THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew by Jeremy Dauber
• Brynn W. Shiovitz

It seems fitting that a biography of Mel Brooks would be published the same week that the comedian auteur released History of the World, Part II on Hulu, a sequel audiences have been anticipating for the last forty-two years. Jeremy Dauber’s survey of Mel Brooks’s career as “Disobedient Jew” is not a typical piece of academic scholarship, but instead a breezy, pun-laden yet deeply articulate bio-analysis of Brooks’s métier writ large. Utilizing a combination of primary source material, Brooksian humor, Yiddish knowledge, and in-depth analysis, Dauber demonstrates his insider status as a descendant of the old country as well as his command of popular culture, an unironically self-reflexive identity necessary to critique the unapologetically Jewish Brooks who has always relied heavily on these traits to tell his stories. Mel Brooks made having fun a requirement of his success, and Dauber has clearly done the same with this book. Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew will prove helpful to anyone teaching a film genre course on parody/comedy or a class on Jewish film/performance. It is also a great resource for anyone taking up questions of representational politics, as Dauber addresses Brooks’s often controversial choices.

It is easy to get swept up in someone’s notoriety and think it was just good fortune that brought them there. Dauber shows, however, that Mel Brooks worked tirelessly to arrive at his fame and acclaim. Brooks lost his father as a toddler, making it understandable why he would forever crave attention—a comic’s cliché—and why the streets of Brooklyn would become so formative for him. It is on these streets that a young Brooks would learn the “art of the fast-paced, free-flow, wild man shpritz” (7). A 1930s Brooklyn vernacular was quick-witted, sassy, and predominantly Jewish, a tongue which no doubt surfaces in everything Brooks touches. Understanding this Brooklyn vernacular helps to highlight the similarities between Brooks’s comedic style and the style of his Jewish predecessors, comedians like Eddie Cantor who Brooks grew up observing and no doubt emulating.

An Amerikaner-geboyren who lived amongst other first-generation US Jews, Brooks was simultaneously shaped by the language and familiarity of his Eastern European neighbors and the more assimilated entertainers he grew up watching on the screen and stage. As Dauber writes, “the outer-borough kid dreamed of the Great White Way, which was everything Manhattan was supposed to be; sophisticated, cosmopolitan, rich, and of course, more than ever so slightly Gentile—the kin

Reviewed by:

• Kate
• Daniel Sack

If a tear is, as William Archer wrote in his 1888 treatise against Diderot, the “external, visible, sensible fact” of the “most important emotion” for an actor, then one can understand how an actor’s failure to produce this sign of effective performance could be devastating. In comedian Kate Berlant’s spiraling meta-performance Kate, the titular character’s inability to cry on cue is itself the traumatic foundation upon which a self is constructed. Berlant’s star is on the rise. Her standup special Cinnamon in the Wind premiered on Hulu two weeks before I caught Kate; both performances were directed by the equally multi-faceted Bo Burnham. Berlant’s brand of experimental comedy shows a sophistication that resonates with the ironic simulations of the downtown New York performance scene while also evincing a genuine love for live theatre.

The lobby of the Connelly Theater was crammed full of all things “Kate”: her name and photos hung on the walls, her black jeans and top displayed in vitrines, her Moleskine notebook elevated on a plinth. Two immersive “experiences” flanked the lobby, inviting the audience to relive the performer’s past: the first, a stretch of sand, recalling her youth on the beaches of Santa Monica; the second, a recreation of her childhood living room, her father’s ersatz lounge chair center. An artist’s statement just this side of pretension proclaimed: “The theatre requires a sacred corporal exchange […] As I enter this space, I am destroyed and transformed, made consumable only as I become consumed by my own narrative.” And there, on a bench to one side, sat the woman herself, in dark sunglasses, scrolling through her phone, wearing a sign that said: “Ignore me.”

Kate Berlant in Kate. Photo: Emilio Madrid.

If the lobby display sent up the narcissism sanctified by both celebrity and museum culture, the performance parodied the genre of the autobiographical monologue. Shifting between direct address and her over-the-top characterizations (including her impersonation of an old stagehand who bookended the show with claptrap about the magic of the stage), Berlant put her own spin on the familiar story of the small-town girl, sitting on her porch under the stars and dreaming of making it big in Hollywood. Stymied by a mother who insists that her “big, crass style of indication has no place on camera,” Kate travels to New York and takes to the stage instead, which she hopes will be more forgiving. Retreading the narrative arc of many such shows, she must overcome a secret trauma to achieve success

• On Editing, Paying it Forward, and Having Energy: A Conversation with Jean Graham-Jones, Former Editor
• Jean Graham-Jones (bio) and Carla Neuss (bio)

This interview was conducted in June 2023 at Yale University through the support and generosity of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, UCLA, and ATHE; it has been edited for clarity and length.

I was coeditor and then editor of Theatre Journal from 2004 through the end of 2007. I worked first with Harry Elam and then with David Saltz. It was a wonderful experience. I really love the apprenticeship model. Being coeditor and actively producing issues—it’s such a relief to have that under your belt by the time you assume the editorship. But that wasn’t my first engagement with Theatre Journal. I first published an article with Theatre Journal in 2001, edited by Susan Bennett. It was from my revised dissertation, which turned into a monographic study, and I was writing about censorship and Buenos Aires, Argentine theatre, and theatre artists during the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. I just submitted an article cold, as we all do. I sought to insert myself into a larger conversation. I’ll talk some more about that later on. But I really wanted to talk about Argentine theatre outside of a strictly Latin American theatre context, which is also a world I live in and love.

So that was my first experience publishing with Theatre Journal. Afterward, in 2014, I published another essay. Ric Knowles was the editor at that point, and that piece was about Argentine theatre during the latest socioeconomic crisis at the beginning of [End Page E-81] the twenty-first century. My students are always surprised: “You just submitted it like everybody else?” And I say, “Well, yeah, you’ve got to walk the talk.” I also published a performance review essay on the contemporary Buenos Aires theatre scene at the invitation of then-performance review editor Daniel Sack. That was a lot of fun. I think that was 2016. And my monographs have been reviewed in Theatre Journal as well. I’m currently on the editorial board, and I continue to serve as a peer reviewer. So I’m a big fan, and editing Theatre Journal remains one of the highlights of my entire academic career. It happened because after that first article was published, Janelle Reinelt, a former editor of Theatre Journal from a little bit before then sent me an email and said, “Jean, I think you should apply to be coeditor of Theatre Journal.” I said, “Wow, thank you. That’s a great idea. Someday I’ll do it.” And Janelle said, “No, do it now while you still have the energy.” So I have Janelle to thank for that c

Abstract:

In her landmark essay “Choreographies of Protest,” Susan Leigh Foster articulated the central concerns of the (at the time) developing field of dance studies. Foster’s following analysis, embedded in her argument about the compositional elements of social action, advanced core dance studies methodologies. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Theatre Journal, this essay revisits “Choreographies of Protest,” published in the October 2003 issue, and considers its significance to the fields of theatre, performance, and dance studies. Foster’s famous guiding questions that appeared in this essay, and which foregrounded real-world actions of the body, served to define the methodological approach and possibility of dance studies as a field, both concretizing the queries that previous scholarship had addressed and proposing what might be examined in years to come. In so doing, these seemingly straightforward queries, and the answers they elicit, begin to argue for dance studies as an essential discipline to the humanities, a way of understanding both human experience and human relations.

Abstract:

The essay advocates for expanding theater studies publications to more effectively engage with global majority epistemologies as core methodologies for analyzing theatrical phenomena. Academic theatre classes often incorporate performance studies paradigms, but most theater programs remain centered around practice-based exercises for acting, directing, designing, and producing Eurocentric theater. Global majority ways of telling stories are either not taught to students or are integrated into curricula in carefully measured doses as alternative approaches to art-making. This essay encourages twenty-first century scholars to more astutely respond to cultural productions based upon vernacular and indigenous ways of theatrical storytelling, arguing that a significant step would be to incorporate more indigenous languages, and perhaps have the journal publish in multiple languages (with translation) to expand the readership. However, even foregrounding text-based performance may be limiting. Many of the aesthetics that underly arts production in global majority cultures are constituted outside of text-based paradigms; they use symbol, myth, sound, gesture, dance language, and music as poetic containers for delivering their messages. They also build from local epistemologies connected to spirituality, religion, or alternative beliefs about the rationale and intention of performance. This essay calls for more time and space devoted to critical analysis of theatre created and performed outside of standard theatre venues, as well as a more nuanced discussion of complex ecosystems that support artistic innovation.

• Index to Volume 75

CONTRIBUTORS’ INDEX

ARTICLES

Arfara, Katia. A Museum of Human Hunting: Thomas Bellinck’s Speculative Documentary. 277–299.

Barclay, Kari. Erotic Returns: Sleeping with the Ancestors in Contemporary Plays about Sexual Violence. 41–59.

Bory, Alison and Ariel Nereson. A Set of Questions for a Field in Motion: Susan Leigh Foster’s “Choreographies of Protest” and Dance Studies in Theatre Journal. 413–423.

Chow, Broderick. “Hold on to That Feeling”: Disciplinary Formations and Asian B-Sides. 485–496.

Cox, Emma. Unsanctioned Refugee Processing: Maritime Interception, Aesthetics, Hospitality. 259–275.

Golomb, Sariel. Channels Through the Humane: The Exiled Body in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern. 301–320.

Gonzalez, Anita. Seeking Critical Frameworks for Global Majority Theatre. 511–517. Herrera, Brian Eugenio. Revisiting (and Revising) West Side Story’s Parahistories Disciplinary Desires. 469–483.

Hughes, Bethany. On Inclusion and Resurgence: The State of North American Indigenous Theatre and Performance Scholarship. 497–509.

Jeong, Areum. From Witnessing to Redress: Objects, Remnants, and Wreckage after the Sewol. 167–186.

Kim, Heidi. Waif, Orphan, Refugee: Staging Korean War Reparation in Lloyd Suh’s Bina’s Six Apples. 341–358.

Kondo, Dorinne. Power and Theory: Structural Racism and Zones of Sanctioned Ignorance. 519–532.

Kruger, Loren. Theatre and Capital Once Again: An Essay on an Informal Archive. 389–398.

Lee, Josephine. “Moving Through and Beyond”: Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. 399–412.

Liu, Siyuan. Pingju (Ping Opera) and the Politics of Celebrity in 1930s Shanghai. 187–211.

Meera, Suhaila. (Not So) Minor Encounters: Little Amal from The Jungle to The Walk. 321–340.

Merrill Moss, Rachel. Skrzypek as Synecdoche: Polish–Jewishness in Fiddler on the Roof. 143–166.

Metzger, Sean. Performance Studies Reorient. 547–552.

Parker-Starbuck. Jennifer, Nonhuman Futures. 533–546.

Power–Sotomayor, Jade. Un Llanto Colectivo: A PerformaProtesta. 121–142.

Shea, Megan. Resisting Nonperformativity: Emma Sulkowicz’s Challenges to Victim-hood. 19–40.

Smith, Kirstin. On the Couch: Casting, Cruel Optimism, and Memory Work. 1–18.

Sofer, Andrew. Catastrophe Practices and the Ontological Gambit: Nicholas Mosley’s Plays for Not Acting. 455–467.

Tompkins, Joanne. The Digital Turn: Research and Publishing in Theatre Journal. 425–436.

Wooden, Isaiah Matthew. In Praise of Performance Reviews. 437–443.

Worthen, W.B. Passing Theatre. 445–454.

Young, Harvey. Whipping the Black Body in Delaware. 61–79.