Theatre Communications Group Research Articles

Between the Sacred and the Profane: The Works and Days of Lee Breuer

Between the Sacred and the Profane: The Works and Days of Lee Breuer

뉴욕 비영리 공연예술 단체의 예술 교육 프로그램 연구 : 씨어터 커뮤니케이션즈 그룹(TCG)의 소속 단체들을 중심으로

미국 뉴욕의 비영리 공연예술 단체들은 다양성(Diversity)을 원동력으로 삼고, 이에 부합하는 창작 방식과 예술 교육 프로그램을 발전시키고 있다. 본고는 뉴욕의 비영리 예술기관과 공연예술 단체들이 목표하고 있는 예술 교육 프로그램의 특성과 실행방식 을 구체적으로 이해하고자 한다. 이를 위하여 뉴욕의 비영리 예술기관인 씨어터 커뮤 니케이션즈 그룹(Theatre Communications Group)의 구조적 특성을 파악하고 본 기 관에 소속된 공연예술 단체들의 예술 교육을 커뮤니티 인게이지먼트(Community Engagement) 프로그램과 공연예술 전문 인력 양성 프로그램으로 구분하여 분석할 것 이다. 이에, 라운드 어바웃 씨어터 컴퍼니(Roundabout Theatre Company), 맨하튼 씨 어터 클럽(Manhattan Theatre Club)의 커뮤니티 인게이지먼트(CE) 프로그램과 마이 씨어터 컴퍼니(Ma-Yi Theatre Company), 얼라이언스 오브 레지던트 씨어터(Alliance of Resident Theatres)의 전문 인력 양성 프로그램을 고찰하고자 한다. 이를 통해 우리 나라 비영리 공연예술 단체들의 특성화된 예술 교육 프로그램의 발전을 위해 보다 전 문적이고 체계적인 예술 교육의 방향성을 제시할 수 있을 것이다.

Covid Conversations 2: Anne Bogart

Maintaining and nurturing an ensemble theatre have been Anne Bogart’s foremost concerns in these past near-thirty years since she and Tadashi Suzuki founded the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) in 1992. Suzuki had established the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1976, making a secluded mountainous landscape of Japan its home to this day. Bogart’s venture in the United States, although inspired by Suzuki’s model of a production-based troupe of high artistic standards that, at the same time, developed its unique training methods, by no means merely duplicates its predecessor. In this Covid Conversation, Bogart briefly maps a segment of SITI’s history, reflecting on the company’s inter-arts endeavours with differing dance idioms and its engagement with Greek tragedy. She discusses the effects of the Covid pandemic on her troupe, also interrupting its performances of The Bacchae at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Her most recent opera production, Tristan and Isolde, was closed for the same reason at the Croatian National Theatre – a key work in her portfolio of nineteenth-century grand opera as well as contemporary avant-garde opera. An acclaimed theatre director, Anne Bogart runs and teaches the Graduate Directing Programme at Columbia University in New York. At the SITI summer school in Saratoga, she and the company have workshopped the Viewpoints method that she has elaborated from Mary Overlie’s six principles for theatre and dance training. Bogart’s international workshops have further developed her method. She is the author of A Director Prepares (Routledge, 2001) and of many influential books that include (with Tina Landau) The Viewpoints Book (Theatre Communications Group, 2004). The Art of Resonance is forthcoming (2021, Bloomsbury). Maria Shevtsova is the Editor of New Theatre Quarterly whose most recent book is Rediscovering Stanislavsky (Cambridge University Press, 2020). The following conversation took place on 27 August 2020, was transcribed by Kunsang Kelden, and was edited by Maria Shevtsova. It is followed by a short coda announcing the transition of SITI into a resource centre.

Why Numbers Count: Looking at Producing More Women

Why Numbers CountLooking at Producing More Women Aoise Stratford (bio) Keywords women playwrights, representation, inclusivity Playwrights who identify as women and those who identify as feminists have been grappling for a while with the question of whose work gets done, so why aren't we there yet? A feminist future has to include and acknowledge where we have come from, as well as where we might go next. In a 2009 article, Marsha Norman bemoaned the state of the field for female playwrights in light of then recent surveys by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and renowned data scientist Emily Glassberg Sands. Norman pointed out that 80 percent of produced plays were by white men, with "everyone else [sharing] the remaining 20%," despite the fact that "women make up 60% of the audience."7 While my concern here is thinking through the challenges facing the enactment of feminist futures on primarily American stages, it's worth pointing out that this is not a uniquely American problem, despite Norman's claim that "no other developed nation [ignores its women writers]."8 For one thing, my contact with international students in playwriting classes suggests that many emerging female-identifying writers (if we want to use that fraught term "emerging") feel that the road to production in their home countries will be more challenging than their road in the States, where they have the ability to develop and stage work in pedagogical institutions. In the context of professional productions, at the time of Norman's writing, terms like "glass ceiling" and "theatrical boys club" were appearing in articles in the mainstream Sydney Morning Herald about the state of Australian theater.9 Perhaps closer to home, Elaine Aston has pointed out a similar bias on the British stage (with which we have a somewhat symbiotic relationship). For Aston, the prominence of male reviewers in British theater helps perpetuate [End Page 109] that bias—a bias she noted in 1995 wasn't likely to change "in the foreseeable future."10 Has that bias changed? Yes and no—at least as far as American theater is concerned. The results of the most recent survey of gender and racial parity in the American theater, The Count 2.0, published by the Dramatists Guild in 2018, suggest that there have been gains in terms of race and gender, but they have been small. Of the sample counted (a sample with which there are some problems, as I will note), the number of playwrights of color getting professional productions went up from 10.2 percent to 15.1 percent, women from 20.3 percent to 28.8 percent.11 The feminist reality we have now is not great for playwrights, or theater, or society. But burning all current structures, institutions, and theater-making practices to the ground probably isn't the answer. One step toward getting diverse voices onstage means supporting a variety of writers before and during the writing process—though this is far from enough on its own, as my other colleagues here take up. Still, The Count 2.0 shows that 60 percent of BA degrees in the performing arts from 2012 to 2017 were awarded to women, although white women outnumbered women of color two to one.12 New Dramatists and the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis both show more women members than men overall, and 24 percent of all their writers are reported as being women of color.13 The number of women who are members of the Dramatists Guild has also risen significantly in the last decade.14 Problematically, The Count 2.0 also reveals that women, nonbinary writers, and writers of color aren't getting produced in the same ratios, suggesting (somewhat unsurprisingly) that the most significant hurdles exist not in writing and training but in production selection in visible national theaters. The fact that women are highly visible in the Theatre Communications Group's inaugural cohort for the Rising Leaders of Color program may have some impact on that in the future.15 Writing residencies also pose opportunities for supporting a diverse group of writers (though the economic reality of taking a month to go write in...

Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? by Robert W. Goldsby (review)

Reviewed by: Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? by Robert W. Goldsby Felicia Hardison Londré Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? By Robert W. Goldsby. New York: Anthem Press, 2012. xx + 202 pp. $39.95 paper. Among Theatre Communications Group’s annual listings of the ten most-produced plays on the professional American stage since 1994–1995, a play by Molière makes the list only once: Tartuffe in 2006–2007. Robert W. Goldsby’s book just might be the impetus to give us more Molière. Goldsby’s long experience as an actor and director of the Molière canon undergirds his passion for the plays and his generous-hearted understanding of the personal motives and relationships behind them. In seventeen chapters grouped into four “acts” that loosely correspond to phases in Molière’s life and career, the book intertwines biography with textual and production analysis of the plays as vehicles for the stage. Goldsby’s warm association with Molière goes back to the Comédie-Française’s 1947 revival of Le Misanthrope in which wartime Resistance hero Aimé Clariond reprised his role as Alceste. As a student on the G.I. Bill in the 1940s, Goldsby had the good fortune to attend the play’s first postwar performance. The communal intensity of “joy and grief” (4) generated that evening led to a theatre career that included chairing the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and directing professionally. Eleven plays by Molière in fifteen different productions (including some in his own translation) figure among the 153 productions Goldsby has directed. He writes about Molière from intimate acquaintance. The first brief chapter summarizes Molière’s life up to 1658 when he won the favor of Louis XIV along with the means to settle his troupe in Paris. The lively writing throughout the book yields abundant nuggets like this: “[Molière] learned that though he loves tragedy and tragediennes his true talent is making people laugh, even, unfortunately, in the tragedies” (10). Subsequent chapters each analyze dramaturgically one or two plays in chronological order even as they continue tracing Molière’s biography in relation to his work. The method involves frequent use of the phrase “we can imagine” as Goldsby deftly ties dramaturgical tidbits to what was apparently going on in Molière’s personal life. Yes, Molière loved women, and Goldsby shows how the playwright’s passions led to the great roles he created for actresses. Through Tartuffe’s attempted seduction of Elmire, Arnolph’s doting on young Agnès, and Alceste’s helpless fixation on Célimène, “Molière confronted on stage his own passion for Armande” [End Page 285] and turned his “deepest feelings” into a “subject for laughter” (62), even—as in the case of Agnès—when Armande Béjart did not play the role she inspired. Beyond the biographical material and the analysis of Molière’s plays for the stage, the book functions as a kind of theatregoing memoir or vicarious experiencing of important productions and directors (and even a range of translators) of the plays from the original creations to our own time. For example, chapter 14 on Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671) celebrates Jacques Copeau’s 1920 production with Louis Jouvet playing Géronte, Jouvet’s 1951 production with Jean-Louis Barrault as Scapin, and Goldsby’s own 1958 Berkeley production for which he used the translation by Lady Gregory. The dramaturgical analysis constitutes a directorial case study in putting farce on the stage. Goldsby’s analysis of the act 2 scene in which Scapin dupes Géronte incorporates snippets from Lady Gregory’s dialogue as well as examples of farcical devices like the “bright idea,” the “turn and go” exit, the “magic prop”; and then Goldsby moves on to the famous “sack scene” and breaks it down into ten playable beats with fine fodder for any director. Chapter 7, which covers Tartuffe, includes case studies of “brilliant entrances” (53). Chapter 8 on Dom Juan; ou, le Festin de Pierre shows how directors like Stephen Wadsworth and Jacques La Salle milk the...

Playz from the Boom Box Galaxy: Theatre from the Hip Hop Generation. Edited by Kim Euell with Robert Alexander. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009; 402 pp. $19.95 paper. Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater: An Anthology. Edited by Daniel Banks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011; 400 pp. $95.00 cloth, $40.00 paper

<i>Playz from the Boom Box Galaxy: Theatre from the Hip Hop Generation.</i> Edited by Kim Euell with Robert Alexander. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009; 402 pp. $19.95 paper. <i>Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater: An Anthology.</i> Edited by Daniel Banks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011; 400 pp. $95.00 cloth, $40.00 paper

The Welcome Table : Casting for an Integrated Society

The Welcome Table : Casting for an Integrated Society Daniel Banks (bio) I’m gonna sit at the welcome table I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days, Halleluyah I’m gonna sit at the welcome table Gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days. —Spiritual James Baldwin titled his unfinished, final play The Welcome Table, describing legendary performer Josephine Baker’s home and her practice of adopting young people of all backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities into her family. As I complete work on this essay in November 2012, several events coincide, confirming that it is a significant moment to be reexamining questions of representation and plurality in US theatre. First, President Barack Obama was reelected due, in part, to the overwhelming support of African American (93%), Asian American (73%), and Latino (71%) voters (Robinson). In addition, both the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the “national organization for the American theatre,” and the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), the professional union for stage actors, have launched initiatives to explore this topic. The TCG held its Fall Forum on Governance titled “Leading the Charge” because, as Executive Director Teresa Eyring explains, the organization “decided that we must bring trustees and theatre leadership more deeply into a thought process around diversity and how we make concrete strides in thought and practice—as individuals, as organizations, and as an artistic ecosystem” (Eyring 2012). And, in the lead article on the front page of its October/November newsletter, the AEA reasserts its commitment to “access” and “opportunity,” both artistically and legally, having participated in the twentieth Federation of Actors World Congress in September where the topic was discussed in depth. The Broadway League has also introduced an EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) committee to examine hiring practices across the industry (McColl). There is clearly a renewed commitment to making US theatre more of a welcome table, with room and food enough for all. I propose that the first step in a sustainable future for our beloved profession and art lies in reexamining the terminology that defines contemporary practices. In some cases, this language serves as an obstacle to more complex narratives about US society; in other cases, the words are misnomers. I have great respect for the work done in the arenas of “non-traditional” and “color-blind” casting; at the same time, I have concerns about the continued use of these and similar terms. Although the introduction of these concepts ignited a crucial process of change in the industry, the terms themselves have now ossified a collective imaginary within the theatre, which works against their original progressive intentions and inhibits practices from changing. In this essay, I will discuss the current language used in US theatre casting, cite examples of work that defy the assumptions embedded in that language, and propose strategies for engaging audiences in dialogue around these important sociological concerns. By troubling the authority of this language I hope to create even greater possibilities for casting, while shifting a national dialogue around identity and identification. [End Page 1] Fictions “Your fictions become history.” —Barbara Kruger (1983) “By saying something we do something.” —J. L. Austin (1962, 94) The AEA introduced the language of non-traditional casting because, as Harry Newman, founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (NTCP), writes: “A four-year study . . . completed in January 1986 revealed that over 90 percent of all the professional theatre produced in this country—from stock and dinner theatre to the avant-garde to Broadway—was staged with all-Caucasian casts” (23). In the past twenty-six years, these numbers have not improved significantly. The Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC) was founded in 2011 to “expand the perception of Asian American performers in order to increase their access to and representation on New York City’s stages” (Bandhu 36). In a five-year study of 493 shows in the New York area from the 2006–07 to the 2010–11 seasons, the AAPAC discovered that 80 percent of all shows were cast with European heritage actors.1 Regrettably, many of the challenges that the NTCP worked hard to address still exist, as evidenced by these numbers and several high-profile casting...

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

Insert [Chitlin Circuit] Here: Teaching an Inclusive African American Theatre Course

Insert [Chitlin Circuit] Here: Teaching an Inclusive African American Theatre Course Rashida Z. Shaw (bio) David Krasner: Do you teach . . . the Chitlin Circuit, and should black theater courses discuss this theater that is truly—or perhaps—“by, for, and about black people”? Why or why not? Margaret Wilkerson: I would applaud it. I’ve taught a little bit about [Chitlin Circuit plays], because I’m intrigued with the fact that they are so popular. Whenever something is that popular with a developing black audience, we who are in black theater and are attentive to it need not look down our noses at it but try to understand their standpoint.1 The above exchange between David Krasner and Margaret Wilkerson took place during a roundtable panel discussion on the “state” of African American Theater at the 1997 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference (ATHE). Twelve years later, the contemporary narratives of African American urban life contained within the gospel musical theatre productions of the Chitlin Circuit have grown in popularity. There are more productions. Circuit routes have been extended. Recordings of plays are widely available in VHS and DVD formats, and the plays themselves have been successfully adapted into network television shows and major Hollywood films. These developments necessitate a reconsideration of Krasner’s question. If, as Wilkerson replied, the plays and productions of the Chitlin Circuit should be addressed in African American theatre courses, then the question becomes, how and in what ways are they to be incorporated? Stated differently, how do we create inclusive African American theatre courses that take into account not only what we have established as the plays, playwrights, and critical perspectives that are fundamental to the discipline, but also those plays and performances, like those of the Chitlin Circuit, that seemingly fall outside of our purview? In this essay, I offer my upper-division undergraduate course, “African American Musicals in Theatre and Film,” as a model of an inclusive approach to teaching African American theatre as it considers the ways in which the contemporary Chitlin Circuit participates in the history and development of African American musicals since the late 1930s. A Forgotten Substitution In his famous 1996 keynote address titled “The Ground on Which I Stand”2 at the Theatre Communications Group’s eleventh biannual conference, playwright August Wilson seemed to assert that black theatre could be divided into two categories: 1) theatre, in Du Boisian terms3—that is “by us,” “for us,” and “about us”; and 2) theatre that is created for the entertainment of whites. Wilson stated: There are and have always been two distinct and parallel traditions in black art. That is art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of Black America by designing its strategies for survival and prosperity. . . . This entertainment for whites consisted of whatever the slave imagined or knew that his master wanted to see and hear. This tradition has its present counterpart in the crossover artists that slant their material [End Page 67] for white consumption. The second tradition occurred when the African in the confines of the slave quarters sought to invest his spirit with the strength of his ancestors by conceiving in his art, in his song and dance, a world in which he was the spiritual center and his existence was a manifest act of the creator from whom life flowed. He then could create art that was functional and furnished him with a spiritual temperament necessary for his survival as property and the dehumanizing status that was attendant to that.4 Wilson positioned his work “squarely” within the category of the “second tradition.”5 He used his address as a platform to demand funding for the support and development of black theatres that would cater to the work of black artists, proclaiming: “We do not need colorblind casting. We need some theatres to develop our playwrights. We need those misguided financial resources to be put to a better use. We cannot develop our playwrights with the meager resources at our disposal.”6 Furthermore, he condemned the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) system for having only one member theatre dedicated...

Up Front

Editorial research for this issue was made possible with generous support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and Theatre Communications Group.

Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy (review)

critically about a play. Rush also provides samples of how his questions can reveal possible meanings by using plays that are frequently anthologized. Although in his introduction he states that a play can have multiple meanings, the examples are asserted in a fairly authoritative manner and may lead students to believe that Rush’s analysis is the de¤nitive interpretation. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this work is that Rush does not provide a summary chapter that might help readers understand how these different analytic tools might work together. Should students follow the order of Rush’s chapters, addressing structure, then proceeding to character, language, genre, and style? The text does not fully explain how these different dramatic components might in®uence each other or how students might decide relative signi¤cance . That Rush does not treat production as the ultimate goal of analysis may also make it dif¤cult for students to grasp connections between analyzing the text and bringing it to life onstage. The greatest bene¤t of Rush’s work is that he has assembled a great deal of information in one text. Additionally, his approach of “questioning the play” seems to be helpful in teaching students how to begin the analytic process. Given the differing opinions about literary and production-based approaches to script analysis, it is probably not possible for one text to treat both adequately. Instructors willing to supplement aspects not addressed in Rush’s text would likely ¤nd it a valuable resource. —KATE SINNETT St. Cloud State University \ Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy. By Felicia Hardison Londré. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. 249 pp. $28.50 cloth. As Mark Bly notes in his introduction to the second volume of the Production Notebooks: Theatre in Process (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), there is an “astonishing dearth of documentation of the artistic process in contemporary American theatre” (xiii). Felicia Hardison Londré examines that artistic process and serves the theatre community well by adding to their resources with her Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy. Readers will¤nd a wealth of useful, practical, and insightful material about the art and craft of the dramaturgical essay, as well as invaluable archival material about theatre in the Midwest. BOOK REVIEWS { 172 } In her introduction, Londré systematically and concisely sets out three purposes for her book: ¤rst, she draws together “short pieces about plays and playwrights that have intrinsic interest”; second, through those short pieces she seeks to help “creative writers and dramaturges . . . hone their skills”; third, she provides a “survey . . . [of] the production histories of three regional not-forpro ¤t theatre companies”: Missouri Repertory Theatre, the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival, and the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival (12). This survey brings to light the concerns and values of those speci¤c audiences at the speci¤c time of her writing. At the heart of these goals is “the dramaturg’s terrible responsibility ”: the program essay. As a matter of principle, Londré makes a persuasive argument for the program essay as an art form in its own right as well as an integral part of a production . She notes that her dream for the book is for the program essay “to win acceptance . . . as an art form to be held to ever higher standards, as is the work of any maturing artist” (10). Londré insists that the essay is not intended to explain the director’s concept to an audience or to be a marketing tool to sell tickets to the production; rather, it can “challenge, provoke, delight, or otherwise stand alongside the experience of watching a play”(3). It is just one of the many options audiences have for entering into the theatrical experience. The book is divided chronologically into ¤ve sections of essays. In parts 1 and 2, Londré reveals a cultural pro¤le of the Missouri Repertory Theatre under the artistic leadership of both Patricia McIlrath and George Keathley spanning the years 1979 to 2000. Part 3 provides a sampling of essays for the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival from 1991 to 2004. Part 4 includes essays for the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival from 1993 to 2003. In part 5, she concludes with...

Fables of (Cuban) Exile: Special Periods and Queer Moments in Eduardo Machado’s Floating Island Plays

Between the time of its publication by the Theatre Communications Group in 1991 and its first major West Coast production at the Mark Taper Forum three years later, Eduardo Machado’s four-play cycle of Cuban and Cuban-exile histories, Floating Islands, underwent major revision.2 Of the four, the play that bore the most revision was the third, Fabiola. As a whole, Floating Islands recounts the story of three connected, extended, and eventually dispersed bourgeois Havana families, the Ripolls, the Hernándezes, and the Marquezes, beginning with the first family’s rise to economic and social prominence in 1920s Havana, and taking us to the marriages that connect the three families in the decades preceding the 1959 Revolution, to the Revolution and its aftermaths in Cuba (the setting of Fabiola), and finally to the ambivalent moment of the family’s exile “success” in 1980s suburban Woodland Hills, CA. The differences between the earlier published and later performed “versions” of Fabiola are considerable, and significant. In this first of four sections to this discussion, I will summarize the two versions; I then take up aspects of Fabiola, and of the Islands cycle that situate Machado’s work in relation to the vexed ideologies still (mis)directing Cuban familial, (trans) national, and diasporic histories; the theory and history of theatre, drama, and performance as they inform the plays; and the legacies of spirit, ritual and religion, still haunting Machado’s Cuban/American theatre.

Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (review)

Reviewed by: Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora Annemarie Bean Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora Ed. Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. 412 pp. ISBN 1-56639-944-0 paper. On the gradual slope that was the informal ending of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in theater, Paul Carter Harrison wrote the powerful and influential The Drama of Nommo (Grove P, 1972). BAM had attempted to artistically and theoretically create revolutionary theater by blacks for blacks. Early grants of foundation support (in particular, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) were quickly rescinded once the content and form of the plays generated were experimental, avant-garde, and confrontational to gender and class stereotypes, i.e., avoided the "thingification" (as coined by Frantz Fanon) of blackness in theater. When Harrison wrote Nommo, he identified the presence of "Nommo on the Block." Harrison's marking of Nommo reinscribes the Dogon god, representing the totality of the cosmos, as a force ("Nommo force") to be [End Page 122] channeled into the theater by having plays less dependent on presenting disadvantaged black families. In fact, for Harrison, "family" should be supplanted by "community," and community is maintained through performance forms that "reinforce[s] the stability of racial identity," such as style (word-magic, repetition, improvisation, change), storytelling (orality), trickstering, and ritual (30). All these performance practices support community, not the individual. The black theater artist, Harrison concludes, "is not a position aloof from the crowd; for if he should be out of earshot of the song, he will surely miss the 'A' train and face a lonely trip back home" (79). Given his authoring of Nommo thirty years ago, and his continued work on ritual theater as a playwright and editor of play anthologies, it is no surprise that Harrison, in 2002, teamed up with Victor Leo Walker II, head of the African Grove Institute for the Arts, Inc., and former Professor of Drama and Film Studies at Dartmouth College, and Gus Edwards, a teacher of film studies and director of a multi-ethnic theater program at Arizona State University, to produce an anthology on ritual performance and black theater. What is to be celebrated regarding this anthology, Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, is that it has been edited by black theater educators and practitioners. According to the Harrison's essay "Praise/Word," the idea of the anthology came about after the 1998 National Black Theatre Summit at Golden Pond (Dartmouth College). The summit itself was a response to August Wilson's Theatre Communications Group 1996 keynote address, "The Ground on Which I Stand." At the end of the summit, the African Grove Institute for the Arts (AGIA) was formed, with August Wilson as the chairman of the board and Victor Leo Walker II as the CEO and president. Black Theatre offers multiple objectives of Black Theatre as was voiced by Wilson, defined by the 1998 NBT Summit, and nurtured by the AGIA: Black Theatre is performative, not didactic, yet seeks collective self-definition. In both ensemble and solo work, the performance objectives rise above self-aggrandizement, recognizing the tension between I/we that subjects the individual self to collective responsibility. It is a preservative and transformative dramatic ritual that requires ritual ground as the space to focus centrality of spirit. [. . .] Black Theatre is joy, passion, and beauty, which lead to positive illumination. (9) Defining Black Theatre as performative, transformative, as based in ritual, and as needing a permanent place of practice most probably influenced the editors to organize the anthology Black Theatre in the following parts: African Roots, Mythology and Metaphysics, and Dramaturgical Practice. As Harrison states, the articles included are "essential texts" that continue the ideas promoted in the Drama of Nommo in 1972, geared toward critically supporting the centrality of "African memory" in the theatre of the African Diaspora. "Part I: African Roots" begins with a brief introductory essay by Walker. He specifies that the words "theatre" and "drama" include all types of, to borrow from Alan Lomax, "collective creation" (13). Of particular note in this section are the essays by the late Ghanaian playwright (Muntu) and...

Theatrics of SEAM

The purpose of this article is to explore the similarities and differences in the socio‐economic approach to management (SEAM) method and postmodern approaches to theatre. Neither metaphorical nor managerialist, SEAM's perspective allows that the organization is theatre. Introduces the terms “metascript” and “metatheatre” to describe how SEAM's approach accomodates the multiple perspectives and simultaneous multiple stages populated by the “spect‐actors” (Boal, A.,Theatre of the Oppressed, translated by Charles A. and Maria‐Odillia Leal McBride, Theatre Communications Group, New York, NY, 1979, originally published in Spanish asTeatro de Oprimido, Ediciones de la Flor, Buenos Aires, 1974) of the Tamara‐esque postmodern organization theatre.

Evolution or Revolution in Black Theater: A Look at the Cultural Nationalist Agenda in Select Plays by Amiri Baraka

... we are on the verge of reclaiming and reexamining the purpose and pillars of our art and laying out new directions for its expansion. As such we make a target for cultural imperialists who seek to empower and propagate their ideas about the world as the only valid ideas, and see blacks as woefully deficient not only in arts and letters but in the abundant gifts of humanity. (August Wilson 71) From a 1990's perspective, one might initially suspect that the nationalist tone demonstrated in the above excerpt is a flashback to the 1960s, when nationalist rhetoric virtually saturated the media and became part of a massive cultural event now known as the Black Arts Movement. Yet this impassioned appeal for a separate and viable black theater was issued by playwright August Wilson in a June 1996 speech delivered before a largely conservative white audience attending the eleventh biennial Theatre Communications Group National Conference at Princeton University. Amid charges of his arguing for (Brustein 26) and dismantling the Civil Rights Movement, Wilson issued a challenge to the larger theater community to establish theaters of, by, and for African Americans and to discontinue funding color-blind casting--a practice he argues merely stifles the growth of black theater. Although Wilson's recent wake-up call to the American theater community has engendered much enlightening debate and redirected attention back to the plight of black theater, the principle behind his call to arms is not new. Indeed some thirty years ago, poet, playwright, activist Amiri Baraka had similar problems with the melting pot of American Theater and devoted his energy toward advancing a separate aesthetic designed specifically for the black audience. He articulated this vision, with as much passion as Wilson commands, in one of many fiery essays written in the spirit of cultural nationalism. Exemplary is Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites & BPower Mooments, in which Baraka proclaims that Black Power movements not grounded in Black culture cannot move beyond the boundaries of Western thought. The paramount value of Western thought is the security and expansion of Western culture. Black Power is inimical to Western culture as it has manifested itself within black and colored majority areas anywhere on this planet. Western culture is and has been destructive to Colored People all over the world. No movement shaped or contained by Western culture will ever benefit Black people. Black power must be the actual force and beauty and wisdom of Blackness ... reordering the world. (47) So that we may understand and more fully appreciate the basis of August Wilson's renewed appeal for a separate black theater, it is necessary to understand the historical basis of his argument and to realize that he, like Amiri Baraka, still realizes the need for continual self-definition through the medium of black theater and, by extension, all art forms. It is important to note that the media fallout surrounding Wilson's highly publicized remarks is mildly reminiscent of the reception that was prompted by Baraka's cultural nationalist stance, which he so forcefully articulated some three decades earlier in characteristically scathing rhetoric and in a number of revolutionary plays. Once under constant scrutiny by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, accosted by policemen, subpoenaed to appear in court, forced to spend time in jail and physically beaten, Baraka knows well the price of the nationalist ideology which dominated his personal life and permeated his plays. Although time has seemingly tempered such fervor among artists, apparently one of the most important issues that fueled Baraka's anger still exists: the need for America to understand why culturally specific theater of, by, and for African Americans is crucial and should not only be subsidized but also encouraged to flourish without the stigma of separatism or racism. …

Do Black Theatre Institutions Translate into Great Drama?

Helen Taylor, in reviewing Classic Plays from Negro Ensemble Company, an anthology of ten NEC plays edited by Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards,(1) observed that African American playwrights have not been so central to American as have black poets, novelists, and essayists. This argues against Harrison and Edwards's afterword, in which they contend that NEC productions over twenty-five years have generated formidable African American theater literature (593). If one accepts revival as one precondition for classic status, then how many NEC revivals--or, for that matter, nonmusical African American plays--have there been on a Broadway or off-Broadway stage?(2) Taylor's reasoning is that history of Broadway (and even much of off-Broadway) is a white one, with blacks taking centre-stage as minstrel figures and minor characters in white (12). In giving keynote address before Theatre Communications Group's 1996 annual conference, August Wilson reinforced this idea by pointing out that, of sixty-six League of Resident Theatres, only one (Ricardo Khan's Crossroads) is black (August 104). Are more institutions like NEC answer to scarcity of revivals and original plays apart from August Wilson's, or is this notion a romantic delusion, as Henry Louis Gates implies (44)? The NEC is one in a line of African American theater institutions and programs that have not fully prospered because of a lack of financial support or support that took institution away from nurturing what August Wilson describes as art that feeds spirit and celebrates life of black America (Ground 16). The lone exception might be first black theater in America, Henry Brown's African Grove, which closed because of hardening racial attitudes shortly after Brown's King Shotaway (1823), a play based on insurrection of Caravs on island of St. Vincent (Stock and Stock 36). Thereafter, serious drama would wait some eighty years, during which time minstrelsy, early musicals, and beginnings of Chitlin Circuit(3) would occupy American and community stages. As Loften Mitchell has pointed out, these forms would use the same weapons--the blackface, low comedy [because] whites would not accept them any other way.... The wrecking of African Company ... reached down through years into 1920's and beyond (84). Charles Johnson's Opportunity (1924) and W. E. B. DuBois's Crisis (1925) magazine playwriting contests, sponsored by Amy Springarn and Casper Hostein, respectively, helped spawn a number of serious albeit melodramatic plays--Ottie Graham's Holiday (1923), G. D. Lipscomb's Francis (1925), and John Matheus's Cruiter (1926). During '30s, a number of Harlem community theaters functioned, such as The Players Guide, The Harlem Players, The Little Theater YMCA, The Aldridge Repertory Players, and Utopian Players. But as Fannin S. Belcher observed in a 1939 Opportunity article lack of funding worked against original material, playwright cannot afford to experiment; hence he must imitate (293). During Depression, Negro Unit of WPA provided employment and a theatrical laboratory, and served as a stimulus for Negro Playwrights' Company and American Negro Theater of '40s. However, an act of Congress, citing communist influence, killed federally funded project in June, 1939. The Negro Playwrights' Company, incorporated as a non-profit organization in May, 1940, by George Norford, was another promising institution that fell to financial pressures. The company's single production, Theodore Ward's Big White Fog, magnified events of Garvey era by singling out a black family's ten-year involvement in movement. But after sixtyfive performances, NPC, although announcing another production for January, 1941, never resumed operations. Ward's idealism to return theater to was compromised by financial considerations, and company's prospectus implied as much: While its plans are designed to achieve and maintain financial independence in future, and thus safeguard public against usual perennial appeals for funds for operation, company is now frankly dependent for support upon these progressive men and women who are conscious of need for developing artists and culture of Negro people (Ward, Why). …

The Colonization of Black Theatre

August Wilson's keynote address to the 1996 biennial conference of the Theatre Communications Group spawned a significant body of critical discourse and contention within the theatrical community and beyond. Among other sharp criticisms, he admonished the funding community concerning the continual lack of support for black theatres and cited the principle of colorblind casting as a denial of both black identity and historical and cultural truths. Mr. Wilson is a company member here at Penumbra Theatre Company and this long-standing relationship has many ways shaped the aesthetic that Penumbra has developed. I have consistently been philosophical agreement with him and have, public arenas, already stated my feelings (albeit not so eloquently as has Mr. Wilson). In this essay, I will indicate my thoughts regard to many of the issues raised by Mr. Wilson and how Penumbra seeks to theatrically address them. I am often, as Mr. Wilson is now, cast as the spoiler, for the efforts of major regional theatrical endeavors the multi-cultural arena. I have been quite critical of many of those efforts. Perhaps this is an opportunity to make a clear statement without argument. Since the Guthrie is our regional, here the Midwest, many of my comments refer to its efforts. In my view, the attempts by the Guthrie are indicative of a national milieu (or malaise) and not particular to the artistic directorship at that particular institution. The greatest travesty American theatre today is that, spite of the voluminous amounts of talent and craft evident at every level the black theatrical, musical, and artistic communities, we--as a nation--have not found it necessary to institute and support a major regional black theatre. Furthermore, I view the efforts of the major regional theatres (translation: white, since those are the only ones existence) to be antithetical to that end. Perhaps the following will help you to understand my position. By examining these specifics, I should be able to shed light upon a national condition which, as August Wilson is advocating, must be rectified. Both Mr. Wilson and Penumbra have, because of the tremendous resources the major regional theatres possess, allowed our craft to be exhibited those venues. Some of those closest to me, and whose opinions I hold high regard, counsel me to find ways to work with these major institutions. They argue quite persuasively that by sharing precious resources we could mount projects that could be to our mutual benefit. After all, these organizations have taken up the multi-cultural mandate and, like it or not, they are now in the business. I am advised to assume a position which would lessen many of my negative comments concerning the recent efforts of these organizations and the effects of these efforts upon my organization. I should, I am told, offer constructive criticism and partnership rather than polemical arguments which only serve to widen the chasm between our organizations. Penumbra, a recent collaboration, performed our production of Fences at the Guthrie Theatre Minneapolis. This collaborative venture was regarded by all as an example of two organizations coming together a respectful manner to produce great art. The result was a production that played to large numbers of people and retained the cultural truth for which Penumbra has been known. What will be the fruits of this endeavor? Will major regional theatres across the U.S. respect the expertise of black organizations that understand and maintain art and culture their communities, or will they understand an endeavor like the Penumbra /Guthrie collaboration to be a license to produce and do what they will regardless of the effects upon organizations like Penumbra and the communities they represent? What strikes me as very interesting is why Mr. Wilson's voice is audible now? Both he and I are saying essentially what we have said all along. …

The Crisis of Black Theatre Identity

We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes. We done sold ourselves the white man in order be like him. Look at the way you dressed ... that ain't African. That's the white man. We trying be just like him. We done sold who we are in order become someone else. We's imitation white men. (Toledo, in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom 417) For the record, and in case the obvious has passed by unnoticed, as we enter the next millennium, Black Theatre suffering an identity crisis, an inability define its ideological purpose and performance practice. Unclarity has encouraged uncertainty, even an ambivalent indifference about whether or not the experience should be designated African American (the conservative practice, in form and content, of petit bourgeois Negro imitations of Euro-American domestic dramas) or reflect the conscious-raising ritual enactments of radical Black Theatre (which should not be confused with the misapprehension of those observers who claim have sighted a New Black Theatre, the enterprising, commercial exploitation of Gospel music staged as popular entertainments that do not own the slightest pretense of pursuing the enlightened aspirations of ritual enactment, an exercise uncharitably labeled Chittlin' Circuit [see Gates 44]). Black Theatre might even be consigned the hybrid status of the new performance orthodoxy that agglutinates race, gender, and gay/lesbian social and philosophical issues into a newly marginalized Other designated by the dominant culture as Multicultural Theatre. The unique, particularized, cultural expression that informs Black Theatre has been restrained by an historically passive response by blacks the hierarchical authority of a dominant culture that subordinates the Afrocentric ethos into conformity with its popular standards of entertainment. As Tejumola Olaniyan so aptly points out in Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance, the impediment an Afrocentric theatre practice in Black Theatre cannot be fully discerned without an appreciation of the European hegemonic domination that has bridled the authentic impulses of black aesthetics: The Eurocentric discourse on black drama thinkable only within the materiality of the rise of Europe, the conquest and enslavement of African peoples, colonialism, neocolonialism, and ongoing aggressive capitalist imperialism (11). Historically, the consequent subordination of the African American cultural ethos found support among influential authorities in defense of slavery, as President Dew of William and Mary College demonstrated in 1832: ... slavery had been the condition of all ancient culture, ... Christianity approved servitude, and ... the law of Moses had both assumed and positively established slavery.... It the order of nature and of God that the being of superior faculties and knowledge, and therefore of superior power, should control and dispose of those who are inferior. It as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that other animals should prey upon each other. (qtd. in Dodd 53) During his courageous challenge mainstream American Theatre hegemony at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group Conference at Princeton University, August Wilson laid bare the fact that Black Theatre is a target for cultural imperialists who ignore the abundant gifts of black humanity, and he characterized the gross exploitation of black social practices for the purpose of white consumption as being a reflection of the House Slave being trotted out to entertain the slave owner and his guests. In his disavowal of the values upon which the standards for American Arts and Letters are erected, Wilson declared: We cannot share a single value system if that value system consists of the values of white Americans based on their European ancestors. …

Ronn Smith American Set DesignNew York: Theatre Communications Group; London: Nick Hern Books, 1991.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis (review)

Book Reviews 171 waves, or their absence. Beyond this Uteral interpretation, Mukand wants readers to recognize that the narrative of medicine, whether in the form of lines of poetry, stories, or cUnical tales, is essential to the understanding of iUness. The goal of medicine, he suggests, is to "empower patients and their families" (p. xxvii); by helping patients and famiUes become aware of their own stories, the goal may be accompüshed. Narrative is basic, a vital component of the practice of medicine. Yet, all too often, the narratives of medicine are obscured by the technical language and the rush to diagnostic tests. Without such narratives, would healing occur? Would empathy be possible? Vital Lines offers a very rich experience to all readers. For anyone who teaches humanities (or the art of medicine) to medical students and residents, this collection is a gift. It can readily be integrated with other materials as a basic text. It can also be combined with Mukand's anthology of poetry, Sutured Words, for a comprehensive course on contemporary Uterature and medicine. —JuUa E. Connelly University of Virginia M. EUzabeth Osborn, ed., The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990. xvii + 282 pp. Clothbound, $24.95; paperback, $14.95. "Place: New York City" With the largest number of AIDS cases of any city in the world, New York occupies a unique place in the medical, social, and cultural history of this pandemic. Almost all of the ten plays anthologized here were first performed on and off Broadway between 1985 and 1990. They bear witness to the city's involvement in the health crisis and to its theaters ' efforts to inform and mobiUze the public through entertainment. Not surprisingly, they feature a large number of writers and poets, actors and actresses, in and out of work in the city. They assume their audience's familiarity with the city's landmarks, from Tribeca to the Upper West Side to St. Vincent's Hospital. Terrence McNally's Andre's Mother (1988) brings together four people who loved Andre and commemorate his Ufe by 172 BOOK REVIEWS releasing balloons in Central Park, not far from the outdoor theater. (This original version lasts eight minutes; expanded into a teleplay, it was performed on "American Playhouse" in 1990.) The name of the New York soccer team, the Cosmos, provides one reading for the ambiguous title of Lanford Wilson's A Poster of the Cosmos (1988). These plays express some New Yorkers' anger with the official denials of a crisis during Reagan's presidency and the personal hypocrisy of a Roy Cohn. The latter appears in the single scene printed here from Tony Kushner's Angels in America, "an epic work in two parts" yet to be produced. Cohn denies to his doctor that he is homosexual in these terms: "Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?" (p. 134). In these plays, desire and disease couple and separate men and men, men and women, Anglos and Latinos, Catholics and Jews, intellectuals and manual laborers, the well and the sick, healers and victims in the anonymity of leather bars, in the overfurnished homes of the upper middle class, and in hospitals. But while social barriers fall, the city's medical, housing, and police services collapse in ruins. The value of these plays to our understanding of AIDS's impact on the imagination lies, in large part, in their apocalyptic vision, as well as in their probing of the mutual attraction of love and death. In Harry Kondoleon's Zero Positive (1987; first performed in 1988), two persons with AIDS (PWAs), a suicidal actor, a senile man, and two neurotics perform Athens in Ruins, a play in which Athens's defeat in the Peloponnesian War brings on pestilence and madness, destroys friendship, family ties, and piety, and confronts the audience with skulls, bones, and funeral flowers. While not without a sense of self-parody, such moments connect this plague in New York with Thucydides' and Lucretius' Athens, Boccaccio 's Florence, and Defoe's London. William M. Hoffman's As is, the ear...