! staged by the London Theatre Workshop, and most intriguingly, The El Train (a combination of three early plays, The Web, Before Breakfast, and The Dreamy Kid) performed by Found Productions at Hoxton Hall and starring Ruth Wilson, who is fast becoming a major interpreter of O'Neill's plays after her performance in the highly acclaimed revival of “Anna Christie” by the Donmar Warehouse. Yet O'Neill's plays were staged across several continents, including Desire under the Elms at the Dublin Theater Festival, Long Day's Journey at the Bermuda Theater Festival, Mourning Becomes Electra at the National Youth Theater in Moscow and Teatro San Martin in Buenos Aires, and Beyond the Horizon at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts—all of which affirms O'Neill's international legacy.Although a great amount of interest in O'Neill in the United States focuses on the upcoming revival of Robert Falls's The Iceman Cometh with Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next year, O'Neill's plays also had much success in regional theaters during the 2013–14 season. In the South, O'Neill productions included Long Day's Journey at the Art Klub at Michalopoulos Studio in New Orleans, A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Irish House in New Orleans, and Desire under the Elms at the Raleigh Little Theater in North Carolina. “Anna Christie” is scheduled for production in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2015. In the Midwest, O'Neill stagings included Ah, Wilderness! in Wisconsin Rapids, Beyond the Horizon at the Ensemble Theater in Cleveland, and even the little-known Shell Shock was mounted in Akron. In California, Long Day's Journey was performed at the Maverick Theater in Fullerton, and A Moon for the Misbegotten was performed at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura. On the East Coast, The Iceman Cometh arrived at the Quotidian Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, and Mourning Becomes Electra unfolded its length at the Quintessence Theater in Philadelphia.Along with the revivals in Moscow and Philadelphia, Mourning Becomes Electra was adapted as an opera by Marvin David Levy under commission from Lincoln Center and performed with much enthusiasm by the Florida Grand Opera last November. Moreover, Lars Norén's And Give Us Shadows, which depicts a fictional encounter of O'Neill, Carlotta Monterey, and his two adult sons from previous marriages as part of a story about family and paternal love, was staged at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, New York, taking us deeper into the shadowy life that haunts us still.

Ecologies of Dramaturgy

Ecologies of Dramaturgy Beth Blickers (bio) and Brian Quirt (bio) Brian Quirt is the artistic director of Nightswimming, a Toronto-based dramaturgical company, and director of the Banff Centre Playwrights Colony. Beth Blickers is an agent at Abrams Artists Agency. They first met on Brian’s home turf when he was serving as president of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) and hosted its 2007 annual conference. He continues to serve on the board of the organization where Beth has just started a two-year term as president. As LMDA embarks on its thirtieth year as the preeminent organization in North America working to cultivate, develop, and promote the function of dramaturgy and literary management, it seemed an opportune time for the Torontonian and the New Yorker, the artistic director and the agent, the past president and current president to discuss the state of the nation for dramaturgs and dramaturgy. There are age-old questions about career paths and the roles that dramaturgs can, and should, play in their theatrical communities; there is ever increasing scrutiny on issues of diversity and inclusion, which extend beyond the plays and playwrights to the entire creative team; and the definition of theatre itself is leaping beyond the traditional, narrative, single-author play performed within four walls. With the ever shifting world in which dramaturgs work, what are questions they are asking themselves in shaping their careers within a rapidly altering landscape? Beth: Hi, Brian. So we have this task to talk about the evolution of dramaturgy. Now that we aren’t spending time trying to define it, what are the questions engaging us? I can say south of the Canadian/United States border I’m regularly in conversation about how the traditional rules of dramaturgy can’t be applied to nontraditional theatre projects. I’ll admit I struggle with whether there are different rules/questions for different kinds of theatre. Should the theatre be using different dramaturgs for different kinds of projects, or should every dramaturg be prepared to work with a range of artistic impulses? Brian: Hi, Beth. I vote for being prepared to work with a range of artistic impulses. Sure, dramaturgs can specialize, and some of us do over time, which is not a bad thing. But one of the powers of dramaturgy and dramaturgs is the ability to synthesize ideas, information, and impulses from a breadth of knowledge and experience and put it to work at the service of the project(s) at hand. I’m leading the Banff Centre Playwrights Colony at the moment and one of our guest artists is dramaturg Ruth Little, whose current job is associate director of Cape Farewell in the UK. She trained as a biologist, was literary manager of a slew of important UK theatres, including the Royal Court, and now works as a dance dramaturg for Akram Khan, as well as with an environmental organization that develops artistic responses to climate change. Now, that’s a dramaturgical worldview that I think is a fantastic example of someone absorbing and applying a range of artistic impulses. I’d vote for more of us incorporating such breadth into our working worlds. On a related topic, theatre-makers submitting applications to my company in Toronto strike me as increasingly uninterested in writing plays (a form that can seem very quaint these days) and very uninterested in working their way up and into the mainstream theatres (large and medium-sized) that for forty years have made up the fabric of the Canadian new-play-development system. I think this is a great shift, though it doesn’t really matter what I think about it. It’s happening, and my take is that a generation of smart, talented theatre-makers is coming of age that will largely bypass the existing system. It is likely that system will suffer very much for that loss. [End Page 249] Beth: I think it might be a good thing for that system to suffer. I’m starting to see some heartening crossover where our regional theatre system hosts, and even commissions, nontraditional companies to build works for their seasons. That’s been a longstanding...

Foreword

As always, the classics from Eugene O'Neill's canon were well represented in 2013, with productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Germinal Stage in Denver, at the Kansas City Actor's Theatre, and the Citadel Theater in Alberta, Canada. The Iceman Cometh was produced at Ensemble Theater, Cleveland, as part of the company's extended exploration of O'Neill's plays (they have announced a production of Beyond the Horizon in early 2014). Strange Interlude was at the National Theatre in London with Anne-Marie Duff in a widely acclaimed performance as Nina Leeds. The Hairy Ape had two productions in regional theaters, at Ghost Light Theatricals in Seattle and The Spot in Arroyo Grande, California, as part of its inaugural season.Yet this year was probably more noteworthy for productions and adaptations of less frequently seen O'Neill plays. Foremost among these was All God's Chillun Got Wings at the Jack Theatre in Brooklyn, which used the play to explore ongoing problems with race and racism in the United States to considerable effect. Desire under the Elms will have two productions in the second half of this year, one at Staten Island's Sea View Playwright's Theater and the other in Ireland as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Bound East for Cardiff and In the Zone were produced on the Tall Ship Gazela at Penn's Landing as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Chris Christophersen concluded the Eugene O'Neill Festival with a performance at Tao House, while “Anna Christie” was put on by Role Players Theatre, for good comparison, in downtown Danville. And O'Neill's seldom-produced one-act Thirst was innovatively integrated into The Big Show, which told the story of the life of Frances Farmer.Along with those drawing upon O'Neill's plays for dramatic raw materials, more and more dramatists have drawn upon his life. Jo Morello's E.G.O.: The Passions of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, which won the biannual playwriting competition of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, was produced by Balagula Theatre, Lexington, Kentucky. Swedish playwright Lars Noren's And Give Us Shadows, which dramatizes encounters among O'Neill, Carlotta Monterey, and O'Neill's sons from previous marriages, was staged at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, New York. These plays follow previous works like Begotten and A Blizzard at Marble Neck and demonstrate that O'Neill's life remains a near synonym for drama.

Rural cinema audiences in South Australia in the 1930s

AbstractVery few South Australian local histories give any account of the ritual screening of films in local community halls and regional picture theatres. Given that the 1930s was a turbulent era for the exhibition industry, the survival of the rural picture show beyond the decade suggests that it played a significant role in local history. This article will discuss the distribution and exhibition of films in rural South Australia during the early 1930s and the impact of legislation on the small operators. It goes on to examine the cinema-going preferences of the mid-north town of Snowtown during two years from July 1933 to June 1935 and considers the factors other than taste that determined the popularity of a screening.

Making Broadway musicals: An interview with Jess Goldstein

Abstract Jess Goldstein has been the costume designer for a number of Broadway productions, including Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), Jersey Boys (2005), The Apple Tree (2007) and Newsies (2012). He won a Tony Award for his work on The Rivals (2005). In addition to designing for Broadway, Goldstein has designed for the Woodland Opera, regional theatre, and a number of off-Broadway productions. He also teaches at the Yale School of Drama. Below are excerpts from a conversation among Goldstein (JG), Princeton undergraduate students Marjorie Kroll (MK), Gaku Liu (GL), and Nora Sullivan (NS), and members of a general public audience about the process of designing costumes for Broadway and Goldstein’s work on Newsies in particular. This conversation took place as a part of the Making Broadway Musicals: Artists and Scholars in Conversation symposium at Princeton University on 21 April 2012.

Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies

Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies

The Shakespearean Glass Ceiling: the State of Colorblind Casting in Contemporary British Theatre

This article examines Shakespearean colourblind casting from a variety of angles, interrogating the 'glass ceiling' that remains prevalent in contemporary British theatre. By offering a brief survey of early examples of the practice of colourblind casting in Shakespearean roles, it seeks to establish casting patterns in the ensuing decades: typically, patterns of very few black, Asian or mixed-race actors and even fewer playing lead roles, instead being cast as members of warring factions or as supernumeraries. This analysis is informed by an attempt to quantify available data that includes major companies and regional theatres, examining 225 productions over a time span of 30 years. Research is drawn from archival materials held at the RSC and National Theatres, as well as local production companies, offering an insight into the ratios of white to ethnic minority actors in productions, the types of roles and the casting of understudy parts within contemporary Shakespearean theatre. The article also considers the perpetually contentious nature of the practice of colourblind casting through the lens of the socio-political events (such as the murder of Stephen Lawrence) that have coincided with specific moments in British theatre history. In doing so, it seeks to challenge commonly-held assumptions regarding the 'inclusive' state of contemporary productions of Shakespeare's plays, instead revealing their perpetuation of the dominant stereotype of Shakespeare as the preserve of the white cultural elite, as well as their assimilation of the practices of the wider entertainment industry, in which non-white actors are significantly underrepresented.

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