THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Abstract:

The technology industry’s recent spatial turn presents new opportunities for theatre and performance in the twenty-first century. One such opportunity is augmented reality (AR), a technology that overlays digitally rendered assets onto the user’s physical space, giving the appearance that those assets populate the physical world. Through an analysis of The Builders Association’s Elements of Oz, which incorporated mobile AR into its stage production, as well as Bitter Wind, the author’s adaptation of Agamemnon for the Microsoft HoloLens headset, this essay analyzes the interpretive possibilities AR creates for theatre and performance.

Reviewed by:

• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Paul Innes

Major theatrical productions were understandably on hiatus in the United Arab Emirates during the COVID-19 emergency. Large-scale events are beginning to resume, however, and the cooperative production of Macbeth—jointly produced by English Touring Theatre, Northern Stage, Shakespeare North Playhouse, and Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg—was a landmark event in post-pandemic Dubai.

The set remained unchanged throughout the performance, varied only in its presentation by the use of props, drapes, and screens mounted on the walls above the main playing space. The costuming was relatively neutral modern dress, and many of the minor roles were played by very young women. The sound design, featuring music by Louis Armstrong, for example, gave the production a 1920s feel, presumably intended to convey a society on the brink of catastrophe by conjuring up imminent stock market crashes and impending war.

The action of this Macbeth began with Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy from act 1, scene 5, so it was clear from the outset that this was going to be no ordinary presentation of the play. The focus on an individual character out of sync with the standard text of the play demonstrated a particularly intense emphasis on the main characters. The production continued throughout to rewrite the text by inserting plot elements—especially those relating to the Weird Sisters—at various unexpected points in the visual and narrative structure of events.

Laura Elsworthy as Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. (Photo: The Other Richard.)

The result was a psychological character study of Macbeth’s descent into wild tyranny. After the banquet scene, for instance, Macbeth isolated himself even from his wife by leading her into their bedroom through a rear door before slamming it on her and [End Page 231] drawing drapes across it. The production consistently concentrated on Macbeth’s centrality, with the effect of turning the play into something like a horror story. At several points, Macbeth mimed the Weird Sisters almost as though he were possessed; the screens above the stage accompanied his performance with the sound of voices that would not be out of place in The Exorcist. No actors played the roles of the witches; the combination of screen imagery and Macbeth’s ventriloquism worked to modernize characters that can cause so many problems for contemporary audiences, thus avoiding kitsch presentations that verge on cackling crones.

Reviewed by:

• Stereophonic by David Adjmi
• Elizabeth L. Wollman

When Stereophonic began previews in October 2023, David Adjmi argued that despite its setting in a 1970s recording studio and its focus on a newly famous rock group under pressure to top the success of their debut album, the piece was not a musical, but instead a “play with music.” The playwright professed an “allergy” to musicals, which to him reflected a “calcified idea” of “how music should feel in the theatre.” Such a distaste for musicals is standard among theatremakers who mine aspects of the rock world for the stage; more often than not, musicals are loudly dismissed as too commercial and formalistic to properly capture rock’s purportedly superior artistic “realness.”

Theatre critics tend to blithely accept and regurgitate such rockist attitudes. It’s no big surprise, then, that virtually every critic covering Stereophonic followed Adjmi’s lead by eschewing the musical theatre label as inaccurate for a show so authentic that it defied traditional descriptors. In his rave for the Washington Post, Peter Marks called Stereophonic “one of the best works of narrative art about the day-to-day grind and emotional toll of artistic creation,” compared aspects of it to those of Waiting for Godot, and described its characters as “refugees from classic drama.” The New York Times’ Jesse Green gushed that terms like “play with music,” “musical,” and even amalgams like “playical” fail Stereophonic, which never foundered, “as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide.” Vulture’s Jackson McHenry likened Stereophonic to a “fugue” built of naturalistic threads that together wove “incandescent art.” “If you’ve recently tried to sate yourself with imitation-crab rock-history dramatizations like Daisy Jones and the Six,” he assured his readers, “you’ll find that Stereophonic is, refreshingly, the real thing.”

Don’t tell McHenry, but Stereophonic is more a companion to Daisy Jones than it is an artistically superior achievement to the television miniseries. Both are accessible entertainments that allow for fly-on-the-wall views of beautiful, overwhelmingly white musicians who fall in and out of love, swill and snort to excess, and argue, sometimes bitterly, as they toil away at making music together. Most obviously, both use Fleetwood Mac’s most celebrated lineup (drummer Mick Fleetwood, pianist/vocal-ist Christine McVie, bassist John McVie, guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, sin

Reviewed by:

• Shakespeare and Latinidad ed. by Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta
• Dennis Sloan

In Shakespeare and Latinidad, editors Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta join twenty-three additional contributors to highlight the underexamined relationship between Shakespeare and Latine theatre. Building on Della Gatta’s earlier work on the subject, which itself extends Bernice Kilman and Rick J. Santos’s research on Latin American Shakespeares, this volume argues that studies of Latine theatre and the production of Shakespeare in the United States are inextricably intertwined. Citing the growing number of artists and productions that adapt or reimagine the Shakespearean canon using Latine methods and perspectives, Boffone and Della Gatta contend that any discussion of either is incomplete without consideration of the other.

Boffone and Della Gatta structure Shakespeare and Latinidad in an introduction followed by four parts, each of which features four to six essays of varying lengths and methodologies. While some pieces, including Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos’s “The Power of Borderlands Shakespeare: Seres Jaime Magaña’s The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe,” offer heavily sourced theoretical explorations, others, such as Migdalia Cruz’s “What I Learned from My Shakespeare Staycation with Macbeth and Richard III,” provide richly personal accounts of the authors’ individual production experiences. This combination is one of the book’s strengths, even if the editors’ delineation between “scholars” and “artists” seems somewhat outdated.

Gillen and Santos’s essay appears in part 1, “Shakespeare in the US Latinx Borderlands.” This section explores how Latine artists use the US-Mexico border, as well as borders between languages, cultures, and genres, to challenge Anglo ownership of Shakespeare’s works in ways that trouble broader colonial and hegemonic structures and make space for diverse epistemologies. In “Passion’s Slave: Reminiscences on Latinx Shakespeares in Performance,” Frankie J. Alvarez recounts his experiences as a Latine actor performing in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and in a bilingual production of Nilo Cruz’s Hamlet: Prince of Cuba. In “¡O Romeo! Shakespeare on the Altar of Día de los Muertos,” Olga Sanchez Salt-veit describes the process of devising and directing a production for a two-year Shakespeare celebration in Portland, Oregon. Faced with combining the celebration’s goals with Milagro Theatre’s commitment to showcasing Latine playwrights, Sanchez Saltveit brought together disparate characters from acros

Abstract:

Occupying a central place in Jacques Derrida’s formulation of hauntology, Hamlet’s Ghost is familiar to contemporary performance theory, standing in for the secondariness and self-division that define dramatic representation. But there was another figure more emblematic of performance in the early modern English playhouse: the revenant. Examining the convention of resurrection as it was frequently deployed in this theatre, this essay uncovers the capacity of the revenant to generate presence, the visceral sense of theatrical immediacy first championed by Antonin Artaud. Following readings of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy and Hamlet, it concludes with a coda on James Ijames’s Fat Ham (2023), a play that adopts the early modern theatre’s resurrective praxis of presence.

Reviewed by:

• Watch Night by Marc Bamuthi Joseph
• Sonja Arsham Kuftinec

Where are we? A marbled cube of cultural life in lower Manhattan, Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) rises luminous and opaque across from the 9/11 Memorial site. There, in the footprints of the Twin Towers, two voids sink into concrete through layers of trade history. That memorial, Reflecting Absence, is designed to stop business-as-usual, to prompt meditation on collective loss. Yet the memorial, alongside the genre-defying performance of Watch Night that took place in November 2023, prompts difficult questions. Whose violent deaths do we choose to remember and how? For PAC NYC’s inaugural season, Artistic Director Bill Rauch commissioned choreographer Bill T. Jones and spoken-word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph to create a piece that reckoned with racialized violence. Rooted in multiple perspectives and genres, Watch Night wrestled with conundrums that refuse easy resolutions.

In its very title, Watch Night pays homage to a dialectic of enslavement and liberation. The historical Watch Night, New Year’s Eve 1862, anticipated emancipation, marking both prophetic release and weighty reflection. Jones and Joseph’s composition draws on these energies while inquiring still further into the nature of forgiveness and redemption amid Super/Natural energies and a shifting Echo Chamber Chorus. In this way, Watch Night resists easy categorization. In part, the piece reflects on the dual tragedies of racially motivated slaughter in sacred spaces: the 2015 murder of congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Yet Watch Night is not a documentary account. The congregations are fictionalized, and we are led through the events of the piece by a flawed Black Jewish journalist as well as a lone white Wolf. The dramaturgy moves forward in time while also being pulled into memory. Scenes split, echo, repeat. There are beats of story as well as percussive pulses of energy. Ostinatos and choreographic returns. Jones defines himself as a postmodern artist, concerned less with narrative cohesion than with the rigorous play of ideas in a form that embraces classical opera, everyday movement, and displays of hip-hop-inspired virtuosity. Joseph is a spoken-word artist who self-identifies as a “code surfer” rather than a code-switcher. In his libretto, references to the “Parable of the Sower” point to the Book of Matthew as well as to Black futurist author Oct

Reviewed by:

• Root Beer Lady the Musical by Barbara Cary Hall
• Eero Laine

If you drive far enough, you eventually run out of road. And if you’re driving north through Minnesota, you might hit the end of the road right around the town of Ely. You can keep traveling, but you’ll need a canoe to transport you through the federally designated wilderness that borders the town. Throughout its history, Ely was a mining town, a logging town, and also a tourist town—a gateway to the wilderness for anglers and campers, youth groups, and adventurers.

Ely is also an arts town. Photography, painting, and other visual arts have flourished in Ely since the turn of the twentieth century in no small part because of the beauty of the landscape. The area, it seems, is also full of singers, poets, musicians, and actors. The Ely Music and Drama Club celebrated its centenary in 2023, and Ely’s Historic State Theater has been significantly expanded and updated in recent years. If you find yourself at the end of the road during Ely’s annual Harvest Moon Festival in September, you will likely have a chance to see Root Beer Lady the Musical, which premiered in 2017 and has been performed in different iterations ever since. The musical celebrates and remembers Dorothy Molter, who spent her life not in Ely but out past the border of what is today the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Molter lived on an island called the Isle of Pines for the better part of the twentieth century. It is a small island, and it’s still there on Knife Lake, if you are willing to paddle a canoe for half a day and carry it over a series of portages and small rapids. That is more or less how Molter got to and from her island home for most of her life. She moved there in the 1930s and stayed until her death in 1986. Not long after she moved to Knife Lake, the federal government began buying up private property with the intention of converting the area to federally managed wilderness. The process took decades, and as it wore on, Molter saw modern conveniences and connections to society recede one congressional bill or executive order at a time.

Molter supplemented her income by selling supplies and snacks to passing canoeists. However, a 1949 federal law prohibited float planes from landing in the area, making it difficult to transport enough inventory. Realizing she had a significant supply of glass pop bottles on the island, she began to brew and bottle root beer that she could make with lake water and dry goods that were more easily transported by canoe. She then offered the root beer to summer canoeists and campers

Reviewed by:

• Marginality Beyond Return: Us Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s by Lillian Manzor
• Eric Mayer-García

Lillian Manzor’s Marginality beyond Return: US Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s is the first critical book dedicated to Cuban theatre in the US. As Manzor recounts in the acknowledgements, this project began in 1990 during a conversation between the author and two playwrights outside the Duo Theatre in New York. That conversation [End Page 255] shifted her approach and quickly led to one of her first publications, in GESTOS, where she introduced early versions of several of the concepts and questions she considers in this present work. Fast forward to 2023, Manzor’s long-awaited monograph on US Cuban theatre, Marginality beyond Return, is the culmination of many years of careful thought, presentations, and publications on the subjects therein. The author makes several field-changing interventions, including introducing the term “US Cuban,” a hybrid identity-in-difference distinct from Cuban American. As Manzor argues, US Cuban playwrights did not conform to the paradigm of multiculturalism that opened opportunities in equity theatres during the decades of the Hispanic and the Latino. Rather, their plays presented latinidad as the antithesis to the homogeneous, commodifiable, and interchangeable Other multiculturalism sought to interpellate. The author’s historiography questions narratives of Latine theatre since the 1960s that associate its beginnings with community-based activism alone. Finally, Manzor calls for the continued development of Latine theatre archives, interdisciplinary and transnational research methods, and collaboration with artists in theatre research. The persuasive force behind Manzor’s arguments and her meticulously researched historiography is the archives she has assembled over the last three decades, working with artists to donate and with archivists to process collections in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive and the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries.

Distinguishing her subjects from Cuban Americans, Manzor introduces the term “US Cuban,” which builds on the theories of Norma Alarcón and other Third World feminists to name a hybrid identity-in-difference. In presenting several case studies, Manzor forges a dynamic interdisciplinary discourse to theorize the cultural production of an “ensemble” of border-crossed—atrevesados, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s sense of the term—US Cuban artists whose theatre makes visible the hybrid, the abject, th

Reviewed by:

• Tom Stoppard In Context ed. by David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin
• Katherine Weiss

Tom Stoppard in Context, a collection of thirty-one short essays, is part of Cambridge University Press’s Literature in Context series aimed to enhance its readers’ appreciation of an author by providing the “literary, political, intellectual, social and cultural” context that has “bearing on his or her work,” as noted on the publisher’s website. To help the reader navigate the “context” provided in this particular volume, editors David Kornhaber and James Loehlin have grouped the essays in six parts: Origins; Influences; Ideas; Aesthetics; Politics; and Page, Stage, and Screen. The volume’s many contributors help to paint a portrait of Stoppard as one of Britain’s eminent playwrights, whose conservatism and extraordinary wit continues to win over audiences.

Stoppard emerges as a deeply intelligent writer and thinker, engaged in big ideas. Parts 3 (“Ideas”) and 5 (“Politics”) examine the ways in which Stop-pard incorporates philosophical, historical, scientific, and mathematical concepts in his plays. Many of the chapters come to a similar conclusion: that Stoppard’s interest in big ideas, despite his lack of a university education, is astonishing. Thankfully, his use of these ideas is not academic. Kornhaber, in chapter 10, sums up Stoppard’s use of analytic philosophy, writing that Stoppard saw “the philosophical potential” of “theatre itself, a potential he often saw as lacking in academic philosophy: the potential to contemplate what it actually means to be human” (87). William W. Demastes takes Stop-pard’s use of ideas a step further, arguing that scientific thought provides the playwright with the very questions of “behavioural consequences” (92), which evolutionary science attempts to answer. For Demastes, Stoppard is content with those questions remaining unanswered.

Part 2, “Influences,” includes chapters on Stop-pard’s debt to Russian literature, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett—the usual suspects and hardly surprising for anyone familiar with Stoppard’s plays. What is surprising, though, is just how often Beckett appears in the book. In addition to Kersti Tarien Powell’s essay, “Samuel Beckett” (chapter 8), the Irish writer appears in all six sections of the book. His presence outdoes Shakespeare’s and Wilde’s. However, in most chapters in which Beckett appears, the discussion amounts to a brief pointing to Stoppard’s debt to Beckett as seen in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. What sets Powell’s chapter apart is that her exploration

Reviewed by:

• Die Zauberflöte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Joseph A. Heissan Jr.

In Mozart’s singspiel Die Zauberflöte, the characters struggle to distinguish truth from lies. Chock-full of conjurings, transformations, mysterious trials, and magical instruments, the heavily allegorical libretto provides many opportunities for elaborate onstage illusions. While this contemporary-dress production at the Met certainly delighted the eyes and ears with inspiring theatrical artifice, what distinguished the staging by Simon McBurney (co-founder of Complicité) was the decision to place the artists creating those effects in clear view of the audience. Exposing the artists’ activities paradoxically exemplified the Enlightenment ideals of truth, honesty, and integrity woven into the libretto while also championing the power of the imagination in live performance-making.

Thomas Oliemans (Papageno) and Ruth Sullivan (Foley artist) in Die Zauberflöte. (Photo: Karen Almond/Met Opera.)

From the moment I entered the auditorium in search of my seat, I noticed the creative team had worked to reinforce our collective awareness of being in the Metropolitan Opera House awaiting the performance. The open stage curtain revealed the upstage cyclorama and exposed wings. The minimal scenery consisted of a centerstage platform with four corner cables, each connected to tower-like scaffolding that formed two proscenium arches over the platform, thus creating a smaller onstage stage. (When repositioned during the performance, this platform was transformed imaginatively into various objects and locales.) In the orchestra pit, raised flooring made the musicians visible. After finishing their last-minute preparations, the actors, [End Page 226] who would serve as performer-puppeteers, took seats in chairs out on the apron, stage left and stage right, near the Met’s proscenium arch. Even farther left and right on the apron, workbenches displayed various materials and equipment. When the overture began, visual artist Blake Habermann and Foley artist Ruth Sullivan entered and walked onto the down-center apron to observe the audience. They exchanged glances confirming all was ready to begin. Habermann then crossed to one workbench and Sullivan to the other. From the beginning, this production called attention to the presence of these artists, whose labor—like that of most theatrical designers—might well have been left invisible.

Seth Morris (Flute So