THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

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:

• 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:

Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933) is perhaps best remembered as one of the first Black opera singers, despite having never performed on the operatic stage. Exploring race and phonography as interlinking technologies of perception underlying and structuring the ability of audiences to perceive black performers, this essay analyzes the multiple Joneses produced through her archive—in reviews, promotional photographs and illustrations, and the absence of her phonographically recorded voice. Through this exploration, I argue that we must resist the drive to embalm the remains of performance in order to move toward a more multiple analysis of Black archives.