THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life Of Black Power by Sampada Aranke
• Les Gray

Sampada Aranke’s Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power closely reads a group of cultural objects and ephemera circulating around the lives and murders of three notable Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defense members: Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson. Aranke attends to undertheorized and under-historicized art objects while drawing supplemental support from Fanon to Foucault. These theorists help her develop her argument and were interlocuters for the three BPP members upon whom she focuses. Conversant in Black cultural studies, performance studies, and general critical theory, Aranke uses material culture and art to prove how visual life of Black power is activated through Black radical death“(4). The book begins from the premise that in the United States (and globally), Black death, Black liberation, and Black art are not only intimately linked and referential, but also constitutive of each other. Aranke details how state terror and the disciplining of Black bodies provoked the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to utilize Black radical aesthetics in response to the banal yet generative spectacle of Black revolutionary death. While her text concerns itself with objects, it is also attuned to the technologies that allowed for iterative reproduction and distribution of images to “mobilize a revolutionary future” (23). Aranke’s study unites bodies and objects as they move socially, spatially, and temporally in order to construct a multivalent consideration of the archive and its limited capacity to preserve Black life.

Aranke’s object lessons related to Hutton, Hampton, and Jackson range from images printed in BPP newspapers to the books authored or read by the revolutionaries. She centers Black embodiment, “politicized looking,” and the production of fugitive imaginaries which were intentionally deployed by Black cultural producers to mobilize masses. For Aranke, this kind of gaze destabilizes and clarifies one’s relationship to the murder of Black radical subjects as it demands viewers “slow down the process of image consumption in order to see the conditions through which life, and in this case death, occurs at an uneven, disjunctive, and violent level against Black people” (87). Aranke enacts readings of fugitive imaginaries within a frame of ongoing domestic warfare in relationship to the bodies and objects discussed in her book.

Death’s Futurity details an interconnected network of Black radicals and lays the foundation for a conclusion that extends into today as Aranke links early

Reviewed by:

• Inés De Ulloa by Sergio Rubio
• Victoria Jane Rasbridge

Since his first appearance in El burlador de Sevilla (1630), the figure of serial womanizer Don Juan has loomed large in literature. While the protagonist’s deceitful antics have been revered and even emulated by many, little consideration has been shown to his victims and others unfortunate enough to cross his path. Yet with the emergence and rise of fourth-wave feminism empowering the individual and demanding acknowledgment of widespread abuse, there is a new and increasing pressure to look back and to reconsider injudicious idolatry and unthinking acceptance of problematic characters. As a result, new theatrical projects are now beginning to reimagine once-celebrated narratives to finally give voice to those who had been silenced. Inés de Ulloa, inspired by José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio (1844), is a masterful example of this careful reimagining.

Like its source text, this one-woman play is set in early modern Spain, but rather than adhering to Zorrilla’s narrative, it highlights the tragic consequences of Don Juan’s actions and tempers his legend with the torment it disregards. Contrary to Zorrilla’s text, which relates Inés de Ulloa’s death, Rubio’s play finds its title character alive and well, cloistered in a convent where she has been sequestered since her fateful encounter with Don Juan. While alone in her room, Inés is interrupted by the arrival of a man who, it transpires, is the now-elderly Don Juan himself. Having learned that Inés is still alive, he has come to see her and hear her side of the story. Over the course of the play, Inés relates their love story from her perspective, revealing what really happened to her, and explaining how their meeting changed the course of her life forever. The production at the Courtyard Theatre, however, had an unexpected twist: the man with whom Inés speaks never actually appeared on stage. While this decision certainly had the potential to undermine the sincerity of the performance, in actuality it produced two productive outcomes.

Lorena Roncero (Inés de Ulloa) in Inés de Ulloa. Photo: Miguel A. Almanza.

Firstly, the absence of the male figure on the stage allowed Inés both literally and physically to appropriate the voice and body of the man responsible for violating hers. The empowerment achieved through this appropriation was patent in the inverted power [End Page 369] dynamics whereby it was Don Juan, rather than Inés, who was held captive, unable to escape th

Reviewed by:

• Earthworks Rising: Mound Building In Native Literature And Arts by Chadwick Allen
• Lilian Mengesha

Chadwick Allen’s anticipated monograph is a rigorous and well-researched engagement with earth-works in both their physical form as well as their representations in literature, visual art, sculpture, and performance. Allen’s work is the first of its kind to compile myriad artworks that engage mounds as sites of complex knowledge. Most academic studies of mounds are grounded in disciplines like history, archaeology and anthropology, and refrain from detailing earthwork’s social, aesthetic, or cultural impact. Shockingly, Indigenous descendants of mound builders are often excluded from the scientific methodologies used for understanding them. Allen, a descendent of mound-building people [End Page 381] (Chickasaw), does the opposite. Central to this book is exploring how Indigenous artists approach mounds as animate beings with whom story is co-created. He organizes the three parts of the text with the three worlds theory of mound building: effigy mounds (above world), platform mounds (surface world), and burial mounds (below world). Allen’s points of analyses follow principles of earthworks themselves: alignment, integration, convergence, and duration. While much of his study within the three sections focus on specific texts and artworks, the codas offer rich embodied reflections from Allen about his experiences being-with these sacred sites. The structure of the book leads to the argument of the text: earthworks are part of a present-past, from the world above to the one below.

This book contributes to an urgent need for Indigenous literacies. Allen teaches readers how to interpret mounds as Native forms of earth writing that hold interdependent meaning and power. Indigenous earthworks are intentionally designed to correspond with the cosmos, seasonal changes, and their natural environments, which he indexes as an enduring precision of Indigenous intelligence. Allen shows how artists listen to and build upon these precise designs in their own work. He is aided in this by tracing a particular through-line of Cherokee, Huron, and Muscogee author Allison Hedge Coke’s book of poetry, Blood Run, named after the mounds on either side of the Big Sioux River. Other artists and cultural producers that guide Allen’s study include Kuna and Rappahannock theatre artist Monique Mojica and Choctaw writer Leanne Howe, sculptor Jimmie Durham, Osage and Tuscarora visual artist Alyssa Hinton, among others. As he writes, understanding earthworks “requires methodologies

Abstract:

How do we comprehend the scale of contemporary Syrian child displacement, much less represent it theatrically—and ethically? In this essay, I explore how the Good Chance Theatre has continued to try, through the evolving figure of Little Amal, an unaccompanied Syrian girl who appears in two transnational performances, The Jungle (2017) and The Walk (2021). Drawing on interviews with directors, actors, and puppeteers, I argue that both productions renegotiate the adoptive gaze Western European and North American audiences usually impose upon Syrian refugee children. The eight locally cast child actors that played Little Amal across The Jungle’s original tour produced a Brechtian doubling of performances that complicated violent spectatorial relations, while The Walk’s twelve-foot-tall puppet of Little Amal resists adoptive logics’ reliance on humanitarian tropes of liminality and minority.

Complicating hegemonic binaries of insider/outsider, seeing/being seen, and even life/death, The Jungle and The Walk invite Euro-American onlookers to reconsider their relation to the refugee ‘crisis,’ undercut the individual logic of adoption, and call for a collective response. Little Amal’s (not so) minor encounters, I find, lay bare the inherent theatricality of the current refugee rights paradigm as applied to displaced peoples of all ages. Reclaiming the figurative and embodied potential of the Syrian child refugee, Amal reveals mass displacement to be a shared human phenomenon: already lived by so many, and looming for all.

Reviewed by:

• John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower, and: The Good John Proctor by Talene Monahon
• Sean F. Edgecomb

The past year saw productions of two original plays inspired by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain and Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor. In their exciting scripts, Belflower and Monahon respond to how Miller’s play pulled the focus from women (particularly the adolescent girls who acted as accusers in the story), to center and sanctify the character of John Proctor. Proctor is considered a “modern tragic hero” and a paragon of integrity by a slew of literary critics.

Belflower and Monahon present contemporary feminist narratives that recenter women while helping to fill in the gaps that remain in official, patriarchal histories of the Salem Witch Trials. In this sense, the female characters in both plays engage in a kind of witchcraft—not as a religious practice, but rather as redefined by Sylvia Frederici as a “transfer of [feminist] knowledge.” Both playwrights engage a feminist perspective to question John Proctor’s character—but with different, equally dynamic approaches.

Belflower uses a high school class studying The Crucible to resurrect and embody the women failed by Proctor in Miller’s play, namely Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Proctor, as a commentary on the #MeToo movement. In contrast, Monahon returns to the seventeenth century and reimagines the period that led to Salem’s witch hysteria. Playing with contemporary language to show how Abigail Williams and her younger cousin Betty (both central to Miller’s narrative), were forced into their situation, Monahon exposes a world where Puritan superstition, draconian rules, and rampant misogyny grounded in religious fervor ensured that women in 1692 Salem were denied authority, voice, and freedom.

Miller wrote The Crucible as a theatrical excoriation of the Red Scare in the United States, taking up fear of witches as an allegory of McCarthyism. The play remains a widely produced fictionalization of real-life events, and while it was never Miller’s intention to write an accurate account of the Trials, The Crucible has undoubtedly become the interpretation encountered by most people. Such confusion is exacerbated by an ongoing cultural obsession with Salem’s witchy history, which has in turn inspired a variety of adaptations of the story that are more often interested

Reviewed by:

• Stumped by Shomit Dutta
• Annette Balaam

On screen, a box set opened the play slowly spinning on its axis in a void of black space, exposing its sides, roof and base before temporarily settling in the frontal perspective characteristic of conventional theatre. In a boundary-breaking hybrid live/online production of Shomit Dutta’s new play Stumped, Original Theatre Online displayed other three-dimensional viewpoints of the moving image in a methodology that not only explored the digital screen as a liminal zone with no fixed or determined a priori conditions of space, time and causality, but also reconceived, repurposed and politicized the ontological instability of the in-screen viewer within this liminal landscape between the live and the online, opening up new discursive and political possibilities for the digital screen.

Stumped is a darkly comic play that imagines the two cricket-obsessed Nobel Prize winners Samuel Beckett (Stephen Tompkinson) and Harold Pinter (Andrew Lancel) as waiting batsmen in a brilliantly witty spin on Waiting for Godot and The Dumb Waiter. Act One is set on the balcony of the pavilion, and Act Two finds them on the village green drunkenly waiting for a lift from a stranger called ‘Doggo’ who may never come.

Filmed live from the home of English cricket—Lord’s—Stumped was originally meant to have been filmed in front of a live audience and simultaneously live-streamed from Lord’s on September 10, 2022. But due to the national event of Queen Elizabeth II dying on September 8, 2022, a pause was placed on the presence of a live audience and the live streaming from the real Lord’s Cricket Ground. Notwithstanding the cancellation of the live event, the ghostly presence of the real Lord’s and the echoes of a live audience and live streaming shadow, haunt and frame the reality of the play. [End Page 362]

The cast of Stumped by Shomit Dutta, produced by Original Theatre. Photo: North South.

Insisting on the presence of the real to act as a counterbalance to the hegemony of the virtual, Stumped’s proscenium arch was constructed as a dark, heavy wooden picture frame encircling and framing the set of an English cricket pavilion drenched in the vibrant color palette and design of René Magritte’s blue skies and white clouds, reminiscent of the very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to Beckett’s play Happy Days. On the back wall hung another three-dimensional picture that framed and con

Abstract:

This essay explores the performance series Simple as ABC (2016 - ongoing) by Belgian film and theatre director and activist Thomas Bellinck as an exemplary artistic reflection on border regimes and the technological apparatus of mobility management. Based on extensive research into the most acute forms of human-hunting today, the mechanisms of border control and migration, Bellinck claims the speculative documentary as a counter-genre to “documentary taxidermy.” The speculative documentary investigates the objectification and de-humanization of the Other as an undesirable data-subject by interrelating the ethics of the “sovereign” gaze and looking-from-above management with the looking-from-below perspective of criminalized bodies and borderland communities. By questioning the interweaving of documentary forms with hegemonic representations of the Other, I argue that statements of truth in documentary theatre need to become unsettled, so that the genre avoids becoming complicit in the solidification of essentialist identity politics and the regulative production of narrative protocols.

• Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 by Aaron C. Thomas
• Ryan Donovan

Does the Broadway musical matter to U.S. American political discourse? If so, how and why? These are central questions Aaron C. Thomas asks in his new book, in which he argues, “The politics of Broadway musicals […] matter a great deal more to U.S. American culture than they might seem to mean, and Broadway musicals are especially important to mainstream politics surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality” (10). Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 chronologically charts the sometimes direct, sometimes tenuous relationship of Broadway and film musicals to LGBTQ politics over five chapters. Though the book is primarily about the stage musical, Thomas’s compelling insights into the complexities of identity and identification will be of interest scholars of theatre studies and film studies and apply to a range of theatrical forms beyond the musical.

Thomas’s study aims its focus on five musicals that all “revive a film and a previous musical” (25). For a book ostensibly about the stage (if the subtitle is any indication), Thomas devotes quite a lot of time to films and their stage adaptations and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on musical revivals. The interplay between the stage and screen is another primary concern, occasionally at the expense of a deeper analysis of Thomas’s perceptive points about LGBTQ politics. In fact, a longer elucidation and historicization of LGBTQ politics would have been especially useful for students in the book’s introduction.

The explosion of LGBTQ representation in musicals since 2000 means that Thomas had ample opportunity to select case studies from dozens of options; that he chose “five in which no characters explicitly identify as L, G, B, T, or Q” (23) announces that this book proposes to do something different than much contemporary scholarship on identity and identification. This choice echoes earlier musical theatre studies scholarship, particularly Stacy Wolf’s foundational A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002). In this light, Thomas could be said to take up Wolf’s call that “the challenge is to determine how lesbians appear where none officially exist” (Wolf, 4). He explains that he is “working with . . . the idea that queer audiences and queer performers–what they say about the shows and what they do with the shows–are more important or more interesting than any of a show’s own ideas about queerness” (23). Much space in the book is, however, spent on Thomas’s queer readings of the shows in

Reviewed by:

• Kimberly Akimbo by David Lindsay-Abaire
• Rachel Evans

It is not often that playwrights choose to transform their straight plays into musicals themselves. That task is usually reserved for other adapters; however, there is nothing usual about David Lindsay-Abaire. His offbeat play Kimberly Akimbo is a perfectly satisfying venture, but somehow he knew that there was more to the script than he initially explored in the 2001 South Coast Repertory premiere and the 2003 production of a revised version at Manhattan Theatre Club. It took the musical stylings of a similarly singular artist—the composer Jeanine Tesori—for Lindsay-Abaire to unearth the full manifestation of his vision. After the two collaborated on 2008’s Shrek, The Musical, they brought Kimberly Akimbo (the musical), and its bittersweetness, to Atlantic Theatre Company in 2021 and then to Broadway in 2022.

What makes this partnership so effective is Tesori’s ability to create the musical match to Lindsay-Abaire’s signature use of unexpected characters in strangely dire circumstances. Even in his less outlandish, Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole, this playwright regularly reveals the profound truths underlying life’s idiosyncrasies. With Tesori, Lindsay-Abaire’s aural vocabulary is expanded and enhanced with great aplomb.

Victoria Clark (Kimberly) in Kimberly Akimbo. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The Kimberly of the title (Victoria Clark) is a teenager all too well aware of her mortality, given that she is afflicted with a genetic disease causing her body to age four and a half times faster than her chronological age: when she’s twenty, she’ll look ninety. That is, if she lives that long. The plot centers on the days around her sweet-sixteen birthday, a less than sweet milestone given that sixteen is the average life expectancy for someone with her condition. Add Pattie (Alli Mauzey), the girl’s very [End Page 360] pregnant, very hypochondriac mother and Buddy (Steven Boyer), her boozy dad, and the familial unit is doomed to dysfunctional dynamics.

Alli Mauzey (Pattie), Victoria Clark (Kimberly), and Steven Boyer (Buddy) in Kimberly Akimbo. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Trying to escape the sting of family secrets, the trio has recently transplanted themselves from Lodi, New Jersey to somewhere in the Garden State’s Bergen County, or as Kim calls it, “forty miles east of hope.” There, Kim skates her way into the puzzle-loving h

Reviewed by:

• Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity Through Music and Visual Culture by Cynthia J. Becker
• Cleo Jay

Since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, North Africa has been the topic of many books and articles, often focused on the role of women and ethnic groups in the revolts. In particular, Amazigh (Berber) minorities have become more visible after years of being marginalized; for example, they achieved official recognition of their languages and specific heritage in several countries. However, very little has been written about Black communities, despite the vibrant, popular Gnawa cultural movement in Morocco. In the racially-charged context of North Africa, Black immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa often face suspicion and discriminatory practices from majoritarian communities, police forces, and governments. With a growing number of migrants and refugees trying to cross into Europe, North African states are placed under tremendous pressure, and this creates tensions between local communities and new arrivals.

Cynthia Becker’s new book, Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity through Music and Visual Culture is a welcome, needed, and topical addition to research on North African identities and contemporary culture. More specifically, it ties performance and music practices to the issue of race and the history of slavery, bringing a new outlook to studies on Gnawa communities and their history. It is an essential read for anyone interested in North African cultural and performance heritage, and, more generally, minority and race studies.

Becker takes a fieldwork-focused approach to research, bringing to the fore the voices of minorities that are often excluded from national discourse. She adopts an ethnographic methodology, fully immersing herself within communities for long periods of time and documenting practices that are central to their sense of identity. Blackness in Morocco focuses on Gnawa performance practices and their spiritual rituals, both unique within the North African cultural landscape. Her previous book Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity (2006) looked at the quotidian lives of women in marginalized areas, who play a vital role in preserving local dialects and traditions. Some of the key themes of this earlier research reappear here: a focus on marginalized groups, particularly women, and the idea of empowerment through creative or spiritual practices. Becker particularly teases out the ways differences are celebrated through performance, and how African ancestral heritage perpetuates despite postcolonial policies that sought