THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Robert Lepage’s Original Stage Productions: Making Theatre Global by Karen Fricker
• Aleksandar Dundjerovic

It has been twenty-seven years since Remy Charest’s book of interviews with Robert Lepage, Connecting Flights (1997), appeared in English translation. It marked the beginning of an organized exploration of Lepage’s creative practices, offering valuable insights into his unique approach to theatre. Lepage, a Canadian theatre and film director, actor, and playwright, has long been known for his aesthetically and culturally intriguing productions that emphasize collaboration between actors and audiences. Connecting Flights also addressed the emergence of global theatre, which gained momentum in the late 1980s and ’90s, largely due to the festival theatre culture.

In the past decade, there has been a resurgence of critical scholarship focusing on Lepage’s body of work, exploring topics like media, space, and global culture. These English-language books have centered on themes such as intercultural encounters (Carson, 2021), theatrical space creation (Reynolds, 2019), scenographic dramaturgy (Poll, 2018), identity and nation exploration (Koustas, 2016), and the language of a visual laboratory (Fouquet, 2014). Karen Fricker’s Robert Lepage’s Original Stage Productions: Making Theatre Global (2020) is part of this renewed interest in the artist’s work. Her focus is Lepage’s relationship with global culture and theatre audiences. Fricker examines the globalization of theatre and performance practice, drawing on theoretical and methodological approaches from cinema, affect, and queer studies. She argues that in the early and middle stages of Lepage’s development, making theatre was for a big international festival—it was theatre that related globally to the festival audience—and that globalization had a crucial impact on shaping Lepage’s theatricality. On the grounds of such contention, she places Lepage’s work within the context of a globalized cultural perspective, exploring the use of global theatre language of new technology and the dramaturgy of cinema and media.

The book is divided into seven chapters, spanning Lepage’s career and encompassing his earlier famous works from the 1980s and ’90s, such as The Dragons’ Trilogy, Vinci, Tectonic Plates, Needles and Opium, The Seven Streams of the River Ota, as well as more recent productions such as The Andersen Project, The Blue Dragon, Lipsynch, and 887. Many of these productions have been on international tours for several years, cap

Reviewed by:

• At The Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators by Jean Ma
• Xueli Wang

Watching a film together is a ritual of intimacy, especially if we fall asleep. In her book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators, Jean Ma takes the familiar act of sleeping at the movies as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of attention, sociality, and embodiment in moving-image culture from the early twentieth century to the present. Tying this ambitious study together is the Thai artist-filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose distinctly soporific œuvre Ma returns to throughout the book as a touchstone for rethinking longstanding theories of the somnolent spectator and for engaging with related works according to an alternative, sleep-woven logic. At stake in this reconceptualization is a fresh receptivity to the kinds of relations sleep can open up: between individuals, past and present, humans and nonhumans, the living and the dead. Whether in the spiritual “possession, transmutation, and reincarnation” that occupy Apichatpong’s visions of sleep (56), or the staging of collective slumber as a ritual of healing in the art installation Black Womxn Dreaming/Divine the Darkness (2019), Ma reads sleep as a social and relational process through which borders soften and energies circulate between self and others. “To sleep in the presence of others is to willingly abandon the fiction of self-sufficiency and autonomy,” Ma writes, “in acknowledgment of vulnerability and interdependence” (36).

At the outset, Ma situates her project within a recent “turn to sleep” in critical and popular discourse, in which “[t]he traditionally suspicious view of sleep—as a thief of time, an obstacle to progress . . . gives way to an attitude of solicitousness and respect” (10). This encompasses the emergence of overnight installations in contemporary art; the rise of “critical sleep studies” in academia; and the proliferation of sleep-aid marketing in the wellness [End Page 133] industry. Ma challenges the prevailing tendency to posit sleep as a universal condition, found in texts as divergent as Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 and Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution. She points to how the uneven distribution of power across race and gender determines “whose sleep must be protected and who must stay awake in order that others may rest” and views the history of modern sleeplessness as intertwined with that of racial capitalism, beginning not in the factory and coffeehouse but the plantation and colony (34–35). Ma’s own inquiry aims at a more nuanced view o

Reviewed by:

• Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability by Vivian L. Huang
• Takeo Rivera

From the foundations laid by scholars like Josephine Lee, Karen Shimakawa, Esther Kim Lee, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Sean Metzger, and more, Asian American performance studies has become an indispensable subfield within theatre and performance studies. While it is difficult to claim any Asian American subjective “exceptionalism” to performance, the performance of affect—or the perceived lack thereof—is a key facet of ongoing racialized and racist apparatuses of orientalism and yellow peril. After all, the unfeeling, inscrutable Asiatic is the figure upon which the anxieties of deindividuation, and the corresponding abject expulsion, are deposited. Building on the more theatre-driven scholarly predecessors listed above, Vivian L. Huang’s Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability takes this theoretical concern head on, advancing Asian American performance studies to new heights in its study of [End Page 130] queer Asian American performance art and theorizations of gender.

At this point, this review is unlikely to spark more excitement for Huang’s monograph debut than has already been generated—Surface Relations was a nominee for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies—but, to put it bluntly, the hype is deserved. Contrary to its name, Surface Relations is itself less a surface than it is a cord, woven from the most vital threads of performance, ethnic, and queer studies to date. The book provides a vital contribution well beyond the Venn diagram sliver between performance studies and Asian American studies. Huang states their intentions clearly in the introduction, stating that the book “considers minoritarian aesthetic and affective modes of inscrutability that negotiate formal legibility with sociopolitical viability” that are in turn “vital acts of world-making in a cultural landscape that has normalized the non-appearance of Asian American culture” (2). Rather than simply condemning Asiaticized inscrutability as a kind of harmful stereotype to be disavowed, Huang explores inscrutability as queer performative strategy for Asian American subjects. Huang’s examples offer a number of diverse strategic effects that vary chapter to chapter, from the production of tenderly queer social relationalities, or the subversion of patriarchal epistemologies, to the disruption of model minority labor relations. Inscrutability rarely inspires political militancy, but rather a subtler, almost clandestine reconfiguration of subjective and p

Reviewed by:

• Shane by Karen Zacarías
• Robert Hubbard

Revising beloved classics to adjust for changing cultural mores may inspire antipathy from audience members nostalgically invested in the original. But what if the revisions come from a place of affection rather than derision?

Jack Schaefer published his young adult novel Shane in 1949. By 1953, Hollywood had turned Schaefer’s novel about a wandering gunslinger in search of redemption into a film that defined the US western for generations. While Shane maintains its status as a touchstone of rugged US individualism and white frontier mythology, no serious historian would stand by the historicity of Schaefer’s allegory. Indeed, Schaefer’s popular, pulpy novel with its homogeneous cast of characters and naive attitudes toward western expansion probably reveals more about the 1950s than the 1880s.

As a sixth grader in a Boston public school, Karen Zacarías read Shane and fell in love. The story about an insecure family making their way in an inhospitable new land spoke to young Zacarías’s life experience as an immigrant from Mexico. After becoming an accomplished playwright decades later, Zacarías revisited her childhood crush. The result is an alluring melodramatic hybrid. Zacarías infuses the original story with diversity and accountability while simultaneously enriching the theatricality of the western genre and enhancing the essential themes of Schaefer’s novel.

Zacarías’s adjustments lend the source text both historical authenticity and needed character development. In a note printed in the program, dramaturg Tatiana Godfrey observes that “[b]y the end of the 1800s, about a quarter of all cowboys were Black and an even larger percentage were of Mexican descent.” Fittingly, Zacarías makes the mysterious title character (William DeMeritt) a Black cowboy. Flashes of added exposition reveal Shane to be the son of a plantation owner who raped his enslaved mother. Ambiguous, oblique references that suggest his biological father suffe ed an unexplained and horrible death add depth and intrigue to Shane’s mysterious past.

The Starrett family also receives a racial makeover. In Zacarías’s reimagining, patriarch Joe Starrett (Ricardo Chavira) has a Mexican mother but inherits his Anglo surname from his white father. As an adult, Joe experiences racial discrimination while working in a mine in New Mexico. It is there, we learn, that he falls in love and marries Marian (Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey). Marian had recently become “American” and homeless when her Mexican family’s land was ceded to the United States after the

Reviewed by:

• The Headlands by Christopher Chen
• Janine Sun Rogers

Set between fog-shrouded locales on either end of the Golden Gate Bridge, Christopher Chen’s The Headlands contends with how the precarities of memory, family structures, and atomized geographies render the familiar unfamiliar and the known mysterious. The story follows Henry Wong, a Chinese American Silicon Valley techie and true crime enthusiast, as he works to solve the decades-old cold case of his father George’s mysterious death. Along the way, he ends up discovering a great deal about the dark recesses of his family history—and the fallibility of his own mind. The case of George’s death is ostensibly closed, presumed to be a burglary gone wrong. Henry does not buy it, however; the alleged burglary does not match the pattern of others in the neighborhood at the time, and a vague deathbed comment made by his mother Leena further incites his scrutiny of the case. Henry, a professed film noir buff, plays detective, following hunches—depression, money troubles, an affair—until he uncovers Tom, a brother he didn’t know he had, hidden in the fogs of the Marin Headlands. Throughout the process, Henry peers into many sites and perspectives on San Francisco, popping into various domestic scenes, and visiting and revisiting his evolving memories, which build and morph as he gleans new pieces of information. The play, as a result, destabilizes the concept of fixed or truthful memory as Henry revises and restages scenes from his past in ways that, we discover, refle t more about his mental state at the time of remembering than the truth of the remembered situation. The play’s engagement with San Francisco, the Marin Headlands, and the communities that live there as affec ive sites reflec s social and psychological entanglements with place.

The particularities of Bay Area geographies and temporality took on special resonance in this production, played to a hometown audience in its West Coast premiere at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. In a metatheatrical nod at the start of the play, Henry wandered onto the stage and engaged in some direct-address crowdwork, peering at the audience with the house lights still up. He introduced himself as “that rare bird known as the San Francisco native” and gestured to various sites around the city with a sense of immediacy and intimacy. He pointed stage right, to the northeast, to self-deprecatingly confess to “‘work’ at Google, over by the Ferry Building,” drawing attention to the proximity of the Google campus to the historic trade terminal in a move that signaled the specific - ties of a San Francis

Reviewed by:

• Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama by Daisy Black
• Christopher Swift

On the subject of late medieval English plays, Daisy Black’s Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama gambols among three important critical inquiries from the last few decades. The author conducts close readings of four canonical dramas and situates her readings in conversation with a dazzling array of theorists and historians in medieval studies. Her original contribution to the study of medieval biblical drama is her engagement with gender and critical race studies to uncover subjective experiences of time that disrupted the linear, supersessionary models from the Bible. Black argues that rebellious, heterodox, and ignoble characters, and the incongruous juxtaposition of stage and scriptural time, offered audiences unique experiences of familiar religious stories. By staging these alternative renditions in pedestrian spaces outside the jurisdiction of the Church, the lay producers disrupted the typology of Christian history.

Informed by Carolyn Dinshaw, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Kathleen Davis, among others, Black employs spatial and somatic metaphors for understanding diverse theatricalizations of time. Black focuses on characters in English drama who subvert the Christian supersessionary model by expressing the sense of time as it pauses, meanders, repeats, remembers, and folds in on itself. She writes that “negotiations of time lie behind some of the most fraught depictions of conflict staged between biblical characters” (12), describing the ways in which the subjective experiences of time by those characters resist orthodoxy. Since conventional typologies of Christian history underscored the inevitability of the sacrifice of Christ, moments that undermined these typologies would have been compellingly affective. Importantly, Black demonstrates how these irregular figures of temporality confounded hegemonic constructions of gender and antisemitic tropes from the period. Alternative temporalities in the plays were revealed in scenes of conflict between men and women, Christians and non-Christians, and characters sacred and profane.

The dramatization of the domestic relationship of Joseph and Mary in the N-Town manuscript is the subject of chapter 1. As was typical in many medieval narratives, Joseph’s Jewishness is characterized by his impotent, aging body and doubts about Mary’s miraculous pregnancy. In the drama, the antisemitic attribute of intractable literalness contrasts with the ethereal, vessel-like quality of Mary.

Reviewed by:

• 76th Festival D’avignon
• Ljubiša Matić

After the collective trauma that made the live (co-) presence of people in public irrelevant, or even dangerous, the breath of a certain freedom soared afresh along the ramparts of Avignon. The longest-running theatre festival in France was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and then returned in 2021 with strict “social distancing” measures in place, which brought forth an atmosphere of crowd management, surveillance, and insecurity. In July 2022, those restrictions were rescinded, which allowed the Festival to once more pervade the one-half-square-mile within the fortifications of the former City of Popes that houses upward of two hundred performing venues. Given that theatre attendance in France had plummeted by as much as thirty percent compared to pre-COVID times, theatre companies were eager to embrace the Avignon festival as a way to revitalize attendance at live art events.

By dehierarchizing and depersonalizing dramatis personae, as well as assembling them as choruses and in chorus-like configurations, several festival productions reflected on the tensions surrounding contemporary collectivism. Specificall, the festival spoke to lingering tensions regarding governmental policies enacted during the pandemic in the name of collective values and public health, which were perceived by some members of the public as examples of latent authoritarianism. As if to suggest ways out of this impasse, the choral formations, as well as the dehierarchization of dramatic character, necessitated performers’ multidisciplinary versatility and volatility, hinting at an artistic ambivalence that elided overt contestations between the state and the individual.

After Russian authorities disbanded his Moscow theatre, the popular Gogol Center, Kirill Serebrennikov became the first Russian artist to have the honor of opening the Avignon festivities with a premiere at the Palais des Papes. Although the director had long been considered an opponent of Vladimir Putin’s politics, and since 2021 an antiwar spokesman to boot, he was chosen as the festival’s drawing card long before the February 2022 onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By the same token, his conceptualization of the play The Black Monk (The Чёрный Mönch)—co-produced by the Gogol Center, Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, and, as rumor had it, Russian tycoons who defected to Berlin—predated the war’s outbreak. The mixed critical reception of the show, which had attracted considerable attention from festivalgoers, was due partly to the audience’s inflated expectations as well as to the artistic team’s unfulfilled ambitions

Reviewed by:

• Theatre in Market Economies by Michael McKinnie
• Alex Ferrone

In his lucid and insightful book Theatre in Market Economies, Michael McKinnie pulls no punches, something immediately evident in his pithy opening sentence: “Keynes was wrong” (1). In the five chapters that follow, McKinnie gathers case studies that reveal a theatre industry increasingly taking up the mantle of the “mixed economy”—i.e., the practice of “combin[ing] economic efficiency with social security, while promoting liberal democracy”—a shift that has coincided with the decline of center-left social democratic politics while “the tools of the welfare state have been used to regulate ever more closely the lives of citizens rather than the operations of markets” (2). The book covers the late 1990s to the present day, a period that McKinnie identifies as a “key transitional phase” in the Western political economy, between “the ascendancy, and then unravelling, of the centre-left ‘Third Way’ and the subsequent emergence, and then entrenchment, of the age of austerity (with the 2008 financial crisis as the linchpin connecting them)” (4).

McKinnie’s central argument is that the theatre is not merely a subject of the political economy but an active agent and performer of political economy itself. What makes his analysis so compelling is his sober, even-handed approach: he avoids those sometimes uncritical maneuvers—not uncommon in our field—that romanticize the theatre by glossing over its more politically ambiguous practices. He points out, for instance, that the production of theatrical ephemera dovetails rather neatly with a neoliberal labor market whose output has become increasingly immaterial, wondering if “theatre—as a key player in the creative industries—has helped exacerbate the defects of an economy that speculates rather than produces actual things” (5). The theatre, ultimately, “is neither heroically resistant nor bluntly instrumental—it is a much more complicated picture than that” (23).

This ambiguity is vertebral to McKinnie’s book: the theatrical political economies he discusses reveal that the theatre is able successfully to “capitalise upon the processes of marketisation, while resolving (or at least managing) the social antagonisms that marketisation leaves in its wake” (6). Part of his methodology involves widening the scope of what constitutes the economic. For this reason, so-called economics plays—David Hare’s The Power of Yes, Lucy Prebble’s Enron, Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money—are not the focus of McKinnie’s study. He explains that the genre “can sometimes treat the e

Reviewed by:

• Stars: An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey by Mojisola Adebayo
• Isabel Stuart

STARS, a play by Mojisola Adebayo, centers around an older Black woman, Mrs, who has spent her life searching the universe for an orgasm. Her neglectful husband, Mr, who never even briefly considered Mrs’s pleasure, has died, opening new possibilities for Mrs to live her life without the patriarchal limitations placed on her by Mr’s presence. The Black feminist politics of STARS is deeply connected to finding hope and joy both in the everyday and in far-reaching imaginations of other galaxies before and beyond our current world. This combination of domesticity and otherworldliness, where pleasure is both tied to the present and flying off into the future, underlies the political efficac of Adebayo’s ambitious exploration of Black feminist and queer joy in STARS.

Creating an atmosphere—or, perhaps more accurately, a “vibe”—of enjoyment and pleasure was integral to the politics of STARS even before the performance began. As the audience entered the performance space, we could choose from either sitting in standard theatre seats near the back or lying down on beanbags near the front of the stage, as if gazing up at a starry night, situating the audience within the astronautical world of the production. [End Page 112] The raked circular stage was illuminated by a ring of light, as if the stage were a faraway planet that Mrs was exploring. Atop this planet-like stage was a homely scene made up of a table and chair and a fridge, which, once spun around, turned into a washing machine. This set design (by Miriam Nabarro) combined the domestic with the intergalactic, highlighting the sense of discovery and wonder that can be found in the everyday while also suggesting a home that is emotionally off-balance

Debra Michaels (Mrs) in STARS: An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey. (Photo: Ali Wright; courtesy of Tamasha.)

As the audience entered, there was a live DJ to the left of the stage playing a mix of house music and techno, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a 1990s nightclub. Following this theme, on two nights of the run, STARS transformed from a play into a celebratory club right after the show had finished, featuring multiple DJs, dancing, and popup performances from characters in the show. This experimentation with and expansion of the theatrical form produced a multimedia experience that spanned artforms and generations, from African folklore and mythology to the unimagined realms of

Reviewed by:

• Miss Saigon by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg
• Jayoon Byeon and Jodie Passey

Miss Saigon, despite being one of the most popular megamusicals, has met with significant criticism regarding racial stereotypes and the objectification of women. The original West End and Broadway productions notoriously included the use of yellowface for the role of the Engineer, and recent productions have endeavored to address such racial misrepresentations by hiring actors of appropriate ethnicities. While the regenerative capacity of enduring musicals gives Miss Saigon recurring chances for reinvention, the effectiveness of these efforts is debatable. Some believe it should be maintained in its original form as proof of its problematic past, while others believe that an innately flawed show should be retired. Protests greeted the original West End and Broadway productions in opposition to the damaging portrayals of Vietnamese people, and this protest culture continues today. New Earth Theatre, a company of British East and Southeast Asian artists, pulled their play Worth from the Crucible Theatre in Sheffiel following its decision to stage Miss Saigon. As the issues run deep—both textually and contextually—the very concept of deproblematizing is seen by many as problematic. The brand-new revival at the Crucible chose to pursue an intermediate option between preservation and permanent withdrawal: revision, where changes add a provocative new dimension to the material.

The production’s endeavor to revise the racial dynamics of the original show was evident from the casting. While past productions have typically cast white actors as Chris (Christian Maynard) and [End Page 89] Ellen (Shanay Holmes), none of the regular or understudy actors who played these roles in this production was white. This change diverts the dynamic between Kim (Jessica Lee), Chris, and Ellen away from the white savior theme, instead highlighting Chris and Ellen’s US nationalism.

Christian Maynard (Chris) and Jessica Lee (Kim) in Miss Saigon. (Photo: Johan Persson.)

Shane O’Riordan (John) and Joanna Ampil (The Engineer) in Miss Saigon. (Photo: Johan Persson.)

Gender-swapping the Engineer (played in this production by Joanna Ampil) was a change that transformed the character in the context of 1970s Vietnam. The female Enginee