THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Byggmeister Solness by Henrik Ibsen
• Andrew Friedman

The words “Byggmeister Angst” flashed in neon above the stage throughout Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s eight-and-a-half-hour performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Byggmeister Solness (The Master Builder, 1892). The production was the ninth installment of the duo’s Ibsen-Saga (2006-), a self-proclaimed six-hundred-year project to stage Ibsen’s œuvre as interconnected performances unified by a singular aesthetic. The two performances of Byggmeister Solness I attended uncharacteristically abandoned the Saga’s use of artistic ambition as a pretext to challenge institutional limits. Now on their second production of a five-year residency at Oslo’s Det Norske Teatret, Vinge and Müller officially reside in the resource-rich belly of the institutional beast. Emerging from Oslo’s free scene—and the relatively permissive environs of Berlin—the Saga’s oppositional aesthetics now share a season with a major theatre’s marquee production of the Disney musical Frost. Rather than stage a grand Ibsenian conflict, Vinge and Müller dramatized their angsty acquiescence to the institution hosting them by transforming The Master Builder into a musical about safety.

Ragnar and the builders sing the opening overture in Byggmeister Solness. (Photo: Ole Herman Andersen.)

[End Page 228]

Solness oversees his builders in Byggmeister Solness. (Photo: Ole Herman Andersen.)

The production retained the Saga’s hallmark aesthetics and associative dramaturgy. Directed by Vinge, designed by Müller, and composed by Trond Reinholdtsen (all of whom performed in the piece as well), the production combined cartoon-ish artificiality (hand-painted scenography and masked performers gesturing to prerecorded text and sound effects) and extreme reality (destruction, excreta, and stunts). Solness was an old vampiric god in a diaper; his gory crimes and the lives of his victims were presented in stage action and in live and prerecorded films. Solness drank the blood of his apprentice Ragnar Brovik and beat Old Brovik to a pulp, used his assistant Kaja as a canvas for his “artistic juice” (ejaculate), sexually abused the prepubescent Hilda Wangel in spectacles evoking coprophilia and suicide, and, with the help of Dr. Herdel, sedated his wife Aline, who mourned their deceased daughters. These brutalities were filtered t

Reviewed by:

• National Arts Festival
• April Sizemore-Barber

For nearly half a century, South Africa’s National Arts Festival (NAF) has been the premier platform for the artistic state of the nation. Its most recent outing in 2023 marked a hearty post-pandemic rebound, with ticket sales doubling from the previous year’s initial tentative return to live performance. At the same time, COVID’s long interregnum also allowed the festival’s organizers to take stock and adjust the status quo, most notably by substantially curtailing the number of productions featured on the fringe program. This contraction marked a striking departure from the fringe’s previous centrality to the festival’s identity and branding as the second largest after Edinburgh’s. The decision was at its root pragmatic: plagued by years of nationwide rolling blackouts (also known as load-shedding) interrupting performances, the NAF would now limit all performances to venues with a backup generator. Nevertheless, this ethos of strategic contraction had a galvanizing effect on the eleven-day festival as a whole. In prioritizing smaller-scale, local stories and idioms over spectacle and size, the festival thrived with a tighter, more personal focus. Playing to its strengths of combining multiple forms and incubating new voices, 2023’s festival strikingly foregrounded work by Black feminist artists, often working in Indigenous languages.

A broader trend toward responsive, genre-bending, site-specific performance was apparent in the work of the winners of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Awards. Given a platform at the festival to execute their visions, the winning artists—and their work—provided a model for how constricted performance aesthetics can often inspire spatial reimagination. As an illustrative example, three of the six artists honored—all Black women—staged performance installations at the hulking Settlers Monument complex, a location where generators could be depended on to keep the lights on. Lady Skollie, an Indigenous artist of Khoi descent, used the apartheid-era arts center built to memorialize British colonizers to interrogate the absence of her ancestors from the historical and artistic record. Transforming the bowels of the building into an exhibition of Indigenous rock art, which has largely been destroyed in South Africa, Groot Gat (Big Hole) re-created cave art in situ. The result—referencing capitalist extraction in the famed Big Hole Kimberly diamond mine while also celebrating women’s vaginas as a creative force— served as a South African iteration of the Great Hole of History (introduced in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play). Rather than depicting the ar

Reviewed by:

• Oregon Shakespeare Festival
• Lindsey Mantoan

In the wake of tremendous upheaval at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), from leadership turnover to the COVID-19 pandemic to wildfires to audiences balking at a reduction in plays by Shakespeare in favor of new works by diverse playwrights, OSF produced a “Season of Love” in 2023. This season featured five live productions, down from eleven in previous years: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Rent, The Three Musketeers, and the one-person tour-de-force Where We Belong. Showcasing beloved titles aimed at bringing back audiences still reluctant to go to live theatre, the “Season of Love” generally avoided the hard-hitting contemporary socio-political issues recent productions have explored (institutional racism, gender identity, queer love) and focused instead on widely appealing themes of romance, connection, and family (both found and biological).

Despite the move toward programming with broad appeal, no doubt intended to boost the organization’s financial outlook, OSF emailed patrons in April 2023, on the eve of opening, with a plea entitled “Save Our Season,” informing the theatregoing community that the entire 2023 season might be shut down due to lack of funds: “Right now, OSF is in crisis. . . . We see the path forward to sustained success, but we need your help to get there. We have set an ambitious goal of raising $2.5 million dollars over the next four months in order to save our season and to help us continue producing the world-class theatre that keeps you coming back home to OSF year after year.” Two months later, the organization had met that goal and issued another, more ambitious one: $7.3 million to complete the season. Robust community support for the festival, paired with a crowd-pleasing season, generated a better financial outlook for the festival than it has enjoyed in recent years.

But financial woes are only one of the challenges the organization faced this season. After a series of separations and furloughs in January, Artistic Director Nataki Garrett stepped into the position of interim executive director, a role she juggled with her artistic director duties and her work as director of Romeo and Juliet. Yet, on the eve of the production’s opening night, it was announced that Garrett was stepping down as artistic director, ending a tumultuous three years at the helm of the 88-year-old festival. In July, Tim Bond was announced as Garrett’s successor. He is a familiar face at OSF, having directed How I Learned What I Learned in 2022 and serving as the festival’s associate artistic director for eleven seasons, from 1996 through 200

Reviewed by:

• Pageant By Joan FitzPatrick Dean
• David J. Eshelman

Pageants are large-scale scripted events designed to appeal to, include, and build communities. Joan FitzPatrick Dean’s book serves as an introduction to the pageant form, with three detailed analyses of pageants in history. This historical study focuses on British and US examples. Dean’s exploration spans centuries, with key examples including the Noah pageants of the Middle Ages, A Pageant of Great Women and other suffrage pageants of the early 1900s, and the Isles of Wonder that opened the 2012 Olympic Games in London. In each case, she provides abundant description and situates performances within the larger context of pageant history and theory, studying language, structure, and production elements. This book is important because it brings attention to a theatrical form that [End Page 250] has been largely ignored by critics since the early twentieth century. Pageant is a welcome addition to the sparse number of recent studies such as David Glassberg’s American Historical Pageantry (1990) and Dean’s own All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry (2014). Dean’s published work makes her the expert in the field. Pageant differs from her previous publication in that it discusses the form more broadly, but this broadness goes perhaps too far. While she makes apt use of the categories of “hegemonic” and “counterhegemonic,” I would have preferred a stronger argumentative thrust. However, I am intensely grateful for her work.

Among Pageant’s strengths is the introduction, which details the form. Dean lays out features that separate the pageant from traditional stage plays: qualities such as “short shelf life” and the tendency to be “performed outside purpose-built theaters” (2); “straightforward” plotting, presentational style, and its emphasis on amateur performance (4); and a dependence on singing (7). These traits are tantalizing and point to innovative ways of doing performance. Dean’s representative performances cover key historical points typically cited in pageant studies—the medieval period and the turn of the twentieth century—along with the more recent Olympics example. Medieval pageants, or Corpus Christi plays, were religious dramas commonly performed at festivals by working-class laymen. The turn of the twentieth century is significant because it marked a spike in popularity of the pageant. Dean begins her analysis of this period with a discussion of British dramatist Louis Napoleon Parker and US playwright Percy MacKaye. Both were established “pageant-masters,” meaning that they toured their resp

Reviewed by:

• The Second Wave: Reflections on The Pandemic Through Photography, Performance and Public Culture by Rustom Bharucha
• Amanda Culp

Rustom Bharucha begins The Second Wave, his insightful and broad “reflections on the pandemic through photography, performance and public culture,” with an acknowledgment of his position in the thick of things: “in medias res” (ix). Written [End Page 247] from Bharucha’s apartment in Kolkata during the catastrophic second wave of the pandemic that tore through India in the spring of 2021, the book contends with the question: how can we write about, reflect on, or make art about an experience as all encompassing—and world-altering—as the COVID-19 pandemic when we are still so fully immersed in its aftershocks? Bharucha’s interest in the middle—in beginning from the space in between—performs a kind of temporal alchemy: reading these essays feels like both an imprint of a particular moment in time and a moment extended. For here I am writing this review nearly three years later, and the world still feels very much in the middle of this crisis, perhaps just further along. We are still suspended between the world before the pandemic and the world that will follow it—on the threshold between an ending and a new beginning.

The Second Wave makes more connections than it does explicit arguments. The book is divided into three essays—“Photography in the Pandemic,” “No Time to Mourn,” and “Endings/Beginnings”—and while each has a distinct focus, the real success of the volume is in its fluidity. In the preface, Bharucha offers instruction as to how best to encounter the work: “Instead of spelling out here how I shift gears from one context to another, I would prefer that you share some of the surprise that I felt on discovering these connections as they came to life in the narrative” (xvii). In the spirit of that directive, I can speak to my own discoveries, which I imagine upon a second reading would shift from another point of relation to the last four years. On this read, what really captured my attention was how The Second Wave expresses liminality, in both the content that it documents and the manner in which that content is communicated. It is betwixt and between genres, somewhere between theory, memoir, and journalistic documentation; disciplines, moving effortlessly through case studies drawn from mythology, visual arts, performing arts, and literature; continents, insisting that a global pandemic be theorized, documented, and responded to from global vantages; and temporalities, a condition that, as I’ve sugge

• Digital Scholarship Roundtable: The State of the Field
• Sissi Liu, Derek Miller, Erin B Mee, Kate Elswit, and Sarah Bay-Cheng

In the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of Theatre Journal, former editor Joanne Tompkins in her essay “The Digital Turn: Research and Publishing in Theatre Journal” presents a grippingly thorough historization of the launch of the journal’s online platform in 2016, a key milestone in its development. She describes the initial plans for the online platform in what she calls a “two-part structure” that “presents the most straightforward narrative”: “essays that focus on theatre that is about or incorporates digital practices in the first instance, and essays on theatre that deploy digital methodologies as part of the structure of their critical endeavors.”¹ However, she also states that for theatre and performance practice and research more generally, “it does need to be [more] complicated” than the two-parter.² In response to Tompkins’s article and to the digital turn in theatre and performance in general, Sissi Liu, current chair of ATHE-ASTR Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award Committee, has invited prominent scholars and former chairs/committee members to reflect together on the state of the field of digital scholarship in theatre and performance. Each contributor addresses a complicated issue or takes on a series of productive questions: What kinds of digital scholarship are currently out there and how do we conceptualize them (Liu)? What questions might we ask to assess the current state of digital scholarship (Derek Miller)? Why should we all write/perform born-digital articles and how do we do so (Erin B Mee)? When is a widespread shift coming for digital methods in theatre, dance, and performance (Kate Elswit)? The roundtable concludes with an overview of how digital scholarship across the field in the past twenty-five years has shifted and evolved from digitalization to datafication (Sarah Bay-Cheng). Together, these contributions offer perspectives on what the field looks like now and where it is going.

A Taxonomy of Digital Scholarship Sissi Liu

Digital: using computer technology to generate, store, and process data; the opposite of analog. Scholarship: the production of new knowledge. When the two combine, the result is much larger than the sum of its parts, promising endless possibilities. Digital scholarship in theatre and performance studies has been growing since the early 2000s (see Sarah Bay-Cheng’s reflections below), and especially since 2015, when several theatre journals launched online sections and ATHE and ASTR together established the Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award. Since the COVID-19 global pandemic [End Page E-17] began in 2020, high d

Reviewed by:

• Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber
• Ryan McKinney

As audience members settled into their seats for the American Repertory Theater’s revival of Evita, a white, shimmering ball gown hung suspended over the Loeb Drama Center stage, floa ing with ethereal life, though unfilled by a human form. The musical’s [End Page 106] opening voiceover announcing the 1952 death of Eva Duarte de Perón rang out across the theatre, and then the dissonant chords of a requiem shattered the ensuing brief silence. A chorus of Argentines processed onto the stage, grieving the loss of Argentina’s First Lady, the suspended iconic gown serving as the only visual reference of her legacy. Who or what was being mourned here? A political figu e? A humble woman? A controversial criminal? A beloved icon? These questions remained at the forefront of this stunningly directed, performed, and sung revival of Evita.

Shereen Pimentel (Eva), Omar Lopez-Cepero (Che), and the company of Evita. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

Originally released as a concept album in 1976, Evita marks one of the first collaborations between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Later produced as a stage musical in the West End in 1978 and on Broadway in 1979, Evita served as a star-vehicle for its leading ladies, Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone, respectively. These original productions, both directed by Hal Prince, and their associated cast recordings made artistic, design, and musical choices that have become embedded in the fabric of Evita. While the ART production honored Prince’s original vision, it also strove to reimagine Evita—the musical and the woman—by creating a piece of musical storytelling that tangled with class, humanity, and memory.

Based on an earlier 2019 production in the City Center Encores! series, the ART production featured many returning cast and artistic team members, including its director, Sammi Cannold, who staged this production with a great deal of detail, thoughtfully foregrounding the theme of memory. The musical begins with Eva’s death, but the timeline then leaps backward to Eva’s humble beginnings and progresses from there in a sung-through narrative that details her life. These unfolding memories and events are filte ed through the eyes of the musical’s narrator, Che, an anti-Perón revolutionary who serves as Eva’s dramatic foil. Cannold embraced this memory framework to clarify not only Eva’s own story but also that of the mystical figu e of Che. Al

Reviewed by:

• Parade by Alfred Uhry
• I. B. Hopkins

Time moves peculiarly in Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s sobering Parade, which was revived on Broadway in 2023 for the first time since its debut fizzled out after only eighty-five regular performances in 1998–99. Every day seems to be Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, as the sensationalized story of Leo Frank unfolds over several years and the audience’s sense of what precisely is being commemorated thickens. The major drama-turgical challenge of its ripped-from-the-headlines plot remains the fact that many theatregoers will already know the outcome: an antisemitic mob brutally lynched Leo Frank in 1915. The success of City Center’s revival is owed in part to the celebrity status of lead Ben Platt, who along with co-star Micaela Diamond gave a commanding vocal performance. More fundamentally, however, director Michael Arden’s meticulous attention to thematic cyclicality and innovative commitment to treating the musical as a ritual service of remembrance account for the widespread acclaim it enjoyed.

Uhry grew up in the Atlanta Jewish community, where, as the playwright describes, Leo Frank’s name remained verboten decades after the tragedy. The victim was accused, convicted, and later exonerated of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 14-year-old white girl who worked in the factory he [End Page 108] oversaw. According to Uhry, it was precisely the untellable quality of the story that drew his fascination and ultimately served as the seed for the musical. Indeed, his narrative bears out this emphasis as it highlights systems of oppression—populist yellow journalism, the court’s racist and coercive use of chain gangs, absolutist political bosses, and the sacralization of white womanhood—rather than excoriating individual villains. Actual historical figu es do populate the stage, but apart from Leo (Platt) and his wife Lucille (Diamond), Uhry’s storytelling subordinates their personal heroism or culpability to the conditions that made possible the murder of an innocent man.

“The Old Red Hills of Home,” featuring the company of Parade. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

Playing out on Dane Laff ey’s uncrowded set, Arden’s stripped-down staging embraced this structural critique. As the cast gathered along the perimeter of a bare platform, they took a breath in view of the audience before beginning the Prologue (“The Old Red Hills of Home”). This gesture to the artists’ labor in rehearsing such a grim spectacle preceded the char

Reviewed by:

• Mussolini’s Theatre: Fascist Experiments in Art and Politics by Patricia Gaborik
• Alessandro Clericuzio

While much has been written about fascism and cinema, architecture, and literature, theatre studies has only recently offered new insights into Italy’s ventennio, the dark years of dictatorship that ended with the Allied invasion of Sicily during World War II. This is the task undertaken by Patricia Gaborik in Mussolini’s Theatre, a must-read for anyone interested in Italian studies or in the intersection between politics and drama. While sidestepping the concept of Benito Mussolini as actor—e.g., the mesmerizing frontman with powerful eyes and dramatic body language—this study explores lesser-known avenues such as those of the dictator-as-spectator, critic, impresario, playwright, and censor. All these roles no doubt had to do with his exercise of power, which means that the connections between thespian aesthetics and politics (and therefore history) are of major import.

Gaborik investigates the role of theatre in the personal and professional life of Il Duce, starting [End Page 119] from his tastes as a theatregoer and then as prime minister. His favorite writers for the stage had to embody certain sentiments—apart from being “on his team”—meaning that they had to show respect and admiration for Blackshirt philosophy. Gabriele D’Annunzio and George Bernard Shaw, with their ideals of the Superman, for instance, met with Mussolini’s approval. Luigi Pirandello’s theatre, which played between reality and imagination, and his belief in the possibility of building alternative worlds appealed to Mussolini’s self-centered view of life and government. More significantly, in the case of Pirandello, who was highly estimated abroad, Mussolini used the artist as a cultural ambassador for fascist propaganda. Gaborik demonstrates the important role theatre played in telegraphing the Mussolini government’s beliefs abroad.

Il Duce was also a meticulous censor, and he banned or heavily edited works that did not meet his criteria. Delving into archives, memoirs, and current scholarship, Gaborik manages to present a thorough reconstruction of the activities of theatre censorship, taking considerable note of the many contradictions of a difficult and at times ambiguous practice. For instance, she discusses the ways Mussolini was aided in this endeavor by Leopoldo Zurlo, whose task was to approve, reject, or suspend plays. This latter case was applied when “any determination was considered too ‘sensitive.’ It was a strategy that amounted to ignoring the problem and hoping i

Reviewed by:

• Torera by Monet Hurst-Mendoza
• Weston Twardowski

When Elena María Ramírez (Jacqueline Guillén) and Tanok Cárdenas (Jesse Castellanos) ran onto the stage at the opening of Torera, the Alley Theatre’s world premiere production of Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s new play, the gender expectations and social roles that formed the core tension of the show were immediately established. Elena, dressed in a child’s white peasant dress, rapidly climbed a knotted rope representing an orange tree. Tanok, in a boy’s private school uniform, sat in a swing across from Elena. Although a projection had informed the audience that the year was 1992, the costumes could easily have been mistaken for those of a century earlier. The interplay between the potentially period dress and the contemporary setting signaled the importance of tradition in the play: in the Yucatán, history, tradition, culture (and cultural roles) matter. The costuming and the scene’s blocking worked in tandem to define the gender roles assigned to the two principal characters throughout their ensuing journey.

Torera arrived at the Alley after COVID-19 delays. It had been in development for six years, with readings or workshops at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference, the Public Theater, Long Warf Theatre, Alley Theatre, and elsewhere. The center of the show is Elena, whom we see at ages 12, 20, and 28 as she navigates her upbringing as the daughter of a poor maid, Pastora Ramírez (Maria Elena Ramirez), who lives in the house of a wealthy retired torero (bullfighter), Don Rafael Cárdenas (Eliud Garcia Kauffman). Don Rafael trains his son, Tanok, to follow in his footsteps, but it is Elena whose greatest ambition is to enter the arena. While the driving action of the plot is Elena’s quest to become a torera, a family drama plays out as well: unbeknownst to Elena, she is the illegitimate daughter of Pastora and Don Rafael, and the sexual attraction she and her half-brother Tanok share causes tension in their “fused-at-the-heart” relationship.

Jacqueline Guillén (Elena), José José Arrieta Cuesta (Ensemble), and Jesse Castellanos (Tanok) in Torera. (Photo: Lynn Lane.)

The script demands physicality, and Tatiana Pandiani, who was credited as both director and choreographer for the Alley production, blended movement and dance to create a visually rich production. Pandiani added short dances and movement sequences into each scene transition to help the production flow across time and space. Occasionally these sequences were led by the named characters