THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Abstract:

In Soft Power (2019), David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori deconstruct and demonstrate the affective power of American musicals by reversing The King and I (1951). Soft Power satirizes democracy, white supremacy, and gun violence with whiteface, meta-propaganda, and a sweeping Broadway-style score. In the torch song “Democracy” and its reprise, the artists articulate Asian American ambivalence about US democracy: hope in its promise to lift everyone, despair in its rootedness in racism, and cognizance of musical theatre as a delivery system for ideology. This article uses repetition, interviews, reviews, and dramaturgy to consider Soft Power, soft power, and democracy.

Reviewed by:

• Fat Ham by James Ijames, and: White Girl in Danger by Michael R. Jackson
• Kevin Byrne

The overlapping New York runs of James Ijames’s Fat Ham and Michael R. Jackson’s White Girl in Danger brought to the fore some remarkable connections between the two acclaimed productions, which I had the good fortune to see on the same day. Each created dense theatrical landscapes through the appropriation of other texts and genres, using them to complicate and underline the stories they told. Fat Ham is modeled after Hamlet, and White Girl in Danger draws from daytime soap operas in its overall aesthetics and reliance on pastel. Shakespeare and the soaps are full of white stories and white problems, which makes it all the more intriguing when Black artists use them as fodder to tell their own tales. Both have enough cultural currency that their various signifier—skulls for the former, mysterious bruises for the latter—can be easily identified and lovingly remixed.

Marcel Spears (Juicy) and Billy Eugene Jones (Pap) in Fat Ham. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The production history of Fat Ham, from debuting as a streaming production during the pandemic to winning the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, made its arrival on Broadway even more joyous. The plot of the play unfolds in real time over the course of a particularly fraught wedding celebration. The central character is Juicy, whose mother has recently married his uncle after the sudden, violent death of his father. The setting is the backyard of the family home, and the play begins as Juicy organizes decorations for the party. In Saheem Ali’s production at the American Airlines Theatre, the helium balloons that bobbed around the stage indicated the [End Page 93] haste with which the party and the wedding were planned. In a lovely touch, they were festooned, bizarrely, with messages for birthdays, holidays, and get-well-soons. The upstage center of the backyard set was dominated by a large grill that ominously leaked smoke.

The ensemble of Fat Ham. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The show quickly set up the analogues with Hamlet, largely in terms of plot, character, and motivation, which then deepened and strained as the performance went on. Take, for example, the arrival of the father’s ghost, who demanded that Juicy ex

Reviewed by:

• Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America From The Beginning to Raisin in the Sun by Clifford Mason
• Cheryl Black

As indicated by its subtitle, Clifford Mason’s Macbeth in Harlem traces the history of Black theatre in the United States from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the appearance of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. Mason, who once described this book on X as a “fighting history of Black Theatre,” is committed to exposing the obstacles confronting the artists he writes about. It is a story that unfolds against a context of virulent anti-Black racism, enslavement, and de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination. While it is a story that ends before the momentous political achievements of a reinvigorated civil rights movement in the 1960s, Mason’s text still resonates [End Page 116] in the twenty-first-century US, the era in which a new civil rights movement has emerged to persuade the nation and the world that Black Lives Matter and in which a coalition of theatre artists of color issued the “We See You, White American Theater” (WSYWAT) manifesto to demand an end to systemic racism within the industry.

Mason employs two controlling ideas throughout the narrative. Although the Federal Theatre Project’s Black-cast production of Macbeth is discussed, “Macbeth in Harlem” also serves as a metaphor for a kind of inclusion and recognition sought by Black theatre artists within US cultural life. The second recurring theme—evoked in almost every chapter to describe the nature of Black theatre artists’ “progress”—is the myth of Sisyphus, who continually pushes a boulder up a steep hill only to have it roll back down just as he approaches the top. Taking Orson Welles’s exoticized “voodoo Macbeth” as a progressive benchmark may seem problematic, but as a metaphor for wide-ranging inclusivity and increased representation, it is reasonably apt. Mason’s Sisyphean metaphor seems even more apt and in keeping with recent WSYWAT activism to combat systemic racism within the theatre that persists despite increased representation by Black playwrights and performers.

The book is organized chronologically and composed of a brief introduction and six chapters, each surveying a particular timespan. Macbeth in Harlem is narrower in scope than Errol Hill and James Hatch’s comprehensive history of African American theatre published in 2003, though considerably broader than much recent scholarship in the field. For a relatively slim volume, it is remarkably detailed, yet also remark

Abstract:

This article examines how performance represents, reflects on, and reimagines the function of technology in drone culture. From a pharmaco-phenomenological angle, I analyze drone art practices, focusing on how drone performances invite audiences to feel/make their way through a networked reality. I highlight human tension, vulnerability, and precarity in their digital thrownness in conditions perceived as alien or alienating, yet not completely foreign or nonhuman. Featuring Ars Electronica Futurelab’s 100 Drones, Julian Hetzel’s The Automated Sniper, Laura Poitras’s Bed Down Location, and Random International’s Zoological, I investigate drones as pharmaka in practices where these technologies potentially antagonize, elevate, or even outperform their human counterparts. It is through this pharmacological functionality of drones that this article seeks to understand how to be human in drone culture.

Abstract:

This article follows the structure of a pop song—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus—to put into relationship scholarship on North American Indigenous theatre and performance, the current state of academia, the politics of Indigeneity, and critiques of recognition and inclusion from Indigenous Studies. Historicizing Indigenous theatre scholarship and production alongside Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick’s participatory karaoke performance, “Love Songs to End Colonization,” models disciplinary inclusion and how Indigenous performance challenges it. This essay turns to Glen Coulthard’s call for Indigenous resurgence and Dylan Robinson’s demonstration of disciplinary redress to explicate why Indigenous performance can be aesthetically and politically powerful. In singing these disparate ideas together, this essay considers the benefits and pitfalls of inclusion for Indigenous theatre into North American theatre production, scholarship, and higher education as well as issue a warning against complacent inclusion and mere celebrations of diversity. Indigenous performance asks more than theatre and performance studies often acknowledges; to engage with it robustly and productively, the field must be open to singing a song it is just beginning to learn.

• Four Notes on Six Conversations
• Carla Neuss (bio)

In June 2023, I had the unexpected privilege of being able to sit down, in person, with six scholars in our field for a series of open-ended and wide-ranging conversations. The occasion was, nominally, a chance to reflect on the seventy-five years of Theatre Journal’s contribution to theatre scholarship; but over the course of my conversations with Rustom Bharucha, Jean Graham-Jones, Joseph Roach, Karen Shimakawa, Patricia Ybarra, and Harvey Young, what emerged was a multi-valenced probing of the past, present, and future of what has come to be known as theatre and performance studies. As a recently minted PhD, I was conscious of proverbially sitting at the feet of intellectual giants in our field and had planned on dutifully asking a series of pre-prepared questions: What has your experience with Theatre Journal been? What do you see as the role of scholarly journals today? What are your hopes for the next seventy-five years of the journal? As in only but the richest of conversations, what resulted exceeded the narrow bounds of such questions and I found myself sharing ideas, concerns, and hopes with my interlocutors that ran the gamut from redefining diversity to the collapse of public universities, the sidelining of theatre history to the tensions between scholarship and practice.

My task since that June has been to distill the knowledges generated from these conversations in order to share them with TJ readers and the field at large. To that end, I have produced a series of short videos drawn from these interviews (which I had the good fortune to be able to record) as well as publishing the transcripts of our conversations in hopes of building an archive of reflections on the state of the field that can serve scholars in years to come. In this short essay, I cannot do justice to the richness of this archive. What I can do, though, is distill the threads of conversation into four key considerations, each of which continues to linger with me. I hope by sharing these notes with you we can collectively consider—and create—what the next seventy-five years of the discourse on theatre and performance will be and the form it will take.

1. 1. Dwindling, if not gone, are the days of receiving a journal like TJ in the mail, sitting down with a beverage of choice, and reading it cover to cover. Harvey Young suspects that perhaps only Ric Knowles still enacts that ritual of reading that was once dominant. For me, as a scholar raised in the keyword generation, reading a journal in its entirety has gone the way of listening to an entire album; instead, I usually just stream the hit single from Spotify (in this case, JSTOR or ProjectMuse.) A sense of loss surrounding this shift underpinn

Reviewed by:

• Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetic of Theater by Joseph Cermatori
• David Krasner

In Thornton Wilder’s inaugural 1938 production of Our Town, director Jed Harris staged a moment in the play where over a dozen actors portraying townspeople hold open umbrellas aloft on an otherwise bare stage. The decorative image, a sea of hovering black umbrellas, conveyed what was in keeping with the playwright’s penchant for baroque theatricality. Wilder, a close friend and colleague of Gertrude Stein, absorbed Stein’s conceptualization of opaque, esoteric, and stylized representations that drew from the qualities and history of the baroque. Wilder and Stein engaged in and promoted baroque modernity by combining the commonplace [End Page 584] with the visually profound, unworldly, and hyper-theatrical; they shared a vision of a modernized baroque theatre in which the spatial comportment of vivid spectacles and dynamic stage images created extravagant, playful, eclectic, exuberant, and temporally immediate (living in the moment) theatricality.

The umbrella staging of Our Town aligns with Joseph Cermatori’s Baroque Modernity, a brilliantly written history of baroque theatre that focuses on four doyens of modern baroque aesthetic: Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Stein. By examining the theories, ideas, and staging of these four figureheads, the book documents “an account of the historical, artistic, and philosophical circumstances that made Wilder’s vision of baroque modernism possible” (6). Cermatori’s objective is to excavate the baroque from its perceived recidivist Renaissance antiquity and situate it firmly and dynamically in the modernist (specifically 1875 to 1935) Euro-American zeitgeist. This re-reading of the baroque significantly shifts our perspective of modern drama from a temporal drama to “also an art of space” (9), where the physical theatre incorporates architecture, music, dance, sculpture, lighting, engineering (“special effects”), and a plethora of visual-spatial aesthetics.

Baroque themes for the four thinkers and writers, Cermatori claims, “held out a liberatory promise, one that can be read against the grain of the frequently reactionary program of seventeenth-century baroque art” (26). Rather than accepting modernism’s natural trajectory as leading towards realism or mimetically representative theatre, Cermatori provides an alternative modernity guided by Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Benjamin, and Stein’s advocacy for a lavishly anti-mimetic, Dionysian prone, and visually spectacular baroque-centered drama. His book offers a fresh

Reviewed by:

• Trans Care by Hil Malatino
• Dan Paz

Trans Care, written in the context of western, queer, trans and non-binary experience, is part of University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners: Ideas First series. These books, short in length and sometimes long and wild in sentiment, are meant to provide a [End Page 597] more immediate and open-access space for scholars to speculate, analyze, and think out loud.

Rather than producing a guide or manual, Hil Malatino illustrates how daily negative affect impacts queer, trans, and non-binary lives. One of the topics that Malatino takes up is the harm of misgendering. Malatino critiques misgendering as a microaggression that is not simply offensive to an individual’s sensibilities but is instead ultimately an ontological refusal of the legitimacy of trans existence. In response to such attacks, Malatino uses photography as a metaphor to describe a culture of trans care that pushes beyond the frame of rote institutional mores to provide a temporally generative space for thinking about trans existence and imagining its possibilities. Malatino looks for relations between the lived experiences documented by photographs, the aesthetics and limits of the photograph, and the photograph’s audience, leveraging what French photography theorist Roland Barthes would call the overall cultural interplay between personal and collective responses to visual representations in the “studium.”

In this reading, the image depicts both the cultural and structural aspects of society, while shaping and interacting with our lives. In the first chapter, “Surviving Trans Antagonism,” Malatino describes the anticipation of his upcoming top-surgery to explore aftercare as a world of living and wellness; a vulnerability “that facilitates and supports emergence into a radically recalibrated experience of both body-mind and the world it encounters” (3). He uses contemporary photographic mise en scene, contextualizing a single frame of space in time, to decenter Eurocentric and normative concepts of family, picking apart “dominant imaginaries of how care labor does and should operate” (7). Malatino asks, “how are queer and trans folx living in the world, and how is the world living around us?”

Recently, my partner underwent gender affirming surgery, and it’s been difficult to reckon with the degree of queer kin interdependence required to make our lives work. They had a very alarming fainting spell the day after top surgery while on a host of medications. Stumbling to answer a series of dated and irrelevant questions on a 911 phone call to paramedics, I was bo

Abstract:

For decades, Theatre Journal has deeply engaged with different aspects of Asian American theatre and performance. This essay surveys a range of Theatre Journal articles published from the 1990s in order to map out this distinctive area of theatre and performance studies. Key articles by James Moy, Karen Shimakawa, and Daphne Lei grapple with the legacy of racial stereotypes and the aesthetics and reception of contemporary Asian American performance. Essays by Angela Pao, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Sean Metzger, and Ju Yon Kim emphasize the racialized bodies of actors and the history of yellowface and brownface acting, while Christopher Eng, Christine Mok, Megan Shea, and Dan Bacalzo emphasize the intersectional and transnational dimensions of Asian American expression. These and other scholars of Asian American theatre and performance continue to engage with new aspects of immigrant and refugee performance as well as gender and sexuality in Asian American theatre. At a time of changing demographics and cultural visibility, this essay helps us see how scholars have addressed the enormous diversity of Asian American experiences and perspectives as well as common preoccupations about visibility and representation, the persistence of orientalist typecasting, and the dynamic and complicated nature of Asian American identity.