Theatre Movement Research Articles

Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (review)

Reviewed by: Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans Alan Sikes Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans. By Robert A. Schanke. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hardcover $64.99. 262 pages. The latest book by Robert Schanke is the work of a seasoned scholar who clearly relishes the pleasures of academic research and publication. Schanke takes evident delight in recovering the life and work of Cal Yeomans, a now-nearly forgotten pioneer in the gay theatre movement of the Post-Stonewall era. Frank and explicit in his portrayal of gay male sexuality, Yeomans found early success in the emerging gay theatre scene of the 1970s and early 1980s, but at the advent of the AIDS epidemic he refused to compromise the unconstrained sexual [End Page 165] expression that marked his writings; his plays fell from favor, and since his death in 2000 he has been little more than a postscript in the emerging narratives of gay theatre history. Until now, that is. Through meticulous research and patient reconstruction of Yeomans's life and work, Schanke has written an academic "page turner” that restores this early maverick of Post-Stonewall theatre to his proper prominence. Simultaneously, however, Schanke situates Yeomans within the larger contexts of his cultural moment, demonstrating how his plays reflect and resist the various discursive trajectories of gay life during the second half of the twentieth century; in this sense, the book performs a valuable double duty, operating as both biography and social history. Schanke opens his text with a preface that offers crucial insights into his research and writing process. He credits his colleague Kim Marra for directing his attention to Yeomans; she first perused his collected papers at the University of Florida archives and alerted Schanke to the "gold mine” of as-yet-unexamined original documents. Shanke likewise extends thanks to the University curatorial staff, who responded to his interest in the papers by quickly cataloguing the materials. Yet he also recounts with good-natured humor how the staff restricted his access to some of Yeomans's personal letters and journals because their intimate references to still-living individuals might land them all in trouble with the law. As Schanke tells it: "If Cal described in his journal an actor having ‘a big old dangling dick,' could the actor sue the library for allowing me to read about it? Could the actor sue me as well?” (xvii). Through his candid observations on the challenges he faced not only in his archival work but also in his interviews with Yeomans's friends and colleagues, Schanke supplies a useful mediation on the legal, and indeed ethical, negotiations that can accompany academic research. The first chapters of the book recount Yeomans's years as a "horrible misfit” born into an affluent family in small-town Crystal River, Florida, in 1938. Yeomans's first recognition of his homosexuality, it seems, occurred in tandem with his introduction to the theatrical profession in the late 1950s, and the book relates his early work as an actor and acting teacher throughout the 1960s South, as well as his work with the famed La MaMa Theatre in the early 1970s. Schanke writes candidly about the emergence of Yeomans's bipolar disorder, a condition that would affect him the rest of his life, and observes that Yeomans's plays and poems were, from the beginning, explicit and sometimes surreal takes on unconventional sexualities; the early and unproduced Swamp Play #2, for example, featured a transvestite nymphomaniac and a pedophilic minister quite literally haunted by the phallus-shaped demons of their desires. In later chapters, Schanke details Yeomans's rise to prominence in the national gay theatre scene, most notably for two plays, Richmond Jim and Sunsets. The [End Page 166] first premiered at Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco in 1979, and later had another successful run in New York City. It is a story of the sexual awakening of the titular Jim, a young man from the South whose sexual encounter with an older man in Manhattan introduces him to the world of bondage and leather sex. Sunsets premiered in New York City in 1981 and subsequently played in Chicago and San...

Katherine Tingley's Theosophical Theatre: Greek Revivalism and New Religion in Lomaland, USA

Katherine Tingley's Theosophical Theatre: Greek Revivalism and New Religion in Lomaland, USA Edmund B. Lingan (bio) In Point Loma, California, which is a small town a few miles west of San Diego, stand two eye-catching buildings on what is now the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University. One is a round building topped with what resembles a three-dimensional, purple, stained-glass teardrop. The other is an outdoor theatre with orchestra and hillside seating that recalls the architecture of ancient Greek theatres. These two buildings are reminders of the headquarters and residential community of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society (UBTS), also known as "Lomaland," which flourished under the leadership of Katherine Tingley between 1898 and 1929. During the heyday of the UBTS, the Greek Theater housed ancient Greek and original plays that Tingley directed as a means to teach the principles of her spiritual worldview, which is called Theosophy. Although Tingley's name is virtually unknown by contemporary theatre scholars, in her own time she was known and understood by theatre critics as an important director of experimental theatre. In The Open-Air Theatre (1918), Sheldon Cheney, who is one of the first American critics of avant-garde theatre, credits Tingley with being a pioneer of Greek Revivalism and the Open-Air Theatre movement in the US.1 Cheney writes that Tingley constructed the first outdoor, Greek-style theatre in California and credits her with developing a new and decorative form of drama that was "permeated by the Greek spirit."2 In a 1916 article entitled "Some American Experimental Theaters," W. L. Sowers compared Tingley's theatrical work to that of well-known Greek Revivalist theatre artists such as Maude Adams and Margaret Anglin.3 Tingley, however, differed from the professional theatre artists with whom she was compared because her theatre was created primarily to teach and promote Theosophy: one of the most well-known and enduring of the "new religious movements," or "NRMs," that emerged during the Occult Revival of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, Tingley was known internationally as the leader of the UBTS, and she predicted that the mysteries of a lost primordial religion, or "Wisdom Religion," would be [End Page 5] revived on the grounds of Lomaland, which was presented to the general public as a new Athens of the modern age.5 Tingley viewed theatre as one of the most important tools for teaching the mysteries of the Wisdom Religion. With the stated goal of reconstructing what she imagined the "supreme religious dramas" of ancient Greece might have been like, Tingley directed Aeschylus's Eumenides and original, Greek-inspired theosophical mystery dramas called "symposia" (see fig. 1).6 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Katherine Tingley (1847–1929). Copyright and courtesy of the Theosophical Society Archives, Pasadena, California. This essay explores the religious motivations behind Tingley's theatre, as well as the social and political concerns that were embedded within those productions. To accomplish this purpose, it has been necessary to depend for the most part [End Page 6] upon primary resources because little scholarship has been dedicated to Tingley's theatrical work. Emmet A. Greenwalt's The Point Loma Community in California 1897–1942: A Theosophical Experiment (1955) includes an illustrated chapter on Tingley's theatre, and a few theatre critics who worked during the early-twentieth century discussed Tingley's theatre.7 Knowledge of Tingley's theatre faded, however, after her death in 1929, and since then the bulk of the documents concerning her theatrical work have been held in The Theosophical Society Archive in Pasadena, California, which is not open to scholars and the general public. Between 2001 and 2008, two directors of The Theosophical Society—Grace F. Knoche and Randell C. Grubb—granted me permission to visit the archives on three separate occasions, and this rare opportunity has enabled me to access hundreds of photos, scripts, programs, and articles relating to the theatrical activities of Katherine Tingley and the UBTS in Lomaland (Point Loma) and New York City.8 Like many organizations identified by sociologists of religion as an NRM, Theosophy offers alternatives to some...

Revisiting a dream-site of liberation: the case of Mukta Natak in Bangladesh

In 1984, a group of urban theatre activists of Bangladesh rejected their role as ‘traditional intellectuals’, and sought to join the subaltern classes as ‘ideologues in action’ by mobilising their knowledge and expertise on theatre in a manner that would animate those classes entwined in the exploitive infrastructure of the rural areas. This initiative, named Mukta Natak (translated as ‘Liberated Theatre’), was intended to generate a ‘Theatre by the People, for the People and of the People’, in which the ‘people’ would be the ‘organic intellectuals’. Until 1992, Mukta Natak flourished as a rousing popular theatre movement at the grassroots level, articulated by a network of around 40 local units and numerous sub-units, which operated in isolated rural pockets. As political activism motivated by passion, which was generated by a vision of social change based on class struggle, Mukta Natak was neither funded by the state, nor international donor agencies but entirely by voluntary participation and contribution of urban animators and villagers. This essay revisits the dream-site of the Mukta Natak movement in order to pick up the pieces of the dream. It proceeds in three parts: the first draws out the theoretical underpinnings of the movement. The second gauges its impact by field-level investigation at two notable grassroots sites – Kansona and Chatmohar – which were revisited in 2009. The concluding section refits the broken pieces of the dream to recover a tangible alternative for applied theatre for the South.

Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora (review)

{ 153 } BOOK REV IEwS \ Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora. Edited by John P. Harrington . Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xix + 226 pp. $24.95 cloth. Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora, edited by John P. Harrington, features thirteen essays from the third conference of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora Project, held at NewYork University’s Glucksman Ireland House in April 2006. In his introduction, Harrington asserts that these essays contribute to the “evolving subject area on how Ireland’s relationships with the world have been more complex than they are often represented and how the ‘wider world’ is already developing new relationships with Ireland”(xiv). In addressing such a field, specifically relating to America, the anthology can boast a number of important essays. Mick Moloney opens the collection with an insightful essay on the latenineteenth -century Harrigan and Hart phenomena with their comedic and musical Mulligan Guard shows. Moloney traces the history of the Ed Harrigan and Tony Hart (Cannon) partnership with the songwriting foundation of Harrigan and David Braham. The essay notes that the Harrigan and Hart depictions of contemporary urban working-class immigrant life “affords us a unique window not just into the evolution of Irish America but into America itself” (18). Harrigan and Hart are complemented by Maureen Murphy’s“From Scapegrace to Grasta: Popular Attitudes and Stereotypes in Irish American Drama,” which traces Irish drama in America from 1830 to 1965 as it mirrors immigration and assimilation. Murphy attempts to define the difference between Irish drama in Ireland and Irish drama in America: the former grew from a “legacy of colonialism” or “want of work,” while the latter grew from the premise that the Irish in America found work; hence, the appeal of Harrigan and Hart–type entertainments (21–22). Murphy eventually touches on the Abbey Theatre’s 1911 U.S. tour, which influenced the American Little Theatre movement, leading her to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night as an example of Irish American drama’s“legacy of emigration”(32). Unfortunately, neither Murphy nor any other scholar in the anthology writing on Irish American drama makes mention of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet—that most Irish of Irish American plays. Two essays that are well coupled are Deirdre McFeely’s“Between Two Worlds: Boucicault’s The Shaughraun and Its New York Audience”and Gwen Orel’s“Reporting the Stage Irishman: Dion Boucicault in the Irish Press.” McFeely explores the Irish audience that rejected The Shaughraun’s imaging, despite the { 154 } BOOK REV IEwS play’s New York success, as expressed in a debate of letters in the Irish World. The paper’s correspondents “wanted an Irish drama to . . . establish the Irish race as culturally different from both the British and Anglo-Americans,” with Catholicism, abstinence, and nationalism as ideals (59). Orel provides further context on the overall Boucicault debate in the Irish American press in the 1860s and 1870s by recalling the fact that Boucicault’s Irish plays were not admired by Catholic American papers. One of the highlights of the collection is Lucy McDiarmid’s “The Abbey, Its ‘Helpers,’ and the Field of Cultural Production in 1913.” The essay explores the efforts of Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats to raise funds for the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art during the Abbey Theatre’s early 1913 American tour, using performances of Gregory and Yeats’s The Pot of Broth, Gregory ’s Hyacinth Halvey, and G. B. Shaw’s American work, The Shewing­up of Blanco Posnet. McDiarmid relates Gregory’s efforts in courting wealthy Americans , the“helpers”who assisted in the fund-raising, and the controversy that resulted when Dublin Corporation voted in September 1913 not to proceed with establishing the gallery to house Hugh Lane’s modern paintings (which he was giving to Dublin provided the city build the gallery). Contextualizing her essay through 1913, McDiarmid reveals that the Abbey actors, with the Dublin Lockout as their backdrop, petitioned Gregory and Yeats for the money raised through their performances of the above plays in America. Gregory and Yeats had wanted to retain the money until a later date when the...

Dramatists under a label: Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd and Aleks Sierz' In-Yer-Face Theatre

ABSTRACTTheatrical trends, schools or movements are cultural groupings that fill a central function when considering theatre histories. In many cases, specific critics play a major role in categorizing, defining and characterizing new trends or movements. This article examines the critical phenomenon of defining a trend, concentrating in particular on those critical means employed in constructing a new theatrical trend, school or movement that serve to promote a new type of drama associated with several playwrights. I illustrate these means and how the critics employ them by focusing on two case studies: Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) and Aleks Sierz' In-Yer-Face Theatre (2001). Examining the means employed by the two critics serves here not only to map those means that are essential for such a grouping, but also to illustrate how they manifest the critics' practice of claiming authority. Additionally, I relate the differences between the two studies, primarily with respect to the particular phase of the theatrical development (the new type of drama) at the time each study was written, and, consequently, to each author's specific critical intentions.

The Transparency of the Text: Contemporary Writing for the Stage ed. by Donia Mounsef, Josette Féral

is an hors-sujet in this volume. Kiera Vaclavik’s well-documented treatment of the underground in children’s literature of the nineteenth century is grounded in the literature of Antiquity. Reading Alfred Jarry’s Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, Ben Fisher enumerates allusions to Jarry’s literary circle, to British scientists, and to Verne. In the twentieth-century section, Louise Lyle studies J.-H. Rosny’s concept of the Earth as a text “in which mankind’s apocalyptic destiny may be read” (219) while it unfolds according to Darwin and Lamarck. Humans sink into apathy as superior species arise to exterminate them. Rosny thus anticipates both the ecocriticism and biocentric inhumanism of our day. David Walker illuminates Gide’s Nourritures terrestres and L’immoraliste in an outstanding essay that explains how Gide literally returned to the soil while those two works were composed, managing a farm inherited from his mother in 1895, with the advice of a long-time agriculturist friend. Martin Hurcombe concludes the volume with another fine study that demonstrates how André Malraux’s conversion from a Communist fellow traveler to an ardent nationalist serving De Gaulle developed during the period that his Asian and anti-fascist novels were composed. Malraux’s vivid, vicarious experience of humanity’s bond with the Earth in the French maquis and the Spanish peasantry under Franco, merged with his evolving metaphysical humanism . The Antimémoires (1967) show how Malraux’s sense of fraternity expands to comprehend a national community. Broader framing would have enriched the introduction. For example, before the Enlightenment, eruptions and earthquakes were considered sequelae of humanity’s fall; since the nineteenth century, the French regional novel concretizes the Ancients’ cosmological vision of Concordia discors. Marjorie Nicolson’s forgotten classic Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Cornell, 1959) helps put things in perspective. Independent scholar Laurence M. Porter MOUNSEF, DONIA, and JOSETTE FÉRAL, eds. The Transparency of the Text: Contemporary Writing for the Stage. Yale French Studies 112. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007. ISBN 978-0-300-11819-3. Pp. 174. $30. This well-conceived volume, divided into three sections, focuses on what distinguishes contemporary French theatrical texts from other writings for the stage, both from the distant past and from most of the twentieth century. Authors of the articles are especially concerned with the wild diversity of ways in which language is used in these texts. Plays are not constructed to represent the world but to show how knowledge of the world is inaccessible. Texts are no longer dialogues but are rather constituted of any utterance imaginable. Actors’ voices and bodies are not simple vessels through which an author’s words flow but are, for the playwrights discussed here, inextricably intertwined with the text. Part 1, “Avant and Après Garde,” revisits several twentieth-century French theatrical movements and emphasizes the current rupture with much theatrical tradition, including the theater of the absurd, the reign of the director, and the conventional use of myth. The articles discuss innovative forms of writing and performance and how new theatrical works are liberated from many traditional constraints. In some plays dialogue is replaced by hybrid texts where, for example, stage directions 176 FRENCH REVIEW 85.1 are spoken. Other works, epic in nature, are comprised of interminable lists and disjointed monologues, creating a theater of totality. Writing is performance and mystery, and breath is as important as words. Works by authors Valère Novarina and Claude Régy are analyzed to show how text and performance converge to create new modes of expression where writing, voice, and body exist as one. In the section entitled “(Under)writing the Stage,” attention is paid to authors whose works exemplify the explosion and expansion of the theatrical text in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. An article on Michel Vinaver shows that, for this playwright, no single point of view is enough to convey a situation. For him, fragmented scenes and open interpretations express the instability of perception. The study of Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose characters struggle within the confines of language to express desire, illustrates how theater can effectively represent...

Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre Susan Cannon Harris Eamonn Jordan. Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010. Pp. 277. £40.00 (Hb). Ironically, the first crop of books on Celtic Tiger literature and culture hit the market right around the time that the global economic crisis smashed the Irish miracle to smithereens. Unlike some of his less fortunate predecessors, Eamonn Jordan had time to incorporate the bust into the boom narrative [End Page 590] before his book went to press. Jordan notes, in his introduction to Dissident Dramaturgies, that the spectacular implosion of the Irish economy and the investigations that followed indicate that the Celtic Tiger ultimately was as mythological a beast as the unicorn: "These factors suggest that many of those local prosperity and wealth gains were driven by spurious speculation as much as by anything else and are now about to recede" (3). Jordan contends, in his introduction, that "while a great deal of the work under consideration [in Dissident Dramaturgies] was first performed just before or during the period of the Celtic Tiger, it is vital to remember that the work did not necessarily bear much relation to that reality" (10). Tigers come and tigers go, but they have, in Jordan's view, little intercourse with the fabulous beasts populating contemporary Irish drama. Unlike, for instance, Patrick Lonergan's Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Macmillan, 2009), Dissident Dramaturgies is not focused on how contemporary Irish theatre was transformed by the global economic and cultural matrix into which Ireland was fully integrated during the 1990s. Jordan amply demonstrates his awareness of recent work that has insisted on reading "Irish" literature as part of a global system of exchange, and he acknowledges that "[a]lthough this book has the word Irish in its title … Ireland does not provide either the coherence or composure of a metanarrative" (9). But while he goes to considerable effort to discuss all the ways in which the very concept of "contemporary Irish drama" has been challenged, Jordan forges ahead with his study of it all the same. Under the rubric of "dramaturgy," which opens up his analysis to theory and production as well as the dramatic text itself, Jordan organizes his analysis around "six very specific, if restricted, dominant patterns, configurations or constructions that shape the blatant dramaturgy of primarily text-based Irish theatre" (13). These are history and memory, innocence, the pastoral, myth, and storytelling (this last theme is split into two chapters, one on narrative in general and the other on the "Glut of Monologues" in contemporary Irish drama). Most of the plays considered date from the 1980s or later; the authors who garner most of the attention are Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson, Mark O'Rowe, Thomas Kilroy, and Marie Jones. The greatest strength of Jordan's method is his close attention to performance, which adds complexity to his readings of the plays and makes Dissident Dramaturgies, among other things, a valuable record of these original productions. Dissident Dramaturgies also has its shortcomings. The most important is a curious disconnect between the book's extremely well-informed discussion of relevant criticism and theory and the actual readings of the plays. During his discussion of the global turn in Irish studies, for instance, Jordan points out that others have suggested that McDonagh's true context is the "British In-Yer-Face theatre movement" spawned during the 1990s at the [End Page 591] Royal Court Theatre (10). He also notes that the Royal Court co-produced McDonagh's Leenane trilogy and that his next two "Irish" plays were premiered in London by the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (136). Jordan opens his discussion of McDonagh's The Pillowman by pointing out that it was "substantially drafted" in 1993–94, before McDonagh's Irish plays were produced, and that it has "more in common with the work of contemporary British writers, like Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane" (203), the props of the aforementioned "In-Yer-Face" movement. There is, however, no sustained discussion of the work of Kane and Ravenhill; or of the Royal Court's cultivation...

‘This is a case in which Irish national considerations must be taken into account’: the breakdown of the MacBride–Gonne marriage, 1904–8

In her vivid account of the Irish theatre movement, Máire Colum described the first evening of Lady Gregory'sGaol Gateat the Abbey Theatre on 20 October 1906. The performance was delayed until Yeats arrived; he was accompanied by a tall woman dressed in black. As soon as they appeared, there was a violent reaction in a section of the audience:

The Indian People's Theater Association (IPTA) on film: (Con)testing memory and history in the Bengali theaterscapes of Ritwik Ghatak's Komal Gandhar (E Flat, 1961)

This piece focuses on the importance of Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak's Komal Gandhar (E Flat, 1961), in providing a cinematic representation of the methods, ideologies, and personalities of the Bengal IPTA, and how Ghatak's construction of the film – particularly his use of sound and song – powerfully expresses the significance of this theatrical movement in Bengal's cultural history. Specifically, I argue that the prominent role of theater in the film is a means of galvanizing the memory and debating the history of contentious, traumatic events of and around the 1947 Partition. I examine several sequences of rehearsals for and performances of both IPTA-like plays and the Indian classical drama Shakuntala to illustrate Ghatak's establishment of a dialectical dialogue between aural and visual elements, traditional and progressive culture, and ultimately, memory and history in this film.

Redefining political drama: Onwueme and Nigerian society

Tess Akaeka Onwueme, the noted Second Generation playwright of the Nigerian National Theatre movement, moved beyond initial attempts to fashion agendas for a developing postcolonial national theatre. Abandoning the original, First Generation trajectory to found a unique national culture through the celebration of Nigeria’s diverse literary and musical forms, she engaged more directly the political and social issues of her current national history. Inspired in part by Brechtian Epic Theatre performance style and theory, Onwueme’s stagecraft sought to merge Brecht’s famous ‘alienation effect’ with empathic character portrayals. Rejecting Brecht’s view that audiences should leave aside the emotional identification with the characters for the sake of a critical, disinterested perspective, Onwueme used both traditional character empathy and Brechtian distancing devices in her plays. Moreover, her often heavy use of irony and explicit political and social allusions created a critical perspective without sacrificing the audience’s emotive response to character and situation. The result was a richly textured and varied dramatic experience that included political issues of social complexity and psychological depth.

Student Theatre in Poland: Vehicles of Revolt, 1954–57 and 1968–71

Polish student theatre was a unique artistic movement in the Soviet post-war empire, with a liberty of expression unparalleled elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. As in every political system, in any country, its creators and its public were students and young intellectuals. These theatre-makers used the umbrella of the Polish Students' Union – a surprisingly democratic institution in a totalitarian political order – and all attempts at their repression were usually appeased by the activists of the student organization, often the friends and supporters of the theatre-makers. After the creation of the Socialist Union of Polish Students these activists became more dependent on the Communist Party, but the Party establishment decided, in the period of the ‘thaw’ (1954–57), that the student artistic movement would be maintained as a kind of artistic kindergarten for avant-gardists and supporters of artistic and political revolt, to let them manifest their beliefs within the well-guarded, limited territory of student cultural centres. However, the young rebels overcame these restrictions and created a focus of artistic opposition which had a wide social and artistic influence, especially during subsequent periods of political crisis. Juliusz Tyszka was himself an activist in the student theatre movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Now an NTQ advisory editor, he is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance (review)

Reviewed by: American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance Robert J. Vrtis American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance. By John Bell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 292. $95.00 cloth. Peter Schumann, the director and founding member of Bread and Puppet Theater, believes that puppeteers like himself have traditionally occupied an outsider’s place with respect to “high” art in Western theatre tradition. In American Puppet Modernism, John Bell notes that Schumann has reveled in the “low” and even “ridiculous” position that his work occupies, since the puppeteer can use it as strategic footing for political critique. While this status has benefited companies like Bread and Puppet, it has also fostered conceptions of puppet theatre as an insignificant performance genre—silly children’s entertainment at best. Bell’s book complicates the idea of what a puppet is and how it speaks about the culture in which it performs, thus providing an opportunity for the reader to reconsider puppet theatre’s significance by seriously considering what Frank Proschan termed “performing objects” (a term encompassing all things that take part in a storytelling process or that represent ideas). This critical exploration into American object performance yields many insights into the way material objects speak about and work within our increasingly materialistic culture. Bell examines several compelling moments of material performance. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century with traveling panoramas, he then delves into several incarnations of object performance in the twentieth century. The book ends with a discussion of the implications of nascent motion-capture technology in the twenty-first century. These analyses are incisive and provocative investigations into the ways that objects tell stories about the culture that produces them, an intriguing and accessible read for artists and scholars interested in a historical perspective of the material world in performance. Bell begins by expanding his definition of “puppet” to encompass a spectrum of “performing objects,” which allows him to consider such material objects as marionettes, hand-and-rod–style puppets, cars, televisions, and computer-generated animation. Having established a broad horizon of possible material, he focuses on particular practitioners in specific historical moments. Through close examination of the methods and materials used in their performing objects, Bell reveals how the performance of objects reflects, enhances, or subverts the cultural narratives shaping modern American identity. In this spirit, an early essay places John Stevens’s The Sioux War Panorama, which toured Midwestern towns during the 1860s and ’70s, within the mythic history of American expansionism. Showing a succession of painted images (including depictions of westward-bound settlers, Abraham Lincoln with his cabinet, Sioux leaders, conflicts between Native peoples and troops under the command of Colonel Silbey, and the mass hanging of Sioux prisoners), the panorama and Stevens’s accompanying narration told a story of the inevitable taming of the American West. Bell describes how the panorama invoked recognizable American figures in a way that elevated them to hero status, while at the same time reinforcing a conception of Native Americans as dangerous “savages” in need of civilizing, through bloody enforcement if necessary. By framing, confirming, and glorifying the violent process of westward expansion, so that the spectators felt that they were part of a larger American myth, the panorama edified the settlements it visited. Any investigation of object performance must include Edward Gordon Craig’s provocative “The Actor and the Über-marionette,” and indeed Bell expertly disabuses the common misconception that Craig’s theories demand erasure of the living actor in favor of nonhuman actors. He also traces Craig’s influence on emerging puppet modernism in America, beginning with the Little Theatre Movement. As Bell explains, Craig inspired many artists in the Movement who wanted to explore the possibilities of masks, puppets, and other performing objects in contexts of serious artistic exploration: puppet theatre for an adult audience. The example of Remo Bufano, a puppeteer who came out of the Little Theatre Movement hoping to make space for puppets in performance, helps Bell to allay misgivings about [End Page 131] what may appear on first glance to be a call for an actor-free theatre. “In Bufano’s vision, puppets and actors will share...

Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context by Mary Donaldson-Evans

episodes that highlight the relationship between the melodrama and the drame romantique. The five essays that make up the third part deal in various ways with the question of popular theater and popular literature in the nineteenth century and point the way toward a conclusion (that Thomasseau labels his ‘Epilogue’) in which he traces the descendants of the melodrama to André Antoine’s art theater movement and beyond. Elegantly and often wittily written, the individual essays would have benefited from some revision, as background details are repeated from one chapter to another and some arguments, due to the constraints of the twenty-minute conference paper, are more provocative than fully convincing. Still, the author’s erudition is obvious; the information he shares is useful, and the depth of understanding and appreciation for this “bastard” genre that he imparts is priceless . Thomasseau certainly makes the case for the importance of the melodrama as cultural phenomenon and aesthetic artifact, and his Mélodramatiques is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century French culture. University of South Alabama Susan McCready DONALDSON-EVANS, MARY. Madame Bovary at the Movies: Adaptation, Ideology, Context. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 978-90-420-2504-2. Pp. 218. $59.00. The sixties and seventies brought us a new genre, the “ciné-roman [scenarionovel ]” designed to be read and seen. Mary Donaldson-Evans considers the far more common but less studied genre, the adaptation of novels to film. With an admirable knowledge of film theory and of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, she offers expert analyses of four film versions that are linked to Flaubert’s prose masterpiece , while remaining nonetheless quite independent. The first chapter offers a very useful summary of the theory that undergirds adaptations. Literary and visual media have many differences, and the conversion of one to the other presents enormous difficulties. The length of fine novels simply cannot be squeezed into visual sequences of two to three hours. After touching on a number of problems like indeterminacy, Donaldson-Evans asks the most embarrassing question (the elephant in the room): “What purpose is served by adapting [Madame Bovary] to the screen?” (37). One would immediately suspect that there is always a market for film versions of well-known novels, and as the author suggests, we professors need to choose wisely as we attempt to supplement our classes with films for visually-oriented students. Otherwise, the answers are many and complex, whether it is the challenge of rivaling a masterpiece or of using a work to heighten a particular theme, however different from the author’s (in this case Flaubert’s) intention. Donaldson-Evans has chosen adaptations, arranged chronologically, that exemplify the freest use of Flaubert’s novel and a faithful attempt to recreate it in another medium. Despite the many problems that Renoir experienced in directing his adaptation and bringing it to completion, Donaldson-Evans’s exquisite textual analysis of the film insists on Renoir’s fidelity to essential elements of the novel, while adding the personal touches of framed portraiture and allusions to paintings for which he is famous. She explains the most important symbols, and shows how Renoir occasionally invented scenes that successfully abbreviate the novel. Likewise Renoir’s populist sympathies open another dimension that does not reflect 388 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 Flaubert’s novel or attitudes, and he portrays Emma with much more sympathy. Rather than the horrendous death Emma experienced by arsenic, Renoir allows her to attain a certain dignity and peace in her death. Minnelli displays technical advances in 1949 over Renoir’s 1934 film, while Donaldson-Evans’s analysis brings out subtler and indeed more important distinctions . She convincingly argues that oppressive American censors had a marked effect on the final product in order to emphasize the moral of the story of Emma’s destruction. Chabrol’s attempt to reproduce Flaubert’s prose faithfully in 1991 loses much of the marvelous irony of the original novel, and the film’s voiceovers seem all too professorial. Many of the scenic arrangements repeat, yet somehow fail to live up to the novel, despite Chabrol’s guiding principle of fidelity. Furthermore, by deleting all positive references to religion, he “significantly alters the personal...

Modern Chinese Drama in English: A Selective Bibliography

Introduction: A Brief History of Modern Chinese Drama Modern Chinese theatre started at the turn of the twentieth century, in part in response to calls by reform-minded intellectuals unsatisfied with traditional theatre's inability to depict social reality and thus serve political and educational functions. Although missionary schools had staged spoken drama performances in cities such as Shanghai as early as the late 1800s, scholars agree that modern Chinese theatre began in 1907 when the Chinese student group the Spring Willow Society staged in Tokyo an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin titled Black Slave's Cry to Heaven (Heinu yu tian lu). After the fall of the Qing dynasty during the 1911 revolution, new drama moved from Tokyo to Shanghai, where it flourished in a hybrid form known as wenmingxi (civilized drama), which relied heavily on scenarios and improvisation. As a result, few scripts from the era survived. In the late 1910s, the New Culture Movement, known for its attack on traditional culture and aspiration for Western science, democracy, and culture, inspired a new direction in modern Chinese theatre known as huaju (spoken drama). A special issue of the movement's leading magazine New Youth (Xin qingnian) was dedicated to Ibsen and another to dramatic reform. Hu Shi's one-act Greatest Event in Life (Zhongshen dashi, 1919), about the importance of love in marriage, marks the beginning of this huaju dramaturgy. Influenced by modern theatrical movements in Europe, the United States, and Japan, huaju playwrights who had returned from those regions produced plays in a wide variety of styles during the 1920s. Prominent playwrights returning from the United States include Hong Shen, whose Yama Chao (Zhao Yanwang, 1922) used expressionistic techniques; Xiong Foxi (The Artist [Yishujia, 1928] and The Drunkard [Zuile, 1928]); and Yu Shangyuan (Mutiny [Bingbian, 1925]). Returning from Japan in 1922 with a clear understanding of modern Western drama and its Japanese incarnation shingeki (new drama), Tian Han wrote such successful pieces as The Night a Tiger Was Captured (Huohu zhi yiye, 1921), Tragedy on the Lake (Hushang de beiju, 1928), and One Evening in Suzhou (Suzhou yehua, 1929). Ouyang Yuqian, the only original member of the Spring Willow Society still active in theatre, wrote the subversive P'an Jinlian (1928). The English-educated Ding Xilin wrote one-act satires such as Flushed with Wine (Jiuhou, 1925) and Oppression (Yapo, 1926). (1) This diversity of styles took a dramatic turn toward realism and political engagement in the 1930s, first because of Communist-led leftist dramatic movement and then during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The 1930s also marked huaju's maturity, as best evinced by such classics as Cao Yu's Thunderstorm (Leiyu, 1933) and Xia Yan's Under Shanghai Eaves (Shanghai wuyan xia, 1937). During the war, theatrical activities flourished in three regions: southwestern China, where most theatre artists retreated with the nationalist government; the concession areas of Shanghai; and the Communist-controlled region of Yan'an. One of the better-known styles that flourished in the southwest was the historical play (lishiju), which used allegorical historical figures as oblique criticism of the present situation. The representative playwright in this style was Guo Moruo, who wrote Twin Flowers (Nie Ying, 1920-1941), Qu Yuan (1942), and The Tiger Tally (Hufu, 1942). In the Communist region of Yan'an, Mao Zedong, in his 1942 Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (Zai Yan'an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua), urged artists to produce works that directly serve the needs of workers, peasants, and soldiers. This resulted in experiments in new theatrical forms more accessible to the masses, including reformed jingju (Beijing opera) plays such as Driven to Revolt (Bishang Liangshan, 1942) and xin geju (new opera) such as The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nu, 1945), which is included in the list. …

Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 (review)

Reviewed by: Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 Dorothy Chansky Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918. By Susan Harris Smith. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; pp. xvii + 224. $74.95 cloth. Venue matters. This is the crucial idea in Susan Harris Smith's Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918, which considers 125 largely unknown and unproduced plays that were published in fourteen general-interest magazines during the Progressive Era. Such periodicals appealed to what Richard Ohmann has famously called the PMC (professional-managerial class), who represented 7 percent of the US population in 1880, and 12 percent by 1910. The magazines included the lavishly illustrated Century, the slightly less intellectual Harper's New Monthly, the muckraking McClure's, and the seriously progressive Forum. Smith calls these magazines "more parochial than cosmopolitan, more nativistic than international, and more intent on preserving the status quo than in creating a new world" (11). Since almost none of the people who published plays in these magazines were among the ranks of successful commercial playwrights of the day (only William Dean Howells and Booth Tarkington fit both categories, although Zoë Akins was a player in the Little Theatre movement), Harris wisely looks beyond commercial theatre for the significance of these plays as a body of work, noting that the plays covered a wide variety of styles but a narrow spectrum of social beliefs. The plays addressed the same contemporary topics as the essays with which they shared space in the magazines. They did so, however, with concern more for reassurance than for potentially incendiary argument (which essays might undertake). Some were not quite what we might today call dramas at all; they might be monologues or simple dialogues—debates, really, that allowed for comfortably conversational airings of differing points of view on contemporary topics—or plot summaries combined with dialogue, or extended précis interspersed with excerpts from an actual drama. Part of what gave the plays' authors credibility was that they also wrote in other genres and often were already-known commodities for their stories or essays. Arguably, the magazines provided a venue for writers who created drama for reasons other than wanting to fit Broadway's (or vaudeville's) needs. Significantly, twenty-seven of the plays were written in verse and 40 percent are by women—statistics that went unremarked in the magazines but would have been unheard of in the commercial theatre. For readers of these magazines, the plays, which were often illustrated, were understood as informative stories in palatable, albeit sometimes abstract or poetic, form. Smith points out that any differing points of view heard within these plays reflected differences within the proscribed readership, never differences between it and other blocs of political interest. If readers thought at all in terms of the performance of these plays, it would be performance at home with friends or family. Hence, argues Smith, there were no African American characters in this corpus of dramatic work, since it would be too embarrassing to embody such a character in a private reading. On the other hand, ethnic and lower-class whites were fair game for derision and were marked—even when they conveyed a bit of wisdom or were unfair victims of white privilege—as lesser and other via their poor English (64—65). [End Page 352] Following her introductory chapter ("Varieties of Dramatic Experience") and a chapter on plays that "other" lower-class characters ("Cultures of Social Distance and Difference"), Smith discusses, in "Women as American Citizens," plays that flattered and encouraged middle-class, white women "to uplift the lower and lesser citizenry" via essentialist assumptions that their "domestic virtues" were adequate reasons to justify their authority (86–87). Unsurprisingly, plays discussed in this chapter (which is thoroughly researched but holds little in the way of unanticipated discoveries) support marriage and consumerism while worrying about "race suicide" and miscegenation. The independent women in these dramas are those who are shown "choosing" conservative values, not those who buck the trend. The fascinating fourth chapter, "Cultural Displacement," looks at plays with exotic settings or characters that are used for titillation or recuperation, but that flew under the radar of suspicion...

American puppet modernism: essays on the material world in performance

Introductions The Sioux War Panorama and American Mythic History Masks and Shalako Puppets: Anthropology meets Indigenous Mask and Puppet Theater The Little Theater Movement and the Birth of the American Puppeteer Jane Heap and the International Theater Exhibition of 1926 Puppets and Propaganda Identity: Gertrude Stein's Puppet Show From Sorcery to Science: Remo Bufano and the 1939 World's Fair American Puppets and Television Kustom Kulture and Detroit Industrials: Cars as Performing Objects Landscape and Teeth Masks ACT-UP and the Puppetista Movement: Reinventing Activist Performance as Object Theater Mass Media and Motion Capture

Decade of Dreams: Democracy and the Birth of Nepal’s Engaged Stage, 1980–1990

The decade between 1980 and 1990 was a time of political upheaval and change in Nepal as the populace demanded a voice in the system that governed their lives. It was also an important period in the development of Nepal’s theatre as democracy was won with the help of the fledgling political theatre movement, which began in the university, was taken to the streets, and was emulated throughout the kingdom. Particularly important was the work of Asesh Malla of Sarwanam and Sunil Pokharel of Aarohan. The work culminated in the Jana Andolan (People’s Movement), which climaxed in April 1990. As the citizens of Nepal wrestled absolute power from the hands of their king the relationship between Nepal’s theatre and society was changed forever. This paper illuminates this exciting period and the people at the forefront of Nepal’s socially engaged theatre. Carol C. Davis is an associate professor of theater at Franklin and Marshall College. She is also the founding artistic director of the Nepal Health Project, an educational and charitable theatre company that treks to villages throughout Nepal with plays and workshops on health and hygiene, and teaches creative dramatics to children in the orphanages of Kathmandu. Carol has acted and directed in California and Nepal, and her articles have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, Theatre Symposium, Mime Journal, Education About Asia, Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), and Not For Sale: Bearing Witness, Making Politics (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2004).

Nationalism in exotic clothes? Postcolonial thinking, gender and translation in the field day anthology of irish writing

Field Day has been the most important collective cultural initiative in Ireland since Yeats and Lady Gregory’s National Theatre movement in the early twentieth century. Founded in 1980 to articulate a cultural intervention into the crisis in Northern Ireland, it brought together some of the most important cultural figures in Ireland, such as the playwright Brian Friel, the actor Stephen Rea, and the poet Seamus Heaney. While it was originally conceived of as a touring theatre company, the enterprise also became a publishing imprint, and has produced some of the most challenging scholarly work on Irish culture and history. Its most ambitious project was The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, a massive undertaking that looked to compile and rethink 1,500 years of Irish writing. When the first three volumes of the Anthology were published in 1991 the egregious lack of women’s writing in their 4,044 double-columned pages, and the fact that not one of the editors of the 44 different sections was a woman, were immediately noted. In an embarrassed response, the editors commissioned a second instalment, which was entirely edited by women and devoted to women’s writing, and was published in 2002 in two volumes. The focus of this article is on the modes of postcolonial thinking that informed these two instalments. The first three volumes were clearly influenced by thinkers such as Said, who published a pamphlet with the group, and considered Field Day an archetypal postcolonial enterprise. Indeed, Field Day is credited with having introduced postcolonial thinking into Irish Studies, a move that was by no means uncontroversial. For many critics, theories emanating from African, Caribbean and Indian colonial experiences had no relevance in an Irish context, and they strongly suspected that Field Day’s interest in postcolonial thinking was little more than an attempt by the group to re-dress nationalism in exotic clothes. The blindness to gender evidenced in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was taken as confirmation of this, as it showed that Field Day was a group that could not see beyond the ‘national’ question and engage with other urgent issues. In many ways, then, attention to gender and to women was construed in these, at times fiery, debates about the first three volumes as a symbol of progress and modernisation. Particularly in the Republic of Ireland, Field Day was characterised as a group of middle-ged, patriarchal Northern Irish men, who would drag the whole island backwards; who could not provide a viable narrative for it at the end of the twentieth century. However, volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, (those devoted to women’s experiences), are, in fact, even more vertly postcolonial in their outlook than the first three volumes. But rather than looking towards Said, Fanon and Memmi, this second instalment was indebted to Subaltern Studies. Through giving an account of this episode in contemporary Irish cultural history, this article thinks about the problems and possibilities that attended upon this translation of postcolonial thinking from a non-European to a European setting.

Hungarian and Independent

Retracing the movements of Hungarian theater over the past ten years, Andrea Tompa details the rise of Hungary's two most influential independent and contemporary theater directors, Árpád Schilling and Béla Pintér. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, an emergent, internationally prominent Hungarian theater scene took shape: Tompa chronicles the rise of the independent theater movement in the context of the work of other influential directors, such as Viktor Bodó, János Mohácsi, Balázs Kovalik, and Sándor Zsótér, whose daring, performative approaches exploded the psychological-realism tradition. Schilling and Pintér are the heirs: Schilling, praised for the founding of his company Krétakör, whose constant, chameleonic reinvention resists stasis; Pintér, for the theatrical incorporation of Hungarian folk tradition and the resultant questioning of the parameters of identity.

Melancholia (review)

Reviewed by: Melancholia Chantal Rodríguez Melancholia. Collective creation by The Latino Theater Company Laboratory. Directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela. Cultural Reconstruction Series, Los Angeles Theater Center, Los Angeles. 14 June 2007. The Latino Theater Company's recent production of Melancholia seamlessly blended influences from the early Chicano theatre movement with contemporary political issues and elements of European theatrical tradition to stage the widespread devastation of warfare. By following the journey of an East LA marine, the play explores the increasingly high rate of suicide among soldiers returning from Iraq. Created collectively by the company's laboratory of new actors in 2003, the piece grew out of community based research, improvisations, and workshops, premiering at the Edge of the World Festival in October 2005. As the Iraq war rages on and both sides suffer the consequences, the Latino Theater Company chose to remount the production for the Los Angeles Theater Center's Cultural Reconstruction Series in the spring of 2007. The audience entered a small black-box theatre where a minimalist set and low whispers greeted them, setting the tone for the production, which was purposefully unpredictable, nonlinear, and highly theatrical. The play began in darkness with a haunting aria from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, titled "Dido's Lament." After the echoes of the aria faded, several soldiers ran across the stage and exited through an illuminated door. Two fools/clowns, Tar (Fidel Gomez) and Skittles (Carmen Corral), managed to stop one soldier, Mario, from going "into the light"; determined to save his soul, they decide to go back and replay the events of his life to try to save him from the darkness of melancholy. The scenes shift to various moments in Mario's past, which illuminate his life choices and offer insight into his worsening alcoholism and insomnia as he distances himself from family and friends, struggling to forget the unspeakable acts that haunt him every time he closes his eyes. With Melancholia, the Latino Theater Company continues to mine an aesthetic grounded in the techniques of the early Chicano theatre movement by combining minimalist staging with music, dance, ritual, and haunting imagery. The production also reflected influences and didactic methods associated with the movement's early styles: actos, collectively created, improvised agitprop scenes; mitos, or myths; and corridos, Chicano storytelling songs. In addition to Melancholia's collective and improvisation-based creation, the production also shared elements traditional to these pieces, including the use of Brechtian devices, strategic use of music and song, a bilingual script rich with Chicano slang, and classic Chicano characters such as La Muerte (Death). Melancholia bears a striking similarity to Soldado Razo, an early Chicano acto performed to protest the Vietnam War during the Chicano Moratorium in 1971. Theatrical similarities between the plays include a strong antiwar theme, a focus on the role of the family in Chicano culture, the integral role of La Muerte in the central character's life, and the use of whiteface makeup, here used on the entire cast. This visual technique was highly successful, serving as a constant reminder of the death that haunts Mario and foreshadows his demise, while also allowing each actor to slip into several roles. Three different actors played the role of Mario (Ramiro Segovia, Sam Golzari, and Michael Esparza) and often occupied the stage at the same time, a choice that also contributed to the play's Brechtian tactics. The production's incorporation of European elements was also evident in its juxtaposition of Shakespearean dialogue from Hamlet with contemporary language and Chicano slang to create profound insights into mortality with dialogue accessible to the community audience. Throughout the evening, several key moments in Mario's tumultuous journey through his past emphasized the didactic nature of this production, solidifying the play's antiwar message. For example, a reenactment of a military-recruitment commercial was played in the form of a full-blown doo-wop musical number. Melancholia suggested the subversively glamorous recruiting techniques of the military: offering money for college, travel, adventure, respect, and, of course, women and sex. Although the military's specific recruitment of minorities in lower-income families could have been more explicit, Mario's desire to join the...