Theatrical World Research Articles

Leonid Myasin's Music Laboratory: on the 125th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding choreographer

The article is devoted to the consideration of the musical component of the artistic activity of the outstanding choreographer of the Russian diaspora Leonid Myasin (1895-1979), whose 125th birthday is celebrated by the theatrical world in 2020. The main milestones of the choreographer's musical education are noted, the spectrum of his musical interests is revealed, and techniques of working with the music of the created ballets are studied. The purpose of the research, carried out using historical and typological methods, is to study the stages of the formation of the choreographer's musical maturity, his author's style. The circumstances of Myasin's collaboration with contemporary composers Manuel de Falla, Eric Satie, Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith are considered. Special attention is paid to the process of formation of a system of artistic methods of working with music in the joint work of the choreographer with Igor Stravinsky on the implementation of the ballets "Pulcinella", "Sacred Spring". The questions of Myasin's attitude to such spheres of musical expressiveness as rhythm, dynamics, timbre are highlighted. The methods of the choreographer's work with works of symphonic music are studied, the methods of achieving musical and plastic synthesis in the stage solutions of Myasin's choreographic symphonies are analyzed: "Omens" (1933) to the music of the Fifth Symphony by P. Tchaikovsky, "Choreartium" (1933) to the music of the 4th Symphony by I. Brahms, "Fantastic Symphony" (1936) to the music of the symphony of the same name by G. Berlioz, etc. It is concluded that the laws of musical composition and dramaturgy were a source of artistic renewal and enrichment of the author's style for the choreographer, the development of the intellectual beginning of his choreography.

Pengembangan Model Pembelajaran Proses Kreatif Berteater

The main problem of learning literature in school and college is the lack of experience and weakness of students' ability in literature. The experience and abilities in the literature include experience of appreciation and expression, both oral and written. Meanwhile, theoretically and the demands of the curriculum, appreciation experience and students' ability in expression are the main goals of literary learning. This is a fundamental problem of literary learning, the gap between the expected with the reality that occurred. One of the skills of literary expression is theatre activities, in which the activities are required to appreciate the high story played. Therefore it is necessary to design the learning process of creative in the theatre world from start creation and appreciation of the script to the show. This research will parse the full picture of the model of literary activities in the world of theatre in the sixth semester students who contracted theatre courses in the Department of Language Education and Indonesian Literature at the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Untirta through the development method. The output in this research is the product of creative process of theatre in the form of students' work in theatre and long term goal is expected to create qualified human resources in the future.

Loon, lust, liefdadigheid

Abstract Throughout the centuries, many literary authors were engaged in writing theatre plays. Although there are many studies about the theatre business in general from Medieval Times to the present, the perspective of the playwright’s profits is seldom taken into consideration. This article presents both a survey of author’s options to gain an income in the world of theatre and an analysis of the discourse about this advancement. More specifically, on the basis of a comparison of cases from the seventeenth century on the one hand and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the other, this article argues that, despite the fact that for playwrights, as much as for other literary authors, it was a taboo to be open about economic profits, developments in the organization of institutional theatre created temporary openings for (public debate about) financial rewards.

Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830, by Ellen Lockhart

Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 , by Ellen Lockhart. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xi, 218 pp. Happening upon the title Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 , one might suppose that the book places music in a rather esoteric conceptual configuration that held cultural relevance only for the delimited place and time. Do not be so fooled. In this work of sensitive and imaginative scholarship, Ellen Lockhart demonstrates a previously unrecognized centrality of the animated statue—the stone human figure that comes to life—to the development of Western aesthetic thought and operatic practice. Deftly traversing a wide range of sources, Lockhart shows how the animated statue ties together a rich late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century world of musical theater, aesthetic theory, nationhood fantasies, sciences of the body, and notions of self. From such starting materials as the Pygmalion myth, the commedia dell'arte tradition, and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac's Traite des sensations (with its thought experiment of a statue gaining one sense at a time), the animated statue became a “means of understanding the relation of human senses to the self and to the very matters and materials of the fine arts” (p. 10). Lockhart uses this discovery to make a vital contribution to a growing musicological literature that takes seriously the historicity of the senses and multimedial conditions of music, and to make the language of animation and plasticity newly available as a resource or topic for musicological inquiry. Though consisting …

Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity

In Worldmaking, Kondo traces racial affect throughout the theatre world and conducts an ethnography of the backstage domain to argue that artists, including Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and herself, make and remake race through their creative processes, and that reparative creativity is a mode of affective redress.

Getting Caught: A Collaboration On- and Offstage between Theatre and Anthropology

How does an ethnographer remain affected by worlds encountered after leaving the field of research? How does a theatrical deviser build theatrical worlds from empirical research that convey affective experience rather than just dramaturgically sound documentary-style narrative? Affect Theatre is a thinking and acting space for exploring these questions.

«Чайка» А. П. Чехова: перші театральні досвіди. До питання сценічності п’єси

The dramaturgy of A. Chekhov, having overcome the framework of the aesthetic event of a particular national culture, became a phenomenon of world theater. The Chekhov Theater went through several stages of development, and it was in the play «The Seagull» that the new coordinate system proposed by the author manifested itself as a complex phenomenon, overcoming the stereotypes of dramatic rules and anticipating theatrical searches in later decades. Now a landmark for the theatrical arts, for the first time, the groundbreaking play went through serious trials that questioned its potential for the stage. This article offers a look at the performances that emerged between the two well-known aesthetic subjects — the devaluation of «The Seagull» at the Alexandrinsky Theater and its canonization on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre. After all, it is at the Kiev Solovtsov Theater, on the stage of his Odessa entreprise and O. Dukov’s Kharkov entreprise, that «The Seagull» restores the status quo. And these performances will become a precedent for the first readings of the play in theaters in Ukraine.

The importance of M. Kropyvnytskyi’s children’s theater for the formation of a professional musical children’s theater in Ukraine

The importance of M. Kropyvnytskyi’s children’s theater for the formation of a professional musical children’s theater in Ukraine

The figure of the woman in Sardinian theater of the 1970s: The case of the theater company La Maschera of San Sperate

This piece of resesch aims to study the emancipation of women in the world of theater through a particular case that occurred at the end of the 1960s in a small peasant town in southern Sardinia, San Sperate. Ida Pillitu is a woman who started acting and has been working in the La Maschera Theater Company since 1971, when they began to produce more socially engaged shows. I mainly conducted this research through some archive documents and an interview with Ida Pillitu, who revealed to me the effort and the determination with which she achieved her goals and her dream of becoming an actress.

Current trends in directing opera performances

The purpose of the article is to identify trends in the development of 21st-century operadirection in the context of symbiotic processes of theatrical and musical art. Methodology is basedon the use of complex theoretical interaction – systemic (for holistic research of operaperformances as an artistic phenomenon), historical (for analyzing the further development ofoperatic direction), analytical (for researching trends of operatic direction in the context of themodern sociocultural process) and empirical (for purposeful studying object of study) methods.Scientific novelty. The tendencies of the development of modern opera in the context of the specificsof directorial activity have been determined; analyzed the symbiotic processes of theatrical andmusical components of the opera on the example of the productions «Masked Ball» (dir. P. Pizzі, in2014), «La Traviata» (director A. Bernard, 2017), «Aida» by G. Verdi (dir. M. Kavanagh, 2018)and «Tosca» by G. Puccini (dir. A. Talevye, 2018) proved that innovative directorial principles andmethods have a positive effect on the development of performing skills of opera artists.Conclusions. The innovation of opera productions at the present stage is due to the pronouncedindividuality of the direction, the characteristic features of which are: an understanding of theimportance of the creative analysis of the specifics of the modern socio-cultural space; originalartistic thinking, etc. Summarizing the practice of opera and dramatic direction, leading artistscreate new staged culture using the discoveries of modern world theater, preferring the naturalexpression of emotions, reflection and revelation of the spiritual life of a person in performances,since it is the energy component of the play and its spectacle is the key to success with the viewer. The main principle of directorial cooperation with performers is the creation of holistic stageimages due to the accuracy of vocal interpretation and enhancement of acting. The classic legacy ofopera art is currently the basis for innovative creative searches of directors, dominant in which isto preserve the structure of the work as a holistic phenomenon, strengthening the leading role ofmusical dramaturgy, non-standard possibilities of stage decisions, according to the features of themusical score.Key words: opera, musical score, directors, opera performances, conductors, operaperformers.

Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy by Debra Caplan

Reviewed by: Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy by Debra Caplan Sonia Gollance (bio) Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy By Debra Caplan. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 327 pp. The Yiddish theater company that became the legendary Vilna Troupe had two main goals: create art theater for Jewish audiences and bring Yiddish theater to non-Jewish audiences. Entertainment was an afterthought. Yet entertain the Vilna Troupe did, becoming an international cultural phenomenon with wide-reaching influence throughout the performing arts world. In fact, one could say that Debra Caplan's Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy has similar goals. It is on one hand a narrative about the development of Yiddish art theater. At the same time, Yiddish Empire demonstrates the significance of the Vilna Troupe for theater studies more broadly, especially with regard to transnationalism, branding, the creative potential of itineracy, and as a worthy topic for digital scholarship. Entertainment is not the primary goal of an academic monograph, yet Caplan is an engaging storyteller with a compelling subject. The present moment is an exciting one for Yiddish theater scholarship. Productions such as Paula Vogel's Indecent and the Folksbiene's Yiddish-language Fiddler on the Roof have attracted broad public interest. New scholarly works, such as Alyssa Quint's The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (Indiana University Press, 2019), and translations of plays, such as Michael Shapiro's rendition of the 1932 Moyshe Nadir drama Messiah in America (Farlag Press, 2018), expand upon our knowledge of Yiddish theater. The Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (which Caplan cofounded) publishes works of public scholarship and synopses of Yiddish dramas on their website. Yet Caplan's monograph stands out as a work devoted to a theater company, or (one could say) a theater company franchise. Before the advent of digital [End Page 291] humanities tools, documenting the history of the Vilna Troupe was a virtually impossible task: multiple groups (and nearly three hundred individuals) used the company name as they toured almost constantly throughout Europe and the United States for a period of two decades. Caplan successfully navigates her complex topic in two unconventional ways. She provides a companion website, www.vilnatroupe.com, with a visualization of the connections between troupe members (Vilner) and their associates. Caplan also structures her book so that the five chapters about the history of the Vilna Troupe are interrupted by short "interludes" that provide fascinating snapshots into the lives of the Vilner themselves, on topics such as romantic relationships and the Holocaust. Yiddish Empire charts the extraordinary rise and slow decline of the Vilna Troupe, which began as an amateur theater group in German-occupied Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania) and became a celebrated art theater that attracted international acclaim among Yiddish-speaking and non-Yiddish-speaking audiences alike. The first chapter recounts (unsuccessful) attempts by Jewish intellectuals, such as Y. L. Peretz, to create a Yiddish art theater. Professional Yiddish theater companies emerged in Eastern Europe in the 1870s, yet they had an uneasy relationship both with Russian imperial authorities and with the arbiters of Yiddish culture. Modernist writers were embarrassed by what they classified as shund (trashy, poorly written melodramas), yet they were unable to establish a commercially viable alternative prior to World War I. Chapter 2 describes how a group of starving teenaged war refugees created a high-brow Yiddish theater in wartime Vilna. Despite the fact that the actors survived on one potato a day, performed in a theater that had recently been used to stable horses, and had little professional experience, their performances were a huge hit with Yiddish-speaking Jews and the relatively benevolent German occupying forces. When the company went on tour, they became known as the Vilna Troupe. The astonishing success of the Vilna Troupe makes for a good story on its own, yet Caplan also makes it clear that their innovations had a lasting impact on the theater world. One of their major contributions was the popularization of S. An-sky's play The Dybbuk, which also helped [End Page 292] the Vilna Troupe expand...

Paris des Femmes Festival

Reviewed by: Paris des Femmes Festival Elaine Molinaro PARIS DES FEMMES FESTIVAL. Paris, France. January 10–12, 2019. On Saturday, January 12, 2019, as had been happening all over France every weekend since the previous November, a yellow-vest protest against the Macron government took place just a short distance from La Pépinière théâtre where the eighth edition of the Paris des Femmes (Paris of Women) Festival was being held. Protesting among other things crippling taxes and stagnant salaries, the working-class marchers converged upon Paris from the overlooked and left-behind rural areas of France wearing their symbolic neon-yellow visibility vests in order to “be seen.” Police in riot gear filled the [End Page 104] plaza of the opulent Palais Garnier Opera House armed to quell any violence. Click for larger view View full resolution Anna Mouglalis in Puisqu’il fait jour après la nuit. (Photo: Francesca Mantovani.) On a side street off of the Opéra plaza, another overlooked group who faces reduced salaries and frequent violence also gathered in an attempt to be seen. Over the three days of the Paris des Femmes theatre festival, nine women premiered staged readings of their original short plays and monologues. In an interview, festival director Anne Rotenberg stated that works by women represent only 21 percent of plays produced in French theatres. She explained that the theatre world in France is still a very masculine environment, so culturally many women writers do not imagine playwriting and more easily gravitate toward writing novels. In an effort to encourage women to write for the stage, in 2012, Rotenberg, also a theatre director, founded the festival with journalist Michèle Fitoussi and writer/actor Véronique Olmi. They invite women, often novelists, to write original plays on a preselected theme in an effort to develop new playwrights and raise awareness of their work. The theme of the 2019 festival, “Noces” (weddings), offered a rich opportunity to explore feminist concerns, which many of the authors keenly drew out, despite Rotenberg’s claim that the theme was not necessarily feminist. One of the newest emerging authors in the festival, Adélaïde Bon’s first novel La Petite Fille sur la banquise (The Little Girl on the Ice Floe) is a personal narrative as a survivor of rape at age 9. Her play La Photo de famille (The Family Photo) raised the specter of a potential violent backlash by a jilted groom when the bride, remembering the sad fates of her mother and aunt in their marriages, left him at the altar and ran out of the church. Following her out, the groom attempted to reassure and convince her to return, at first gently and lovingly, but he grew ever more exasperated and condescending as she held firm in her resistance. By the end, his increasingly threatening behavior supported the case to call off the marriage for both the bride and the audience. As with Bon, many of the playwrights exposed and examined the issue of violence against women. Carol Fives’s humorous yet tragic play This Is Not a Love Song, titled in English after a Sex Pistols song, portrayed a couple boycotting their fifteenth wedding anniversary by going to bed early. They were, however, kept awake when they overheard their neighbors engaging in what at first sounded like consensual rough sex, but became ever more apparent as domestic abuse. In a welcome stylistic [End Page 105] choice, Fives combined dramatic tension with corny musical comedy enhanced by director Michel Vuillermoz’s light-hearted staging. Throughout the scene, as they sat up in bed, the middle-aged couple broke out into song. With the international hit “(This Is Not a) Love Song,” the couple expressed their ambivalence between respecting the neighbors’ privacy and intervening in the face of dangerous abuse. Recognizing with increasing alarm that the female neighbor’s screams of pain initially mistaken for passion were “not a love song,” the wife convinces her husband to call the police, who proved to be woefully unhelpful. As the couple tried to ignore the racket, the wife brought up being accosted in the street or on the subway at least...

Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and The Work Of Creativity by Dorinne Kondo

Reviewed by: Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and The Work Of Creativity by Dorinne Kondo Josephine Lee WORLDMAKING: RACE, PERFORMANCE, AND THE WORK OF CREATIVITY. By Dorinne Kondo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018; pp. 376. Dorinne Kondo's About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (1997) split its attention between the fashion industry and the theatre world; her Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity immerses itself much more deeply in the world of dramaturgy, playwriting, and theatrical production. Yet Worldmaking nevertheless provides ample opportunity for Kondo to demonstrate her training as an anthropologist and extensive [End Page 538] knowledge of cultural theory. The book's blend of ethnography, critical reflection, first-person narrative, and dramatic work coalesces around ideas of "reparative creativity," or "the ways artists make, unmake, remake race in their creative processes, in acts of always partial integration and repair" (5). Kondo demonstrates the power of theatre to address the complexities of race in contemporary America not only through what is seen onstage but also in the processes of rehearsal, revision, and reception, as artists question representational authority and negotiate collaboration. Her book also imagines a significant role for the dramaturg/scholar as an integral part of creative development rather than as a disengaged critical commentator, and it models important ways in which intellectual critique and theatre practice might inform each other. The three main sections of the book focus on Kondo's professional theatre experiences: first as one of the dramaturgs for Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1993), then as a commentator on David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face (2007), and finally as a playwright. Kondo spotlights her interactions with directors, actors, playwrights, and critics as well as the politics of racial representation that were at play in each of these instances. As she becomes more involved in the practices of play-making, she finds herself increasingly disenchanted even though she remains deeply attached to the theatre, feeling stuck in a state of what Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York's Public Theater, jokingly called "Stockholm syndrome!" (7). Nonetheless, she manages to record in painstaking detail the interplay of creative work, management, and reception that makes American theatre such a fraught terrain for artists of color. Like other parts of Smith's larger project On the Road: A Search for American Character, Twilight drew verbatim from diverse and often-conflicting perspectives on the 1992 LA civil unrest to encourage, according to Smith, a state of "full-body listening" (124). What Kondo adds to the existing body of scholarship on Smith's work is full attention to the collaborative nature of these solo performances. Twilight entailed over 200 interviews done by multiple people, including Kondo, and Worldmaking highlights the backstage tensions inherent in the process of artistic selection. For instance, Kondo relates her dismay at Smith's decision to cut Chicano and Japanese American characters from one performance, thus reducing the work to "largely a black-and-white story" (133). But while Kondo worries about how Twilight might be misread by mainstream critics as "a multicultural smorgasbord in which issues of power and inequality no longer exist" (159), she is fiercely loyal to Smith, crediting her with an exemplary "willingness to listen, every night, even in the face of harsh criticism" (135). Kondo's relationship with Hwang's Yellow Face is less formal but just as actively engaged. Kondo sees intellectuals and artists as having "complementary roles," and aims to mobilize academic criticism "to foster a better play and production, not simply to critique an object as an intellectual exercise" (197). When Tim Dang, the artistic director of East West Players co-producing Yellow Face, asks for feedback during previews, she sends a five-page, single-spaced analysis that details, among other things, the problematic depiction of Chinese ethnic minorities in the play. While she holds fast to this and other criticisms of Hwang's work, she also adheres resolutely to her sense that they are both allied in the same "urgent intellectual/aesthetic/political project" (ibid.). Scholarly reflection and theatre practice are most enmeshed in Kondo's final chapters, which include the complete script for Seamless, an original play about a...

Beloved son of the uzbek people

This article describes Abbos Bakirov's life, achievements, role plays in the world of Andijan theater, staged by a mentor. It seems to us that the character of Abbas Bakirov is a prototype of Yusufbek Haji in “The Past Days”. It means that at that time there were such cultured, farsighted, clever scholars and nobles in our nation. The director of the Andijan Theater at that time was Muhiddin Koriakubov, and the artistic director was Tuhtasin Jalilov. Abbas Khan aka considered these great people as the mentor for himself to the rest of his life. Featured in the gold fund of the Andijan Theater are "Leyli and Majnun", "The Rich with the servant", "Nadira", "Nurkhan", "Gulsara", "Holiskhon", "Tahir and Zuhra", "Alisher Navoi", "Rustam""Tor-mor" and "Alpomish" such as dozens of major workswere staged at that time.

Infl uence of Meyerhold’s Theatrical Concepts on the World of the Modern Chinese Theatre

Infl uence of Meyerhold’s Theatrical Concepts on the World of the Modern Chinese Theatre

The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer by Nicholas Grene

Reviewed by: The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer by Nicholas Grene Adam Goldstein The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer. By Nicholas Grene. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Pp. xv + 233. $102.00, hardcover. In a more than fifty-year career of diverse creations ranging from productions at iconic international theatres to Broadway, Hollywood, and beyond, Irish playwright Tom Murphy carved a long journey to establish himself as one of world’s most vital and dynamic playwrights. Recognized as an invaluable cultural voice in the exploration of Irish identity, Murphy’s canon explodes assumptions of colonial, postcolonial, and an ever-evolving Ireland through a myriad of dramatic forms, structures, and voices. Cementing Murphy’s cultural significance, Irish president Michael D. Higgins wrote in his official statement following the playwright’s passing in May 2018, “The importance of Tom Murphy’s contribution to Irish theatre is immeasurable and outstanding. We have had no greater use of language for the stage than in the body of work produced by Tom Murphy since his earliest work in the 1960s. His themes were not only those which had influenced the very essence of Irishness, emigration, famine and loss—they were universal in their reach.” This notion of “universality” represents the exciting launchpad for Nicholas Grene’s [End Page 250] extraordinary critical companion book, The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer. This wonderfully comprehensive “deep-dive” into the vast landscape of Murphy’s storytelling endeavors to analyze each of Murphy’s works—both major and minor—in the hopes of granting universal viability for the playwright’s work, not only to his native Ireland but to the world of theatre at large. Grene loads the beginning of his work with an assertion that Murphy’s writing, particularly in comparison to his contemporary, the globally lauded Irish icon Brian Friel, is “understudied and undervalued” (xiv). Garry Hynes, artistic director of Druid Theatre Company, echoes this sentiment in the 2018 New York Times report of Murphy’s death, that non-Irish audiences often struggle with his plays because Murphy does not gift his audience easy thematic, narrative, or personal access points. Murphy’s plays are challenging for global audiences to penetrate because as Hynes states, he is “unflinching in his rage about the way things were. He wrote with a very raw essence.” This rawness of essence sparks the subtitle of the work “playwright adventurer,” which identifies both the greatness and the challenge of the playwright in critique. Grene proposes that Murphy is an “adventurer” in that he discovers a story as it emerges and adapts form to fit this emergence rather than write to a predetermined style, outline, structure, or theatrical vocabulary. Through an exhaustive exploration of archival information as well as via significant direct interviews with the playwright himself, Grene guides us into the heart of a writer who follows impulse, delves into the visceral of the moment, and who does not need to know in advance where a story is heading to arrive at powerful catharsis. The author skillfully implies that the challenge for Murphy’s work in achieving “universality” lies in the sheer difficulty in pinning down the playwright’s voice. Murphy’s worlds jump from the page as individual moments in the playwright’s mind that transcend one voice and instead mine numerous the-atrical vocabularies, sounds, tones, and tools in the pursuit of complex truths. Grene examines Murphy’s plays thematically rather than chronologically. He groups works under linking categories that denote important connective tissues that span Murphy’s career. This structure allows the reader to view Murphy’s narrative complexity through a lens of recurring questions, themes, and ideas rather than through a basic linear chronology. Further, by looking at the playwright’s creative process in crafting each story, the book’s framework observes Murphy’s work as incredibly political by identifying it as utterly personal. Grene sees Murphy’s work as universal because it is so universally human despite its often-localized vantage point. The first chapter, “Retrospectives,” lays out the playwright’s biographical [End Page 251] information as well Grene’s key strategy of exploring Murphy’s process rather than just product. Through this refreshing method of analysis...

A New Stage for Eighteenth-Century Irish Theater Studies

A New Stage for Eighteenth-Century Irish Theater Studies David O'Shaughnessy (bio) Recent work on the Irish Enlightenment has reinserted Ireland into debates on the history of ideas in the eighteenth century.1 Moreover, reappraisals of figures such as Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and Frances Sheridan have insisted on acknowledging the Irish heritage of these successful writers who played out the majority of their careers in Britain.2 Goldsmith, to take one example, can no longer seriously be considered a "court jester to the English," whatever James Joyce might have thought.3 The fact of authorial Irishness is no longer hurriedly thrust into a dark cupboard but is an object of scholarly analysis when we consider eighteenth-century texts. While this is by and large a welcome trend, there has been some judicious critical blowback to some of the earlier work in this vein, skeptical of an approach that seems to relentlessly hone in on Irishness as some sort of exegetical panacea, an ineffable solution to every question posed by a text or its author. We are now perhaps at a stage when we can enjoy scholarship that recognizes the importance of Irish influences without needing to reduce everything to that happy accident of birth. Eighteenth-century texts should no longer be twisted into improbable contortions by well-meaning but single-minded readings. In parallel to this development, theater has come much more to the fore in the past twenty years or so of eighteenth-century literary studies. The extraordinary and exceptional mobility of persons and productions between [End Page 355] the theaters of Dublin and London—whose relationships border on the symbiotic—make it the ideal field in which to think through ideas of Irish Studies in less hermetic ways. Transnationalism defines and complicates these figures and productions in ways that are not found in the other major literary genres of poetry and fiction.4 It is also an area of study that is considerably underdeveloped pace work on major dramatists such as Farquhar, Goldsmith, and Sheridan.5 While such canonical writers have been reasonably well served, there is a slew of figures, very successful in their contemporary moment, that deserve further study—Mary Davies, Arthur Murphy, Hugh Kelly, Frederick Pilon, Richard Lalor Sheil, and Alicia Le Fanu are only a few of such writers. Happily, the recognition that theater is one of the remaining "institutional structures" of the Irish Enlightenment requiring examination has coincided with a major publication that will enable work proper to begin.6 John C. Greene's Theatre in Dublin, 1745–1820: A Calendar of Performances in six volumes accompanied by Theatre in Dublin, 1745–1820: A History in two volumes, all published by Lehigh University Press in 2011, are the monumental result of a quarter-century of research.7 Historians of the London theater are all too aware of the importance of the London Stage 1660–1800 (1960–68) to work on English drama, so the advent of this Dublin calendar will allow scholarship on Irish theater to advance in ways simply not possible up to this point. The six volumes of calendars provide records of 15,000 performances—some 1,780 different plays—over the period, mainly in Smock Alley, Crow Street, and Fishamble Lane. The two volumes of history give an extraordinary wealth of information on theatrical practice in Dublin, covering topics such as the repertory, finance, scenery, management, regulation, acting conditions, and the Dublin audience.8 While it is evidently wonderful news to historians of the Dublin theater to be able to draw on this rich data, there are broader scholarly implications. Given what we know about the remarkable mobility of both plays and theater practitioners (here understood in the widest sense to include actors, dramatists, managers, scenographers, theater critics, and newspaper journalists) across the Irish Sea, theater historians interested in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and other London theaters must now take note of Greene's work. The special relationship between the Dublin and London theatrical worlds speaks to the remarkable cultural energies enabled by the free movement of persons and performances across borders.9 Even leaving aside the canonical figures of Steele, Goldsmith, and Sheridan, the...

Culturally Competent and Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Age of MAGA and Brexit

Culturally Competent and Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Age of MAGA and Brexit Sylvan Baker (bio), Stephen Buescher (bio), and Kaja Dunn (bio) The prompt for the following conversation originated in a session at the ATHE conference in Orlando that centered around teaching culturally competent pedagogy in the age of Make America Great Again (MAGA) and Brexit. This piece is a recording of a curated discussion among the three scholars from that panel, which took place on Skype across three time zones. In the wake of massive political transition in both the United States and the United Kingdom, we discuss what it means to have a culturally responsive, culturally competent curriculum on both sides of the pond (figs. 1–2). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Sylvan Baker (top), Stephen Buescher, and Kaja Dunn on Skype. [End Page E-29] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Stephen Buescher, Kaja Dunn, and Sylvan Baker (l-r) at the 2019 ATHE conference in Orlando, Florida. How do we start/continue to push forward ideas of equity, inclusion, and decolonization in our actor-training programs, while also dealing with a changing political climate and the increasingly partisan grouping of issues around race, ethnicity, and culture? This piece considers effective ways of changing both curriculum and culture on campus. Looking at practice and culture in BA, BFA, and MFA programs, the panel explores the barriers and strategies to implementing change in academia and advocating for the theatre world that students will enter. Drawing on critical race theory, decolonizing methodologies, and sociological and psychological research, the panel also looks at the unique barriers affecting faculty of color in theatre institutions that are working to implement change. To view the video, click here: https://www.jhuptheatre.org/theatre-topics/online-content/issue/volume-30-number-1-march-2020/culturally-competent-and-trauma. [End Page E-30] Sylvan Baker Sylvan Baker is a researcher, practitioner, and lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He has experience in a range of applied arts contexts. He is an Artist Fellow at QMUL and an Education Fellow for the UK’s Royal Society of Arts. His research enables individuals to explore social issues through diverse artistic practices. His current projects are working with young people with experience of care and practice aimed at disrupting racial exclusion for students and staff members in higher education. He was elected a member at large of the Black Theatre Association for ATHE. Stephen Buescher Stephen Buescher is a teacher, choreographer, director, and actor. He is a professor of movement at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and has taught or created curricula in various graduate acting programs, including the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), Dell’Arte, Yale and Brown universities, University of Missouri–Kansas City, and University of Connecticut. He has choreographed at theatres including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, A.C.T., Old Globe, Long Wharf, and Trinity Repertory Company, and has directed in the graduate acting programs at A.C.T. and UCSD. He has performed nationally and internationally with Dell’Arte International for over a decade, and is a graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater and Calarts. Kaja Dunn Kaja Dunn is an assistant professor and head of acting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as well as a director, actor, and activist. She has presented her work on Training Theatre Students of Color at Goldsmiths, University of London, Southeastern Theatre Conference, Black Theatre Network, Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and ATHE, among other places. She is on the national board of the Black Theatre Association, and has performed in over forty shows and taught and performed internationally. She was previously a lecturer at California State University San Marcos and toured with Ya Tong Theatre in Taiwan. Other teaching credits include working with homeless and foster youth in San Diego. Follow her on Twitter where she frequently posts about EDI issues under the handle @KajaDunn. Copyright © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press

The Departed: McNally’s Master Class

The DepartedMcNally’s Master Class Gina Masucci MacKenzie (bio) Terrance McNally taught the world a master class on love. More important than any of his many legacies, are these lessons about love. They were needed when McNally’s work was first being recognized for greatness in the 1960s, and they are still needed today as the world is facing necessary isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic and necessary protest due to the enormity of racial inequality in our nation. In these unprecedented times, McNally’s voice rings out, reminding audiences that love, in all forms, can redeem us. McNally’s scope itself is remarkable. He was easily able to move between the Broadway brain/blood barrier of drama and musical theatre. Such movement helps to make the argument that, while each certainly has unique characteristics, each is equally as valuable and literary. Some of McNally’s greatest honors show that perfectly, as he won two Tony Awards for Best Play: Love, Valor, Compassion! (1995) and Master Class (1995) and two Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical: Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992) and Ragtime (1996). His greatest musical theatre accomplishments harken back to his earliest works as a political activisit/dramatist, in the 1960s and 1970s, speaking and writing out against the Vietnam War and political oppression. As the global community joins the United States in taking an unprecedented public stand against the systematic racism highlighted by the murder of George Floyd, the theatre loving among us are reminded of the messages in these two outstanding musicals. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, McNally gives audiences two men in a prison cell, one forced there because of his homosexuality, the other because of his political beliefs. The plot simultaneously revolves around the sexual and romantic loves of Molina and Paz, and around Paz’s incarceration and torture for revolutionary actions. The play clearly sympathizes with Paz’s political activism, using Molina as the agent of sympathy and compassion. Molina, the musical’s protagonist in many ways, is also in the role of the audience, who sits in observation, unable to help the suffering Paz. McNally is not afraid to stage the psychological effects of political oppression and torture. Musical underscore does not mitigate that pain. The show is remarkably unafraid to tackle themes little known to the musical theatre world, and does so with grace and candor. McNally makes the political personal, and in doing so, reminds the audience that political acts are not nameless, faceless, and distant. They can be intimate and individual, even as we are all — as we should be — implicated in them, and when we are implicated in them, we want to take action. This is McNally’s master class on political engagement. Ragtime has a similar political effect; it engenders in the audience a desire to combat racial and social inequity. Based on the E. L. Doctorow novel of the same name, Ragtime, in two hours, confronts the audience with many of the social problems that faced the world a hundred years ago, remarkably still facing the world today. Tateh and Emma Goldman remind the audience of the problems facing immigrant populations. That certainly has not changed. The relationship between Sarah and Coalhouse and its aftermath, especially Coalhouse’s rampage after Sarah’s murder is strangely reminiscent of the protests and riots seen nationwide after George Floyd’s murder. McNally’s adaptation of Doctorow’s text challenges the audience to feel along with these characters and to understand the unimaginable consequences of racism. While the musical resolves into contentment in the wake of great violence and tragedy, it is still able to inspire passion and advocacy for those less privileged in our society. This is McNally’s master class on social engagement around racism and discrimination. Click for larger view View full resolution Advocacy is word that is inextricable from McNally’s legacy and most frequently used in relationship to his ability to humanize and bring familiarity to the homosexual community and the AIDS crisis. Many of his best works of drama revolve around gay male relationships and the effects of the AIDS crisis. Lips Together, Teeth Apart tells the story...

The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer by Nicholas Grene

Reviewed by: The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer by Nicholas Grene Deirdre O'Leary The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer. By Nicholas Grene. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017. Cloth $71.40, Paper $20.96, eBook $18.86. xv + 252 pages. There are several challenges to writing a monograph about celebrated Irish playwright Tom Murphy (1935-2018). First, there is his prodigious output: twenty full-length plays, eight adaptations, six television plays, and one novel. While other writers have also amassed significant bodies of work, the sheer number and variety of dramatic genres making up Murphy's dramaturgy render neat categorization of his work difficult. From the realism of A Whistle in the Dark, to the expressionism of A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant, the history play Famine, the gangster noir of The Blue Macushla, the domestic drama The Wake, and the allegorical The Sanctuary Lamp, Murphy's dramatic oeuvre is purposefully referential, polyphonic, and frustrating for the writer hoping to describe a singular style as distinctly his. Finally, there is Murphy's practice of revising each of his works every time one is revived. Thus, many of his plays exist in multiple published versions. Yet Murphy's very mix of genres and stylistic approaches warrants Nicholas Grene's insightful analysis. [End Page 143] Significantly, The Theatre of Tom Murphy makes rich use of the Tom Murphy archive, which formally opened at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2010. Grene focuses his study on all of Murphy's original plays, supplementing his analyses with meticulous research into every draft, revision, and author note. The result is a nuanced study of Murphy's complex dramaturgy as a practice of revision, where his dramas are understood as literary texts, performance texts, and texts in revision. Where Grene succeeds most is in tracing and documenting the development of Murphy's storytelling and mapping his plays' shifting relationships with scholars and audiences. His book is an immensely valuable addition to the field of Irish theatre. Grene organizes his study across eight chapters, beginning with the author's critical biography. The remaining chapters are grouped thematically, rather than chronologically. Chapter 2 traces the development of Murphy's first play, On the Outside (1959), and its companion, On the Inside (1974). The works are considered in relation to two other early works, A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant (1969) and A Whistle in the Dark, Murphy's early breakthrough hit of 1961. The grouping of these plays allows for a thematic consideration of the male characters having been shaped, as well as limited, by the patriarchal grip of the Catholic church, the class divisions rampant in the Irish economy, and the gendered nationalist discourse of the free state. Chapter 3 considers Murphy's attempt to stage plays based on foundational periods of Irish history. While the focus of the chapter is on his major play Famine (1968), Grene links this with two lesser known works, The Patriot Game (1991), a commemorative play about the 1916 rising, and his wildly unsuccessful The J. Arthur Maginnis Story (1976), a spoof history about storytelling and the making of Guinness. Grene considers the relationship of staging "history" in the Active medium of theatre, and considers how the reception of such history changes as audiences are further removed from the historical events depicted. Chapter 4 pairs The Blue Macushla (1980) with Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) and documents Murphy's practice of revision. Grene provides valuable research into the extended eighteen-year genesis of Homecoming. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on themes of location and dislocation, with The Wake (1998) and The House (2000) demonstrating Murphy's use of the most Irish of mise-en-scènes, the rural domestic space. In both plays he considers how material acquisitiveness informs twenty-first-century ideas of Celtic Tiger Irishness. Conversely, The Sanctuary Lamp (1975) and The Morning After Optimism (1971) are not bound by specific temporal or spatial settings—The Sanctuary Lamp is set in a church (religion not specified) and Optimism is set in a forest. In both plays he creates theatre worlds in which time and history are not integral to the...