Repertory Theatre Research Articles

Free Play: Open Source Scripts Towards an Anti-Racist Tomorrow, Idris Goodwin, directed by Adam Stevens

Review of: Free Play: Open Source Scripts Towards an Anti-Racist Tomorrow, Idris Goodwin, directed by Adam Stevens CollideOscope Repertory Theatre Company, New York University, New York City, New York, Online (Zoom), 9–11 October, 2020, with Michelle Buckle, Treasure Tannock, Brandon J. Elam, Barbara Bethea, Keynessa Nazaire, Jordan Stewart, Zahra Warner, Mary Morris, Vicky Castain, Daniel Brown, Chantal Georges and Jason Butler

Space, Symbols, and Speech in Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’sBehztiand Its Reception

In December 2004, the staging of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre triggered protests by some members of the Sikh community who considered it offensive. By unearthing and exploring tensions in the play’s representation of a Sikh community, this article sheds light on some of the tensions in multicultural Britain in order to complicate and challenge an interpretation of the dispute in terms of a reductive binary of creative freedom versus religious censure and censorship. While, for the liberal secularist critic and proponent of free expression, the explosion of taboos is vital to an expansion of freedom, a hard-line adoption of this position that fails to account for the material specificities of a religious response to a creative work, including the demography of the protestors, can result in a curtailment of the freedom of a religious minority. Reading the play in dialogue with the controversy it generated, this article seeks to ground the outbreak of religious minority offence in its local material conditions and, by doing so, to underline the unequal access to social, cultural, and spatial capital that shaped the controversy. It focuses in particular on religious symbols, space, and speech, exploring how they figure in both the literary and social texts.

The Repertoire and Interpretative Dynamics of Shakespeare’s Dramaturgy in the Twentieth-Century Lithuanian Theatre

The repertoire and interpretative dynamics of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in the twentieth-century Lithuanian theatre have shown that despite the fact that the first premiere on a professional theatre stage in Lithuanian took place only in 1924 (Othello), the main European tendencies of the playwright’s directorial narrative (from Romantic rhetoric and retrospectivism to deconstruction or postcolonial practices) were repeated over the course of the century. The author of the article observes that the general turn towards Shakespeare by many Lithuanian theatre artists, not just one director or repertory theatre, reflects and connects various phenomena of major social changes and new beginnings: the creation of an independent state and a professional national theatre in the interwar period; the creation of a more modern theatre and a more relaxed society during the thaw of the 1960s in the wake of the Stalinist regime and its terror; the transformation of the role of theatre in society in the 1990s following the restoration of the country’s independence; the challenges brought about by the new century and the changing generations of artists. This hypothetical parallel between changes in history and in the theatrical discourses distinguishes Shakespeare as a prominent factor of theatre development and puts the Lithuanian professional theatre in the context of the traditions of European Shakespearean theatre repertory choices formed throughout the centuries.

ДО ІСТОРІЇ УКРАЇНСЬКОГО БАЛЕТНОГО ТЕАТРУ КІНЦЯ ХХ – ПОЧАТКУ ХХІ СТ.: ТВОРЧИЙ ДОРОБОК СЕРГІЯ БОНДУРА

Мета статті полягає у вивченні творчої спадщини танцівника, педагога й балетмейстера Сергія Бондура, який стояв біля джерел формування сценічного репертуару кількох українських театрів. Методологія роботи включає використання таких методів дослідження: мистецтвознавчого, культурно-історичного, системного, типологічного, порівняльного, художньо-стилістичного аналізу. Наукова новизна дослідження полягає в тому, що в ньому вперше детально розкрито творчу біографію С. Бондура, визначено основні етапи його сценічного шляху, проаналізовано найвідоміші ролі, розглянуто балетмейстерський та педагогічний доробок. Висновки. Творчий внесок українського танцівника Сергія Бондура в розвиток вітчизняного балетного театру кінця ХХ–ХХІ ст. полягає у: створенні ним високотехнічних й глибоко художніх образів на сценах провідних театрів України (Львівського державного академічного театру опери та балету імені Івана Франка, Київського державного музичного театру для дітей та юнацтва), які ввійшли в історію українського балету як зразки справжнього сценічного мистецтва; співпраці із багатьма відомими балетмейстерами – В. Литвиновим, Г. Ковтуном, В. Ковтуном, О. Виноградовим, О. Ратманським та іншими хореографами; формуванні балетмейстерського доробку, який складається з концертних номерів, хореографічних мініатюр, моноспектаклів та повноцінних вистав, де випробували власні сили і студенти та молоді українські артисти, і відомі вітчизняні балетні солісти; накопиченні значного педагогічного досвіду, який допомагає артистові виховувати нове покоління українських танцівників.

In the Company of Mump & Smoot and Pochsy

Canadian clowns Michael Kennard, John Turner, and Karen Hines (Mump & Smoot and Pochsy respectively) grew out of the fringe festival circuit in the late eighties. They have gone on to play in numerous major regional theatres throughout North America, including Astor Place Theatre off-Broadway, Yale Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Canadian Stage, and Alberta Theatre Projects. Along the way they have garnered numerous awards, critical acclaim, and a widespread audience through their extensive performing, teaching, directing, writing, and mentoring. They have made significant contributions to both the evolution of clowning in Canada and the Canadian independent theatre scene. In this discussion, these longtime collaborators reflect on their time together, their teachers, the keys to the longevity of their connection, and their artistic interest in horror. They also reflect on how their approaches to performance, and clowning as an art form in particular, differ from one another, as well as the significant philosophical threads that run throughout all of their work.

Репертуарная политика современных любительских театральных коллективов: опыт социологического исследования

The article examines the problem of choosing theatre repertoire, analyses the basic principles of its formation in amateur and professional theatre groups. A comparative analysis is conducted. Special attention is paid to repertoire policy of Belgorod region theatres: monitoring of the stage directors’ preferences was implemented with a view to identify their motives for choosing plays of a certain domestic or foreign author, of a particular genre, time period. The factors influencing the choice of amateur theatres repertoire are determined and an integral picture of theatrical life in Belgorod region is presented.

‘Act Out Justice’: reflective collaborative inquiry on theatre for social change youth programming

ABSTRACTThis study outlines and analyzes the effectiveness of a reflective collaborative inquiry model developed for the programmatic and curricular revisions of ‘Act Out Justice’ (AOJ), a theatre for social change youth program through a partnership between Orlando Repertory Theatre and the University of Central Florida. The authors identify a nine-step process for collaborative teams utilizing a fusion of personal narrative, reflection, and dialogue. This account guides the reader through the AOJ reflection and revision process, articulating how the process revealed four concrete programmatic and curricular changes. The paper provides a model for collaborative reflective inquiry applicable to collaborative teams working with youth.

Theater Art in Oleksandrivsk (Zaporizhzhya): end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th сenturies

Theater Art in Oleksandrivsk (Zaporizhzhya): end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th сenturies

Ah, Wilderness!

Set on the Fourth of July, 1906, Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! offers an idealized view of a world in which innocence was still possible. Centering on the romantic travails of Richard Miller, the O'Neill stand-in as sensitive young man, the play presents a family unit that is, in fact, unified. Unlike the Tyrones of Long Day's Journey Into Night with an endlessly critical father and a mother who regularly disappears into a morphine haze, the Millers are led by fair and understanding Nat Miller (played in this production by Ken Trammell) and his wife, Essie (Lynn Laurence), both of whom are devoted to their children. Their patience may be tested when teenage son Richard (Peter Calvin Atkinson) spouts socialist cant along with selections from Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, and Swinburne.The title of the play is derived from another of Richard's favorites, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” which espouses “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness,” although it can be hard to rebel in a household where one's father, uncle, and aunt have all read and enjoyed this work. Richard may be teased by his younger sister, Mildred (Heather Olsen), or taunted by his older brother, Arthur (Sean Cleary), a Yale undergraduate who seems to major in football with a minor in pipe smoking, but they too are on his side, as is his aunt, Lily Miller (Renee Petrofes), and his charming if dissolute uncle, Sid Davis (Ted McGuinness). When Richard comes home drunk one night, Uncle Sid springs into action, hangovers being his area of expertise. Younger brother Tommy Miller's (Rory Greenfield) only interest is in setting off firecrackers; given the sound effects, he should consider a career in demolition.In this production by Blackfriars Repertory Theatre and Storm Theatre Company, the performances are well matched, beginning with the mellifluous tones of Trammell's Nat, as he doles out fatherly advice, and enlivened by the vigor that Laurence's Essie displays in balancing social convention with what is best for her children. The most intriguing performances come from those who are given the opportunity to show the underside of things. Atkinson plays Richard as an angry and defiant young man when he believes that his beloved Muriel (Megan McDevitt) has dumped him at her father's (Jim Haines) behest, but Richard is often on the edge of tears, reminding us of the emotional struggle behind the Swinburne-induced bravado.Although the family dissolves into peals of laughter when drunken uncle Sid attempts to eat a lobster, shells and all, at dinner, his drinking has already cost him several jobs as well as the love of a good woman in Lily. As Sid, McGuinness reveals the pathos that underlies the stage drunk, whose drinking ultimately is no joke. In the role of Belle, a “college tart” described by O'Neill as “a fairly recent recruit to the ranks … still a bit remorseful behind her make-up and defiantly careless manner,” Natalie Pavelek makes it clear that Belle may be new to the oldest profession, but she will not tolerate anyone demeaning her or her line of work.Director Peter Dobbins makes skillful use of the acting space in the Sheen Center's Black Box Theatre. The early twentieth century meets modernity with the effective use of projections that complement Daniel Prosky's scenic design, as the actors reposition the furnishings of the Millers' well-appointed living room to create the family dining room, then a barroom, and then a beach, complete with a rowboat for Richard and Muriel to sit in. This fluidity is enhanced by the choice of music selected by sound designer Ian Wehrle, from our first view of Richard on the floor of the living room, happily reading, while Stephen Foster's “Beautiful Dreamer” plays in the background, to the final wink of the last musical selection, the Beach Boys' “Wouldn't It Be Nice?” The lyrics by Brian Wilson, Tony Asher, and Mike Love ask, “Wouldn't it be nice if we were older / Then we wouldn't have to wait so long? / And wouldn't it be nice to live together / In the kind of world where we belong?” The first two lines are immediately applicable to Richard and Muriel's wanting to marry, but not until Richard finishes his four years at Yale. The next two lines apply more expansively to the enduring appeal of the play and the production as a whole.Depression audiences who first saw Ah, Wilderness! in 1933, with a cast that included George M. Cohan as Nat Miller and Elisha Cook Jr. as Richard, yearned for a return to prosperity. In the decades that followed, through war and national catastrophe, audiences have continued to yearn for a simpler time, as the age of innocence presented in the play, a time that probably never was, recedes from view.

БАЛЕТ «КОНЕК-ГОРБУНОК» ЦЕЗАРЯ ПУНИ: ЗАИМСТВОВАНИЯ И ЦИТИРОВАНИЯ МУЗЫКАЛЬНОГО МАТЕРИАЛА

The article is devoted to one of the central works of creative heritage of the composer Cesare Pugni — the ballet "The Little Humpbacked Horse", which premiered on the stage of the Saint Petersburg Imperial Bolshoi (Stone) Theater in 1864 with choreography by Arthur Saint-Leon. "The Little Humpbacked Horse" was one of the ballets that survived the October Revolution of 1917 and was firmly established in the repertoire of Soviet theaters. For more than one hundred years, this work was very popular with the public, but due to the appearance of the ballet of the same name by R. K. Shchedrin, it was performed much less. This article analyzes the musical text of the ballet by C. Pugni on the basis of the clavier "The Little Humpbacked Horse", published during the author's lifetime, and reveals the features of the composer's approach to writing music for choreographic performance. Particular attention in this work is paid to the composer's method of working with musical material. C. Pugni not only skillfully stylizes and enriches the score with the genre features of Russian folklore, but also weaves quotations from popular works by other authors into the original musical fabric. In the ballet "The Little Humpbacked Horse" the composer uses the leitmotif system. In conclusion, the ballets are briefly characterized, which use Russian folk tales or their literary stylizations as the basis for the libretto. The significance of "The Little Humpbacked Horse" as the first choreographic performance in the history of Russian musical theater is assessed, in which such a plot is interpreted.

The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, and :Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, and:The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey

Reviewed by: The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, and :Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, and:The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey Michael C. O’neill THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN. By Sean O’Casey. Directed by Ciarán O’Reilly. Irish Repertory Theatre, New York City. January 31, 2019. JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK. By Sean O’Casey. Directed by Neil Pepe. Irish Repertory Theatre, New York City. March 21, 2019. THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS. By Sean O’Casey. Directed by Charlotte Moore. Irish Repertory Theatre, New York City. June 20, 2019. New York City’s Irish Repertory Theatre celebrated its thirtieth anniversary by devoting the second half of its 2018–19 season to Sean O’Casey, [End Page 107] staging his so-called “Dublin Trilogy” in repertory at the Irish Rep’s intimate space on West 22nd Street. Marking the first time in the New York area that The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926) have been performed in repertory, the productions captured the comic energy and relentless suffering of O’Casey’s characters, connecting contemporary audiences to the domestic turmoil and political upheaval that permeates these plays first staged by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre almost a century ago. An audacious undertaking by any measure, the Irish Rep’s productions maintained O’Casey’s legacy without challenging it, and instead embraced the novice playwright’s passions and developing ideas. This method allowed audiences a sense of how O’Casey’s early work, particularly his strong portraits of selfless, sometimes heroic women helped revolutionize theatre in Ireland and beyond. Click for larger view View full resolution James Russell (Donal Davoren) and Michael Mellamphy (Seumas Shields) in The Shadow of a Gunman. (Photo: Carol Rosegg.) Set in 1920 during the Irish War for Independence, The Shadow of a Gunman, under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, immediately thrust the audience into a confusing Dublin tenement flat governed by the guarded behavior and puzzling innuendo of the peddler Seumas Shields and his illegal tenant, the hapless poet Donal Davoren, who, according to tenement gossip, is secretly an IRA gunman. Although the acting ensemble provided vivid portraits of the nosey tenement dwellers, O’Reilly’s direction did little to help the audience distinguish them from one another; moreover, James Russell as Davoren complained so strongly when the neighbors interrupted his writing that he may have made it difficult for the audience to understand these denizens of an unfamiliar era as more than merely part of O’Casey’s microcosm of Dublin’s impoverished working class. O’Casey pokes fun at would-be poets, including his own youthful artistic pretensions, through Davoren, but Russell seemed to equate passion with yelling and never captured the modulation in the wonderful lines O’Casey has written for Davoren. Russell’s Davoren, however, stirred briefly to life in his first act encounter with Minnie Powell, played by Meg Hennessy as a potential “new woman” deprived by her lack of education from taking her place in a culture redefining itself. She imposed upon a receptive Davoren her simple preconceptions of a heroic ethos embodied by soldiers fighting against Britain. In feigning to share her revolutionary fervor, the duplicitous Davoren by the close of The Shadow of a Gunman ironically became a foil to Minnie, whose accidental death was quickly mythologized by tenement gossip as an act of heroism; meanwhile, in one of the production’s most genuine moments, Seumas [End Page 108] and Davoren realized their debt to Minnie for saving their lives must remain a secret they keep forever. Presented at the Irish Rep in 1995 and 2014, Juno and the Paycock remains O’Casey’s most popular play, and in terms of theatrical artistry, it is far more accomplished than The Shadow of a Gunman. The Atlantic Theatre Company’s artistic director, Neil Pepe, directed the production without much evidence of his customary visceral approach, reflecting instead the Irish Rep’s steady and unobtrusive directorial aesthetic. Pepe appropriately contrasted the mundane troubles of the Boyle family in 1924, however, against the insufferable loss of children to...

All Astir

All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards The title of this column, “All Astir,” refers to what is going on in the Melville world. As I write this, however, not much is astir. The whole world is shuttered because of COVID-19. Conferences, dramatic productions, and research have been cancelled. Most American universities have switched to online classes for the rest of the spring semester. Yet the beginning of the year was not so inauspicious. The American Repertory Theater mounted a “World Premiere Musical Moby-Dick,” written and composed by Dave Malloy, at the Loeb Drama Center in Boston that ran December 3, 2019, through January 12, 2020. Everything about the production was impressive, including its length of 3 hours and 25 minutes. The tickets were sold-out long before most Melville scholars (including this writer) had a chance to buy one. Andrea Shea of WBUR called the show, “Crude, Hilarious and Deep” (December 11, 2019). “In the re-imagining,” she notes, “Malloy and director Rachel Chavkin set out to emulate the sprawling form of ‘Moby-Dick.’” Carolyn Clay, also of WBUR, calls the musical “as passionately and quirkily unwieldy as the novel” (December 13, 2019). Although he begins his review, “Call me Exhausted” after “205 riveting, infuriating, audacious minutes,” David Gordon goes on to write that the musical is “all unapologetically Malloy, encompassing intelligent lyrics, soaring melodies, and polyrhythmic sounds used to mirror the communication style of whales. There’s no theater composer writing today whose work is as thrilling to me as his” (“Dave Malloy’s Moby-Dick Musical Is a Whale of a Time,” December 31, 2019, <https://www.theatermania.com/boston-theater/reviews/moby-dick_90373.html>). The musical, writes Jed Gottlieb of the Boston Herald, “aims to put America and its struggles on the Pequod with Ishmael, Queequeg and mad Captain Ahab. The piece turns over issues the so-called New World has wrestled with in the 170 years since Melville wrote the novel” (“ART reimagines ‘Moby-Dick’ as musical party with a message,” December 5, 2019). Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe, brings the musical back to Melville, calling it “an ambitiously conceived and superbly executed musical, if occasionally self-indulgent,” then adds, “Heaven knows what Melville—an onstage bust of whom silently observes the proceedings—would make of this creation” (“A captivating ‘Moby-Dick’ that ripples through time,” December 12, 2019). [End Page 105] Jennifer Baker, who directed the Twelfth International Melville Society Conference in New York last June (2019), was fortunate enough to see the production. She writes, “I thought it did a marvelous job of ‘reckoning’ with the book (it is subtitled a ‘musical reckoning’), particularly the philosophical and non-narrative chapters. I was also impressed by how much of the language is woven into the dialogue and songs. The writer obviously knew the book well.” Natasha Hurley won the Hennig Cohen Prize for “Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee.” The Cohen Prize Committee writes: The Melville Society is pleased to announce that this year’s Hennig Cohen Prize for the year’s best chapter or essay on Herman Melville goes to Natasha Hurley for “Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee,” chapter 1 of her monograph Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Hurley’s fresh and methodologically innovative analysis situates Typee’s publication and circulation as a paradigmatic instance of “acquired queerness”—a phenomenon that occurs when sexual details accumulated in the text interact with shifting dynamics of circulation and reception across time. Hurley argues that, just as Typee accumulates missionaries’ accounts of sexual perversion in the South Pacific, the novel’s own descriptions of queer attachments between men become recirculated in later writings—such as Charles Warren Stoddard’s South Sea Idyls—that helped produce the conditions of perceiving queerness. Blending formalist analysis with queer theory and reception history, “Acquired Queerness” illuminates “how it is that queerness becomes legible through the proliferations of sexual language that take place when . . . social groups and writers cohere through acts of reading texts; when one author cites another in an effort to produce a new frame of reference through a consolidation of...

A Theatre’s Responsibility to Its Community

A Theatre’s Responsibility to Its Community Jennifer Toutant (bio) Regional theatre companies in the last decade have become more focused on how to better serve their communities. As a result, our education departments have become less marginalized and more central to the theatre’s programming and ethos. Furthermore, new community engagement departments have formed at our theatres across the nation. Additionally, equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts have increased as we have been called out for wanting to serve our diverse communities despite the fact that many theatres are primarily white institutions. Theatre has long been an art form that examines humanity’s role as citizens of the world. Theatre has the potential to challenge society and tell stories that evoke empathy and understanding. In Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice, David Wiles claims, “Theatre was for centuries a place of public encounter where opinion was shaped and relations of power were negotiated. Today we must ask ourselves whether that space of interaction has devolved to the internet, or whether face-to-face encounter of theatre is indeed still of relevance in the making of an active citizenship.”1 I assert that it is still relevant, but only if theatre exists for all rather than an elite subset of our population. By definition, citizenship means “membership in a community” and “the quality of an individual’s response to membership in a community.”2 Theatre can be a gathering place for individuals to explore their community membership through storytelling. Additionally, a theatre as an institution can be thought of as a citizen of its own community. A theatre not only creates a space of collective experience for its audiences within its own walls but is also a member of its larger community, and it must exist with and for [End Page 90] that community. Given the American theatre’s history of exclusionary practices, it is imperative today that the work of a theatre extends beyond its own building. To realize our potential to be a communal place for all, we must build relationships with those outside our subscriber base. I am interested in exploring the changing role of community engagement and education in professional theatre, its function in theatre’s responsibility to citizenship (though I challenge the use of that word in this context), and the need to better prepare future theatre practitioners in the art of engagement. How are we to truly engage with the communities in which we are located if they are far more diverse than the practitioners we employ, and programming we produce, at our theatres? How do we expect diverse populations to attend our productions if the narratives we share on our stages are chosen primarily for their ability to appease aging white subscribers? How are we building meaningful relationships with our surrounding communities, and responding to their needs? In exploration of this topic, I solicited peers, colleagues, and young adults at professional theatres and academic institutions to answer the following questions: How do professional theatres define and value citizenship in our work? How are mission and vision statements of theatres changing and why? How has the role of community engagement and education changed in professional theatre in the last five years? How has community engagement and education programming been used in a theatre’s desire to become more inclusive? How are we preparing college students for the rapidly changing landscape of professional theatre, both as artists and as engagement practitioners? In answering these questions, I draw from my own experiences as the director of education for over thirteen years at Milwaukee Repertory Theater as well as the professional relationships I have developed in my career. Before I explore this litany of questions, I would like to scrutinize the word “citizenship.” As a field, we need to interrogate the usage of that word if we are to uphold it as a value. Theatres have a responsibility to examine our role as citizens of their broader communities. But in 2019, citizenship can be seen as a volatile word. As Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s director of community engagement Leah Harris describes: “Today, we have a news cycle that is constantly reminding us of who does...

The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance ed. by Daniel O’Quinn, Kristina Straub, and Misty G. Anderson

Reviewed by: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance ed. by Daniel O’Quinn, Kristina Straub, and Misty G. Anderson Jeanne Willcoxon The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance, ed. Daniel O’Quinn, Kristina Straub, and Misty G. Anderson. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xxix + 720. $240.00; $59.95 (paper). O’Quinn, Straub, and Anderson conceived of this anthology in response to their previous edited volume, The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama (2017). While that text started with the scripts and then brought in “resources for [End Page 92] understanding their performative contexts and impact,” their new collection starts with the performances, providing resources to both contextualize the singular historical events and give the reader a sense of the circulation of those events in a larger cultural and aesthetic repertoire. Drawing from the field of performance studies, the editors invoke Diana Taylor’s conceptualization of “repertoire” and Rebecca Schneider’s work on the archive to craft an anthology that combines historical scholarship with the methodology of performance studies. By doing this, the editors hope to give the reader an idea of the audience-member experience in viewing the performance; provide an understanding of the interactions of print and performance during this time period; “encourage an understanding of performance that emphasizes the immediacy—and changeability—of the theatrical repertoire”; and investigate how performance participates in the formation of “modern categories of social identity.” Surprisingly, given the breadth and depth of these goals, the editors largely succeed by selecting events that allow them to shift the focus of each reading. For example, Otway’s Venice Preserv’d provides an excellent opportunity to contrast the 1682 audience reading of play and performance as clearly loyalist to the audience reception of Charles Kemble’s 1795 production as provocatively republican. The political moment informs the audience reading of text and performance, which in turn potentially enriches our contemporary understanding of this work; the repertoire, in other words, challenges our investigation of theatrical text as purely archival. On the other hand, John O’Keefe and Philippe De Loutherbourg’s Omai, or a Trip around the World offers an ideal tool to analyze the formation of identity in the precarious British Empire of 1786 through a pantomime combining commedia dell’arte characters, scenic spectacles drawn from Thomas Cook’s South Sea voyage, and a fictionalized characterization of the real-life Raiatean, Omai, whose appearance in London society was the subject of gossip in print. While the editors sometimes privilege particular events within the anthology (Omai, a relatively short pantomime, garners almost sixty pages of resource materials while Addison’s Cato warrants a meager four), and occasionally do not quite make a persuasive case for an event (I cannot help thinking there is a more apt and interesting entry for an investigation of Nell Gwynn and female sexuality than Dryden’s Secret-Love, or the Maiden-Queen), they do craft an intriguingly provocative collection that provides advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students with an introduction to both performances of this time period and approaches to historical research that engage with current theories on performance. That the editors also achieved this admirable goal with their previous anthology on drama does not diminish this achievement but does illustrate the shift within the discipline of theater toward not only the methodology but the language of performance studies (for example, the dusty text of “drama” is replaced by the scintillating ephemerality of “performance”). As with the earlier anthology, the editors provide the reader with a breadth of performances, featuring selections from the more well-known and anthologized plays of the period (Behn’s The Rover, Fielding’s Tom Thumb, Addison’s Cato, and Otway’s Venice Preserv’d), less anthologized but popular plays during the period (Dryden’s Secret-Love, Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, Southerne’s Oroonoko, and Centlivre’s The Wonder), musical entertainments (Purcell’s Fairy Queen: An Opera and Thomas Arne’s Love in a Village), special events (the Handel Commemoration of 1784), afterpieces (Charles Macklin’s Love a-la-Mode), dances (Jean-Georges [End Page 93] Noverre’s 1755 The Chinese Festival...

Mikhail Vasilyevich Sechkin – Pianist, Conductor, Teacher

Mikhail Vasilyevich Sechkin – Pianist, Conductor, Teacher

VALENTYNO SERMATTEI’S PRIVATE ITALIAN MANAGEMENT AT ODESA OPERA HOUSE (1857 – 1859)

The relevance of the paper. The Italian Opera of Odesa from its foundation in the beginning of the 19th century became an integral part of the city cultural life. The authorities annually allocated huge amounts of subsidies to support the existence of an Italian troupe in the local theatre. During and after the Eastern War of 1854-57, the city budget suffered from an economic downturn, which is why the Italian opera gradually lost its urban source of funding – from 1855 the usual practice of the Italian opera troupe foreign engagement was discontinued. In such circumstances, the only way to organize theatrical performances was to rent a free theatre hall by various touring troupes. F. Berger’s private Italian opera enterprise acted in Odesa on the basis of the lease, in particular, during the period from 1856 to the spring 1857. After its departure, the city stayed without Italian opera. For the next two theatrical seasons the municipal authorities were again forced to offer the lease of the theatre to another Italian impresario V. Sermattei. A certain period in the history of Odesa Italian opera was one of the poor investigated ones: there missed a piece of information about the artistic composition of the troupe, repertoire policy and peculiarities of entrepreneur’s organizational activities; it is necessary to verify the Italian artistes’ valuations made by local and Italian music critics.The objectives of the study is to investigate V. Sermattei’s Odesa private enterprise activities on the stage and its socio-cultural dimensions through the prism of music-critical discourse.The methodology involves the semiotic-hermeneutic method (to analyze the peculiarities of scenic directing, the specifics of musical-critical thought, the audience reactions and preferences as a text of culture and its hermeneutic comprehension); bio-bibliographical method (for clarifying and combining the facts of Italian singers’ life and creative activity in Italy and abroad, in particular, in Ukraine); cultural-historical method (allows to study V. Sermattei’s Italian troupe scenic activities as a social phenomenon, contributed to the dissemination of Italian opera achievements in the local musical and theatrical environment).Findings and conclusions. V. Sermattei’s enterprise during 1857-59 gained peculiarities connected with the specificity of its financing. As the profit was constituted with season ticket and entrance fees only, the entrepreneur sought to profit by saving money on performances (props, scenery), reducing the cost of soloists, choirs and orchestra musicians engaging, as well as increasing the number of premieres performed in the theatre repertoire. The austerity mode had a negative effect on the engaged soloists’ scenic qualities, many of whom had no stage experience, so they were unable to perform the popular Verdi’s repertoire, also it led to reducing a number of choirsingers and orchestra musicians.The accelerated pace for new performances preparation influenced the directorate coursed the operas being staged without proper rehearsals, so the performers felt uncertain on stage, made mistakes and, as a consequence, exposed to fair criticism. Instead, the music reviews, being published in local newspapers, gained professionalism, first of all, thanks to P. Sokalsky’s, S. Schiff’s and other music correspondents having had special music education publications. News columns devoted to the Italian troupe performances testified to their authors’ deep awareness in the field of the opera history, vocal performance art, contemporary trends in music development in general. The Italian artists’ performances are analyzed in music-critical articles according to the texts of the original operatic scores, often several author’s editions are taken into consideration. The singers’ vocal and acting talents, revealed at Odesa premieres, local musicologists often compared with the eminent Italian artistes’ performances, which they succeeded to see at famous Europe theatres.

Literary canon studies: methodological guidelines

The article presents for the Lithuanian audience an interdisciplinary approach of literary canon studies that integrates diverse methods of various disciplines (sociology of literature and culture, literary and cultural history, teaching of literature, text reception and aesthetic response history, memory and media research and bibliography studies). The most intense development of literary canon studies can be observed in Western Europe and the United States in the last decade of the 20th century. This was due to the fact that the scholars engaged in the field of postcolonialism, gender studies and neo-Marxism gave it a strong impulse by initiating a debate about insufficient representation of some social groups (women, racial or ethnic minorities and people from lower social strata) in high school curricula in the USA. The debate was expanded into theoretical polemics of whether the canon is formed by means of objective aesthetic criteria or, on the contrary, canon depends on the social contract. Methodologically, investigations of literary canon that are genetically related to the tradition of sociology of culture seem to be the most productive, while this perspective provides an apparatus for a detailed investigation of relations between specific interests of literary field and wider national, social or group interests.The framework of this article is based on the studies of John Guillory, Renate von Heydebrand and Simone Winko. Their essential starting point is the understanding of the canon as a sociocultural process in which the political elite selects a corpus of significant texts in accordance with tradition and formulates practices that ensure the transmission of those texts for future generations. Therefore, canon formation turns to be a strategy based on complex relations of evaluation, cognition and actions that aims to conserve this selected knowledge and transmit it to future generations. The structure of the canon is directly related to the notion of literature and literariness; a society (or its group) defines its canon by considering what they recognize as valuable.Unlike religious canons, which can only be constructed by theologians, there are a lot of canonizing institutions (schools, universities, literary criticism, theatre repertoire, book market, libraries, etc.) involved in the formation of literary canons. They do not create any well-balanced system of the canon but rather conduct diverse practices of canonization. We can distinguish a micro and macro level in the process of canon formation. The micro level contains a lot of separate actions of canonization that propel the canonization process which enables the canon formation at macro level. Origin, stabilization and transformation of literary canon are multidimensional processes, thus it is essential not to lose sight of the interaction of separate dimensions.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

A Moon for the Misbegotten opened in Columbus, Ohio, in 1947, under the auspices of the Theatre Guild as part of an abortive national tour meant to culminate on Broadway. The play soon came under assault from critics and spectators who lambasted it as a crude valorization of a libidinous drunkard wallowing in a sexually charged relationship with an unmarried woman even as he mourned the passing of his mother. The Detroit venue canceled its engagement following the police department's denunciation of the play as “obscene” and “a slander of American motherhood” (qtd. in Gelb and Gelb, By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill [2016], 644).Controversy was of course not new for O'Neill, whose work had long been under attack from reviewers, peers, and audiences but whose nuanced investigations of the psychological and emotional complexity of his characters remain the signature attribute of his dramaturgy. The Kansas City Actors Theatre's production generated a bit of controversy from a local reviewer who branded the production “troubled” in the context of misogyny and the ethics of high-canonical scheduling (Liz Cook, The Pitch, Sept. 20, 2018); but the company honored and illuminated O'Neill's complexity, thanks to a strong cast, an excellent design team, and the poignant direction of Mark Robbins. Ashley Pankow and Brian Paulette brought an electric connection to the play's central characters. Their Josie Hogan and Jamie Tyrone were deeply human and commanded the stage with all the subtlety that the play warrants. Pankow struck an uncanny balance between Josie's “brazen and brass” exterior and the vulnerability and sensuality lurking beneath: she weaponizes drink and sexuality while casting a spell over her counterpart. Indeed, Pankow anchored the production with a mix of power and grace that proved to be a fitting complement to Paulette's wonderfully understated Tyrone, whose distraught amalgam of self-loathing, drunken shame, and emotional emptiness was palpably apparent. Nowhere was this complexity more beautifully presented than the self-punishing aria in which Tyrone searches for psychological and emotional resolution after his “Mama's” death: “I know I ought to be heartbroken but I [can't] feel anything …. She's dead. What does she care now if I cry or not, or what do I do?” Paulette weaved his way through Tyrone's pained remembrance with ease and dignity while Pankow cradled him in her arms under an appropriately rendered moonlit set, the work of designers Shane Rowse (lighting) and Gary Mosby (scenic), whose contributions supported the performances through a poetic realism that echoed the dramatic imagination of O'Neill's erstwhile collaborator Robert Edmond Jones. Jon Robertson's haunting soundscape and Emily Stovall's detailed costumes completed KCAT's fully realized production.Robbins's staging was telling in its simplicity, as allowing the actors to command the space through organically expressed action. Victor Raider-Wexler's charming Hogan led a strong supporting cast. The troupe's mastery of Irish dialects and O'Neill's poetic prose was especially impressive. From Pankow's opening moments with Charlie Spillers (Mike Hogan) to Raider-Wexler's lighthearted exchanges with Chris Roady's T. Stedman Harder, the evening was steadily paced to Josie's final—if problematic—offering to her beloved Tyrone: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.” A Moon for the Misbegotten's ending suggests redemption for O'Neill's emotionally torn protagonist. Yes, as the aforementioned reviewer charged, Tyrone is a “philanderer” and perhaps “a sad-sack aspiring rapist with Mommy issues.” And I concur in the critic's observation that theatre professionals bear responsibility for selecting and presenting material that reflects the values and identities of our increasingly diverse population. But the winner of four Pulitzers and a Nobel is not so easily dismissed, and balancing contemporary and familiar offerings is surely part of a repertory theatre's charge. Locals can take pride in the fine work being offered by the Kansas City Actors Theatre, of which this production provided a splendid instance.

Market fundamentals of organization of work in the field of stage and audio-visual arts and production

Market fundamentals of organization of work in the field of stage and audio-visual arts and production

Theater for Kindergarten Children in the Yishuv: Toward the Formation of an Eretz-Israeli Childhood

Abstract “The Children’s Theatre by the Kindergarten Teachers Center,” that was founded in 1928, was the first Hebrew repertory theatre exclusively addressing the audience of children attending kindergarten and the first grades of elementary school. This article explores how The Children’s Theater conveyed a set of performative practices that consolidated a habitus of Eretz-Israeli childhood. The theater articulated the embodied repertoire of Eretz-Israeli childhood and established it on two pillars. First, it epitomized the concept of an innocent and secure childhood. The world performed on the stage created a utopian notion of childhood. Second, it encouraged the children to participate in the world of adults, but in a way suited to their age and psychological needs. The ability of this theatre to create an enriching and a secure environment for children was deeply needed in the Jewish settlement of Palestine of the 1930’s and 1940’s, which was constituted of immigrants struggling to build a future in the land.