York Theatre Research Articles

Love Deadline (Desdemona), 2: Review of Choi Ji Young’s Love Deadline (Desdemona) (Directed by Choi Ji Young for the 2019 York International Shakespeare Festival) at the York Theatre Royal Studio, 14–15 May 2019, Streamed via Zoom for the 2022 Asian Shakespeare Association’s Online Conference on 12 November 2022

Love Deadline (Desdemona), 2: Review of Choi Ji Young’s Love Deadline (Desdemona) (Directed by Choi Ji Young for the 2019 York International Shakespeare Festival) at the York Theatre Royal Studio, 14–15 May 2019, Streamed via Zoom for the 2022 Asian Shakespeare Association’s Online Conference on 12 November 2022

If it happened, he was there

The Asian American Broadway musical continues to be a limited category in which many of its most commercially successful titles have histories mired in stereotype, mockery and erasure. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Pacific Overtures, however, stands apart from most other Broadway musicals written about the Asian and Asian American experience. The positioning of an Asian narrative in a serious and legitimate manner, the effort to incorporate Japanese aesthetic authenticity and the resolve to cast all Asian American talent were central to the creation of Pacific Overtures and were historical firsts for the Broadway stage. Stamped with Sondheim’s incomparable quality seal, Pacific Overtures initiated a new and necessary step towards Asian American Broadway inclusivity. But the show’s original Broadway run in 1976 was unsuccessful, both critically and commercially, and closed after 193 regular performances. In 2004, a highly anticipated Broadway revival gave the New York theatre world a chance to revisit Pacific Overtures. The revival production also offered a company of Asian American actors, whose community had historically been sidelined on Broadway, the opportunity to deliver a high-profile show about the Asian experience that resisted clichéd gestures of Asian-ness. In this article, I share my personal recollections of my time with Pacific Overtures as a cast member of the 2004 Broadway revival and reflect upon the production as it pertains to a grander collective memory of the Asian American Broadway experience. Cautiously optimistic about the critical and commercial outcome of this new production, our 2004 Pacific Overtures cast took great comfort in an ever-present Sondheim, whose constant proximity and participation during the run of the show served as a reminder that even this lesser-known Sondheim piece is still a Sondheim masterpiece.

On Death of a Salesman from the Perspective of Cultural Genes Interpretation of "American Dream"

Arthur miller (1915-2005), as the most outstanding master of drama in the United States and known as the "conscience of American drama", accurately depicted the post-war real society in the United States and the changes in social values. In 1949, Miller wrote the Death of a salesman, which became the peak of his drama creation and won the Pulitzer prize and the New York theatre critics circle award. The play tells the story of the United States in the turbulent social background of the 1940s, the protagonist Willy Loman's dream and the collapse of the whole family. By means of the combination of realism and expressionism, the drama reproduces the changes of social values and the sadness of the little people. In previous studies, most scholars focused on the disillusionment of the "American dream" of the minor characters in the drama, and took the deterioration of the "American dream" and the change of values in American society as the starting point. However, it may be difficult to understand Arthur Miller's interpretation of the "American dream" in the play without tracing the root of the "American dream" and exploring the deep cultural genes of the United States. This paper aims to analyse Arthur Miller's contradictory writings on the American dream in Death of a salesman from the perspective of meme.

The Synchrony Era

The Synchrony Era

Shavian Perspectives on the Cusp of Change and War (Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and St. Joan)

Shavian Perspectives on the Cusp of Change and War (Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, <i>and</i> St. Joan)

Staging Korean Haenyeos in Celine Song’s Endlings: Diasporic Subjectivity Torn between Ethnic Lineage and Metatheatrical Satire

In March 2020, haenyeos—Korean female sea divers who make their living by harvesting seafood without any breathing support apparatus—debuted on the New York stage in Celine Song’s play Endlings at New York Theatre Workshop. The play’s title indicates that being a haenyeo is a disappearing way of life that the younger generation will not learn or follow. The play comprises two distinct segments and locations: the first act tells the stories of three haenyeos on Man-Jae, an island near South Korea’s Jeju Island, while the second part focuses on Ha Young, who is trying to succeed as a playwright on the island of Manhattan in New York. Mourning the extinction of a pursuit that has existed for hundreds or even thousands of years, the first part of the play pays heartwarming tribute to the haenyeos. In the second part, however, the play juxtaposes the stories of the haenyeos with the topics of immigration, real estate, and the survival of a millennial Korean Canadian playwright, abruptly turning into a cynical metatheatrical satire about the white/other binary racial paradigm and the politics of representation. The issue of authenticity looms too large, reducing the grand, resilient spirit of the haenyeos to a mere theatrical device, and the play ends up missing the rare opportunity to tell a powerful story of the haenyeos.

Circle in the Square Theatre: A Comprehensive History

Circle in the Square Theatre: A Comprehensive History

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett

Reviewed by: Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett Craig Peariso Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal. By Kate Dossett. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 338. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5442-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5441-6.) Much has been written about the Federal Theater Project (FTP), a part of the United States government's Works Progress Administration that from 1935 to 1939 paid out-of-work writers, actors, directors, and crews to stage theatrical productions. The segregated "Negro Units" within the FTP, however, have received less attention. In Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal, Kate Dossett offers a rich archival history of a number of Negro Unit productions, setting aside the question of white leadership within the Negro Units and highlighting the political complexity of Black-authored works produced by the FTP. As political opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal increased, its programs actually gained acceptance among many African American writers and activists for their potential to ensure at least a minimum standard of living for all Americans. For that reason, among others, the Negro Units were embraced by a number of playwrights as an opportunity to give form to a variety of political content. Through close study of manuscripts from local productions of Black-authored (or coauthored) plays, Dossett weaves an engaging narrative of the ways authors and performers (though her emphasis is clearly on the authors) used the theater to envision "radical paths to the future" (p. 39). [End Page 358] Dossett's study opens with a chapter on the 1934 play Stevedore, a play about the lives of working-class Blacks produced by members of New York's Theatre Union, a group of white leftist playwrights and directors. Though the play would seem to fall outside her specific focus on federally funded and Black-authored works, it is nevertheless important to her history, as it not only served as an important model for many in the FTP looking to produce socially and politically relevant work, but also "became important to a community of black theatre critics, audiences, and performers who were willing, skilled, and increasingly able to adapt white dramas in order to develop a politically useful black theatre" (p. 41). Having established Stevedore as a type of precedent, she goes on in the next chapter to discuss Black-authored works such as Stars and Bars (1937–1938) and Liberty Deferred (1937–1938), which adapted the Living Newspaper form as a means of "subjecting white spectators to the black gaze" (p. 121). With these first two studies in place, Dossett proceeds to devote the second half of the book to the various representations of Black heroism found in Negro Unit plays. She first offers a comparison of the characters of John Henry in Natural Man (1937) and Bigger Thomas in the stage adaptation of Native Son (1941) and then, in a different register, a consideration of Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1937–1938). Looking to move beyond the now clichéd narrative that portrays Big White Fog as a "'pro-communist'" drama—noting that its labor politics are actually relatively anodyne—she chooses instead to focus on the play's gender politics, offering it almost as a partial counterpoint to the overwrought masculinity of Natural Man and Native Son (p. 165). Finally, she turns to Haiti (1938) and Go Down Moses (1938), two productions offering what she seems to see as a more hopeful model of Black male heroism by rooting it, respectively, in the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War and Underground Railroad. As a whole, Dossett's study makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of the history of African American theater, and American theater more generally. At a time when, as she notes, calls to improve and acknowledge the importance of Archives for Black Lives have become common on multiple social media platforms, Dossett returns to some of those archives to remind readers of their richness and intricacy. Craig Peariso Boise State University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Between the Rainbow Nation and the Melting Pot: Troubling Reconciliation with The Fall

Between the Rainbow Nation and the Melting Pot:Troubling Reconciliation with The Fall Jared Strange (bio) Introduction: A New Turn Toward South Africa? She stands atop the table, extending a hand as if pushing her way through the living tableau. "I heard Eric Garner across the Atlantic," she says, reaching from Cape Town in the world of her play to a killing caught on the streets of New York City.1 The invocation, one of many in her paean to countless Black lives lost to systemic violence, is especially poignant from where the audience sits: not in Cape Town, but in Washington, DC's Studio Theatre, just a few hours' drive from the Big Apple. It is a Saturday night in October of 2018 and I am watching The Fall, a play co-created and performed by a group of young South African actors who, like the college students they portray, were involved with the #RhodesMustFall movement that began at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The movement, led by Black and Coloured2 students, challenged institutionalized racism at the university and spawned other "Fallist" initiatives targeting everything from exorbitant tuition fees to xenophobia.3 Though its ambitions grew national in scale, its most iconic moment was the removal of Cecil Rhodes, the (in)famous imperialist once memorialized in stone on the UCT campus. Beyond the overt reference to Garner, the parallels between the reincarnated Cape Town of The Fall and the present-day United States are manifold: mass demonstrations against anti-Black violence have grown in prominence over the past seven years; American universities have been sites of contest over Eurocentric curricula and racist historical [End Page 59] markers; and Rhodes finds plenty of company among the Confederate leaders whose memorials have been publicly removed from their plinths. These commonalities were explicitly identified in the marketing and dramaturgical materials published by Studio Theatre and in reviews from major DC outlets, including that of The Washington Post's Peter Marks, who invoked both the American civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter in his writeup.4 Similar notes had already been made in reviews during The Fall's previous stops in New York and even London.5 That The Fall would resonate with American struggles for racial justice appears to have been obvious. In fact, with the resurgent protests against police brutality and anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020, its resonance only seemed to grow, a development the South African State Theatre responded to by making a recording of the production available for free via YouTube.6 The idea that a South African play like the The Fall would resonate with American audiences is well founded. When it comes to matters of race, the two nations appear to share a unique bond forged by cultural exchange, political affiliations, and a perceived mutual intelligibility based on similar histories of racial segregation. Yet despite the hard-won victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the fall of Apartheid, and the hope of "post-racial" peace and prosperity that greeted the rise of Nelson Mandela and later Barack Obama, challenges to ongoing racial violence and inequity in both countries have shifted the discourse away from the achievements of the past and toward unfinished business in the present. In the years prior to the arrival of The Fall, my own mid-Atlantic region saw South African drama conspicuously programmed into several theatre seasons, often with the express purpose of inspiring conversations related to systemic racism. This included Washington DC's Mosaic Theatre, which ran Athol Fugard's Blood Knot and Nicholas Wright's adaptation of A Human Being Died That Night in repertory (2017), and EgoPo Classic Theatre in Philadelphia, which also presented A Human Being Died That Night as part of an all-South African season alongside works by Fugard, Reza de Wet, Matsemela Maaka, and a visiting production by South African company Abrahmse and Meyer (2018–19). Unsurprisingly, Fugard, South Africa's most internationally renowned playwright, remains a staple across the country. Recent productions of his work at Signature [End Page 60] Theatre in New York, including his MASTER HAROLD…and the boys (2016) and Boesman and Lena (2019), have used...

“The first entirely masculine Hamlet of our time”: Maurice Evans’s 1938 Hamlet, in Its Entirety

This article examines Maurice Evans’s 1938 New York production of Hamlet, in Its Entirety, a performance that critics at the time almost uniformly noted for its masculinity. Maurice Evans was one of the most important Shakespearean actors working on midcentury Broadway, and he was particularly well known for his performances as Hamlet. Over the course of his career, he staged three major productions of Hamlet: what he termed the “uncut” version in the late 1930s; a pared-down, “G.I.” version inspired by his wartime service in the 1940s; and a full-length telecast in 1953. The latter two productions draw significantly upon his experience in the 1930s, and this article takes this first production as its focus. Drawing on contemporary reviews and Evans’s own unpublished archival material, this article examines Evans’s Hamlet, in Its Entirety, revealing some of the sources of the performance’s notable “masculinity,” a kind of conspicuously staged heteronormativity that captured the attention of New York theater critics. The article also places this performance in the context of John Gielgud’s 1936 New York Hamlet, offering a detailed exploration of midcentury American masculinity and a better understanding of this curiously influential Broadway production.

What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck

Reviewed by: What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck Natka Bianchini WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME. By Heidi Schreck. Directed by Marielle Heller. Amazon Prime Video, October 16, 2020. What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck’s mostly solo show about her experience as a teenager giving speeches on the US Constitution for prize money at American Legion Halls across the country, has had amazingly prescient timing. While Schreck developed and workshopped the piece for about a decade, its official theatrical premiere, at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) in fall 2018, coincided with the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Two years later, the film version of the show premiered on Amazon’s Prime Video just days before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in October 2020. The themes of Schreck’s show—how the Constitution has failed to protect women from domestic violence over centuries of inherited trauma on both the personal and national levels—were heightened against the political backdrop of these confirmations: two staunchly conservative justices poised to further imperil the same rights and protections that Schreck exposes as threadbare and insufficient. Prior to its streaming release, Schreck’s show was an established success. After extending the initial run at NYTW, the production (directed for the stage by Oliver Butler) was remounted at the Hayes Theater on Broadway, where it ran from March to August 2019. Schreck was nominated for two Tony Awards, and the production subsequently enjoyed a national tour. In its final weeks on Broadway, film director Marielle Heller recorded several performances at the Hayes to create the version available on Amazon. Like the stage show, the film runs 100 intermission-less minutes, attempting to replicate onscreen the embodied experience of witnessing the performance live. Schreck begins by reenacting the competition speech she gave on the Constitution as a 15-year-old high school student. Rachel Hauck’s brilliantly claustrophobic set recreates in vivid detail the American Legion Hall in Wenatchee, Washington. The set is a masterpiece of period details: wood paneling, maroon carpet, and a blond-wood, tabletop podium flanked by flags. But the most salient feature of the design is the suffocating rows of framed portraits: men in uniform, stacked four rows high and surrounding Schreck on three sides of a doorless room, more than 150 in all. As Schreck reveals that the twentieth century saw more American women killed by male partners than the total US combat fatalities for all wars combined, including 9/11, concluding that “rampant violence against women’s bodies is there underneath everything, all the time, humming,” the unspoken yet menacing threat of these silent portraits is inescapable. Click for larger view View full resolution Heidi Schreck in What the Constitution Means to Me. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) [End Page 251] Because so much of the show is a solo performance and because it lacks any whizz-bang moments of technical wizardry, What the Constitution Means to Me is ideally suited for this transfer to the small screen. Yet one element of the film I found striking was Heller’s decision to include many audience-reaction shots, reminding the viewer frequently that this was a live performance. During the theatrical run (which I also had the privilege of seeing), Schreck was lit onstage and the audience was, save for a few key moments, in darkness. Heller brought in extra lighting instruments to illuminate the audience during filming. This allowed her to capture dozens of audience-reaction shots and edit them into the film. The editing highlights the success of the show as a dialogue between performer and audience, and underscores the audience’s role as active participant—a vocal counterpart to the wordless stares of those framed male portraits on-stage. Schreck herself is white and careful both to note her family’s white privilege and to lift up the stories of women of color who are even more vulnerable under the US legal system. The audience, at least as showcased through Heller’s editing choices, is surprisingly diverse in race, age, and gender (a rarity for Broadway), and so Heller is able to punctuate Schreck’s words by whose faces she shows...

“The Fantasy of Queerness”: A Conversation with Roger Q. Mason about Lavender Men: An Emancipation Play and Making a Queer of Color Creative Life in Theater and Performance

Research Article| October 01 2020 “The Fantasy of Queerness”: A Conversation with Roger Q. Mason about Lavender Men: An Emancipation Play and Making a Queer of Color Creative Life in Theater and Performance Eric Darnell Pritchard Eric Darnell Pritchard Eric Darnell Pritchard is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, and the Endowed Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas. They are also faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. Pritchard is author of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) and editor of “Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking,” a special issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (Michigan State University Press, 2017). Pritchard’s writings on fashion, popular culture, literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogies have been published in multiple venues including the International Journal of Fashion Studies, Harvard Educational Review, Visual Anthropology, Literacy in Composition Studies, Public Books, Ebony.com, ARTFORUM, and The Funambulist: Clothing Politics Issue 1 and Issue 2. They are currently completing two books: a biography of 1980s international fashion superstar Patrick Kelly and a historical ethnography of Black queer feminist literacy activism.Roger Q. Mason is an award-winning writer, performer and educator known for using history’s lens to highlight the biases that separate rather than unite us. Mason’s playwriting has been seen on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Circle Reading Series); Off/Off-Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, New Group, American Theatre of Actors, Flea Theatre, and Access Theater; and regionally at McCarter Theatre, Victory Gardens, Chicago Dramatists, Steep Theatre, Serenbe Playhouse, EST/LA, Son of Semele, and Skylight Theatre. He/ they are the recipient of the Chuck Rowland Pioneer Award, the Hollywood Fringe Festival Encore Producers Award, and a finalist for the Lark Playwright’s Week and the Screencraft Play Award. Mason’s films have screened at Outshine Film Festival and the Pan African Film Festival. They’ve been recognized by the AT&T Film Award and Atlanta International Film Festival. He/they hold degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2020) 7 (3): 63–101. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.3.0063 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Darnell Pritchard; “The Fantasy of Queerness”: A Conversation with Roger Q. Mason about Lavender Men: An Emancipation Play and Making a Queer of Color Creative Life in Theater and Performance. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 October 2020; 7 (3): 63–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.3.0063 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Mind the Gap! A transatlantic, intergenerational theatre project

ABSTRACT This practitioner reflection explores the impact of a long-term inter-generational theatre project operating at the intersection between community and professional theatre practices in south-east London. The work developed through a creative partnership established between London South Bank University School of Performance, Southwark Playhouse and the New York Theatre Workshop whose intergenerational programme, Mind the Gap began in 2009. In this critically reflective essay, I seek to interrogate the precise nature of the impact of Mind the Gap! UK, derived from working with professional artists and processes within a community context. Writing in the journal of Health Promotion Practice, Anderson et al. observe that developing theatre performances from participants’ own experience and stories creates a “unique space that release(s) participants from usual ways of thinking and interacting” and this has certainly proved to be true for the Mind the Gap! ensembles. In order to understand how and what impact is generated, I will evaluate the key artistic and theatre practices which underpin the work and consider the precise nature of the effect of taking part in the project for both youth and elder participants.

Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage by Melinda Powers

Reviewed by: Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage by Melinda Powers Thomas E. Jenkins Melinda Powers. Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage. Classical Presences Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvi + 230 pp. 23 figs. Cloth, $74.00. At first glance, Melinda Powers' Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage might seem a surprisingly narrow slice of reception studies: nothing Roman, nothing comic, nothing Modern, nothing global, nothing nontheatrical. But it's the power of Powers' tome that it proves the enduring fascination (and versatility) of Greek tragedy: even within the relatively narrow ambit of her purview, Powers covers an impressive swathe of issues vital to contemporary performance in America, including non-white bodies and stereotypes; gender and drag; LGBTQ+ identity; and veterans' experiences, including PTSD. Some reception theorists—myself included—might be surprised by the absence of Charles Martindale as a theoretical frame: Martindale's famous definition of a classic as one that can serve as a (reiterative) vehicle for pluralistic "voices" might serve Powers' purposes nicely (Redeeming the Text, Cambridge, 1993, 28). But perhaps Martindale is too textual for her purposes: instead Powers draws especially on the scholarship of Sue-Ellen Case as well as Helene Foley and Marianne McDonald, each of whom is dedicated to the notion of performance as performance, not simply as text. Thus Powers bills herself a type of "cultural historian, examining the corporeal signifiers of each performance as if they were artefacts. Theatrical space, audience, performance style, and costumes are the material that I document . . ." (11). Because the extra-textual signifiers of performance are crucial to her research, she has largely confined herself to analysis of performances she has herself witnessed (which might account for the seemingly eclectic selection, with many from New York City, where Powers works). The book's five chapters, then, group about twenty performances into the headings above, with an entire chapter dedicated to Luis Alfaro's Chicano versions of Greek tragedy. Chapter 1—"'The Black Body' in TWAS' MEDEA and Pecong and CTH's Trojan Women"—is an expansively titled but ultimately rewarding investigation of three Harlem productions of Euripides. It also shows a bit of Powers' polemical tone, as she chides critics for not paying more attention to Take Wings and Soar's Medea (2008), which received only one critic's review, even with famous actress Trazana Beverley in the title role. (So an admiring shout-out here to New York Theatre's intrepid Kat Chamberlain: we salute you.) TWAS' Medea presents for Powers an interesting study: it's a generally straightforward version of the play (designed in swanky, American threads, and with a formal-dinner vibe). But the cast is African American, and that one casting choice is enough to catalyze [End Page 129] a whole host of issues, some interpretative and some distinctly American. Set against the backdrop of violence against black bodies in the United States, this Medea avoids the cliché of having a white Jason and a black Medea: "TWAS' production does not use the self/other, foreigner/Greek binary inscribed in the Euripides . . ." (32). Instead, this black Medea is herself "other-ized" by dint of her intersection of gender and race, a powerful reading of the title role (and predicament). In addition, the avoidance of translocation (to a specifically African or African American context) reinforces the idea that black and white America are "intertwined, not separate" (32). Contrariwise, TWAS' Pecong, a version of Medea, was specifically set in the Caribbean, thereby raising a host of other issues: this translocation transparently distances the "black body" from the classical text (41). In other words, translocation is also an act of bifurcation, of separating epochs and identities. A possible solution to the problem of translocation is introduced via the Classical Theatre of Harlem's Trojan Women which is here analyzed as a "double-conscious" translation: it interweaves the story of the Trojan War with that of the civil wars in Western Africa. As Powers elucidates, CTH's production may thus be read as ancient and modern simultaneously; it avoids the unfortunate division between "classical" and "diverse" that attends to some translocations of ancient tragedy. Considerations of audience rise...

New Discoveries: The Marriage Certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey (July 22, 1929) / Sean O'Casey, Letter to Eugene O'Neill (November 25, 1936)

New Discoveries: The Marriage Certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey (July 22, 1929) / Sean O'Casey, Letter to Eugene O'Neill (November 25, 1936)

An Ever-Changing Drama Laboratory: Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information

Having staged the trend of the times quickly, Caryl Churchill thoroughly explores an era of being bombarded with information in Love and Information. The story portrays modern people who face the heavy burden of information. The work consists of seven sections, seven scenes in each of the first six sections with a title, and eight scenes in the seventh section. The sections should be performed in order, but the scenes within one section can be performed in accordance with the principles of the director. Furthermore, there are no specific directions to the frame of each scene and the lines are not allocated to any character. Due to the characteristic of such an indeterminable text, Love and Information create a completely different play in each performance where a playwright, a director and actors should collaborate base on the common creativity. This paper includes three main ideas. First, this paper explores what Churchill intends to convey through several representative scenes in the text of Love and Information, and the effects of the indefinite text on readers. Second, according to the New York Theatre Workshop production in 2014, it analyzes the changes and effects when such text is performed. Finally, it reveals a messages that Churchill tries to give the audience with this indeterminable script and performance. (Chonbuk National University)

Harry Watkins's Sword: An Object Lesson in Nineteenth-Century US Theatre Culture

For US actor, playwright, and theatre manager Harry Watkins (1825–94), the 1852–3 season was a whirlwind of ups and downs, elation and despair, triumph and tragedy. His engagement as an actor in C. R. Thorne's stock company at the New York Theatre ended abruptly in mid-September, leaving him without work at a point when few theatres were hiring. He mourned the loss of a beloved cousin, Jane Mott, who passed away one rainy day in October after a drawn-out illness. He endured many a headache while spearheading a fund-raising effort among his fellow actors to contribute a memorial stone to the Washington Monument. He was elected to the board of the American Dramatic Fund Association, but infighting among the directors left him feeling insulted and underappreciated, ultimately leading him to cease his involvement. By far, his biggest frustration was his inability to obtain reliable employment. He wrote many letters to many managers, to no avail. More than once, he considered giving up the theatre altogether.

Stately Women in Retrospect: Actresses Jenny Bacon and Joan MacIntosh Recall Their Roles as Sara and Deborah Harford in Ivo van Hove's More Stately Mansions

Abstract Though condemned by a majority of the mainstream press, Ivo van Hove's staging of More Stately Mansions at New York Theatre Workshop in the fall of 1997 has become a historic moment in O'Neill production history. Van Hove's physical means of storytelling challenged conventional attitudes about the play by moving the text beyond naturalistic presentations. The production featured standout performances by Jenny Bacon and Joan MacIntosh as Sara and Deborah Harford—characters based on O'Neill's second wife, Carlotta Monterey, and his mother, Ella O'Neill. In this interview the actresses share their recollections of working with van Hove as well as their insights into Sara and Deborah and their thoughts on O'Neill.

Nelson Waldron, Master Stage Machinist of the Nineteenth-Century Theatre

Always on the margin of the nineteenth-century theatre is the stagehand. Nameless to history, they follow orders of influential producers like Lester Wallack; they follow theatre dreams of artists like Steele MacKaye. Yet researching this last artist, one stagehand name repeatedly appears. Doing so he takes on a personality and a history. The man was Nelson Waldron (1839–1917). At times he was noted as stage machinist, later on a master machinist, then a recipient of a theatrical benefit night – something reserved for actors who had achieved peer recognition. This peer of the New York theatre community during the last quarter of the nineteenth century begins to take shape. He was savvy enough to hold the patent for the Madison Square Theatre’s double stage in the heady days of feuding between the Mallory Brothers and Steele MacKaye. In the days that first brought Buffalo Bill’s rodeo inside to become an actual horse drama, there was Nelson Waldron again, building visual sensations that filled the Madison Square Gardens, literally. Waldron’s life in the theatre was evidently full and rewarding. His was a life not chronicled, but certainly one deserving. The paper brings forward an initial accounting of Nelson Waldron’s theatre.

New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway ed. by Edna Nahshon

MUSICAL THEATER AND OPERA New York's Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway. Edited by Edna Nahshon. New York: Columbia University Press, in association with the Museum of the City of New 2016. [328 p. ISBN 9780231176705 (hardcover), $40; ISBN 9780231541077 (e-book), $39.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.Yiddish theater arrived in New York in 1882 while still in its infancy. Just six years earlier, Ukrainian-born Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908) had established a theater company in Iasi, Romania. His operetta The Sorceress was the first in a long series of dramas, melodramas, comedies, operettas, and musicals that lit up the stages on New York's Second Avenue for some seventy-five years. At its height in the 1920s, more than a dozen theaters on the city's Lower East Side and in the outer boroughs attracted thousands of attendees per week to shows ranging from high-class Shakespeare translations to the basest vaudevilles.By the 1950s, the Holocaust in Europe and assimilation in the United States combined to reduce potential audiences to the point that theater pretty much died out in the following decade. All that was left was for the actors, producers, writers, and composers to write their memoirs, for scholars to write histories of a glorious past, for companies to undertake the rare revival-and for Edna Nahshon to mount a superb exhibit that also resulted in the book under review. Much more than a mere byproduct or companion to the exhibit, New York's Theater serves as an excellent history through images, together with illuminating essays by Nahshon herself and other scholars.The greatest value offered by the book lies in its three hundred illustrations, many in color, drawn primarily from material at the Museum of the City of New with contributions from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Library of Congress, and other sources. In addition to many photographs of theater stars, we find reproductions of posters, programs, scenes from shows, sheet music, set designs, costumes, and costume designs. There are photos of theaters and of important historical events, such as crowds of mourners lining the streets for the funeral of actor Jacob P. Adler (pp. 20-21).In the chapter Overture: From the Bowery to Broadway, Nahshon provides a fact-filled capsule history of the theater. She ends the essay by quoting director Robert Sanford Brustein, who suggested that the essence of theater lives on today in the work of Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen (p. 44), to which she adds Donald Margulies and Tony Kushner (p. 48), and I would add Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.In the chapter Yiddish New York, Hasia Diner briefly tells the story of speakers' arrival in the city beginning in the 1870s. Nahma Sandrow, author of the comprehensive Vagabond Stars: A History of Theater (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), contributed the chapter Popular Theater: Music, Melodrama, and Operetta in which one of the more curious reproductions is that of a poster depicting the non-Jewish African-American Thomas LaRue in full cantorial regalia. The text on the poster identifies him as Tevye, the Black Cantor, the Greatest Wonder of the World (p. …