THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Abstract:

This essay returns to the author’s 2012 Theatre Journal article, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949–2009,” to reassess the utility of “parahistory” as a critical or historiographic device to evince how “revisals” of canonical theatrical works might chart, illuminate, and document changes in the historical conditions of creative possibility. The essay then considers three notable productions of the musical that have appeared since the essay’s publication: the 2021 cinematic adaptation by Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner; the 2019 Broadway revival directed by Ivo van Hove; and Carnegie Hall’s 2016 The Somewhere Project. Teasing out how each of these productions underscore both the limits and possibility of “parahistory,” the essay concludes with a consideration of how artists and scholars have used West Side Story as a point of critical and creative departure and ponders how a more expansive notion of parahistories might orient a generative path toward understanding the theatrical canon amidst the contemporary cultural trend toward “the multiverse.”

Reviewed by:

• Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini by Yehuda Moraly
• Clare Finburgh Delijani

Dream Projects is about works of which artists can only dream. Works that remain forever unrealized. Works that are abandoned or destroyed. Yehuda Moraly’s premise, rooted in the work of three of the great artists of the twentieth century—Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini—is that while these dream works in and of themselves remain eternally inexpressible, they make possible the remainder of the artist’s oeuvre, for which they become the key.

By consulting authors’ notes, drafts, and letters, and examining the testimonies of those with whom they collaborated, Moraly painstakingly reconstructs the abandoned projects “from the birth of the idea through its ripening to the different versions of the project and then to its abandonment, or sometimes its abandonments since the author may come back to the project from a different angle before leaving it once more” (6). Significantly, Moraly deploys the uncompleted works as a prism through which to reevaluate each artist’s entire oeuvre, meaning that his study is of interest to specialists and non-specialists engaging with any aspect of the three artists’ works.

Chapter 1 examines the fourth part that Claudel intended to add to his Coûfontaine trilogy, which was to be a dialogue between a Jewish mother Pensée, her daughter Sarah, and the Pope’s nephew, Orian. Perhaps the fact that Claudel never resolved [End Page 580] this dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, between the Old and New Testaments central to his larger oeuvre, reflects his inability to transcend their contrasts, suggests Moraly.

In chapter 2, Moraly seeks to piece together the work, which was to be entitled La Mort (Death), that occupied almost two decades of Genet’s life and which he abandoned several times. The ultimate work of art which, according to his correspondences with interlocutors including Jean Cocteau and his American translator Bernard Frechtman, was to mirror the world, encapsulating all possible images. Genet imagined that La Mort would found a new aesthetic and morality by taking difference and alterity to extremes. The cycle would feature seven plays, each of which would be independent, but would gain true value in relation to the overall group. Only Genet’s posthumously published and fittingly entitled Fragments survive from what was to be his greatest p

Abstract:

This essay reviews Theatre Journal articles that examine the intersections of theatre and capital, to highlight the challenge of analyzing neoliberal transformations of global and glocal economies, in particular, the trend to financial speculation to the detriment of investment in public resources, and the impact on theatre and performance. Commentators in the “global” North can better understand the scale of transformation—the concentration of wealth for a few and the loss of public revenue for the precarious majority—by examining strategies deployed by this majority in the South, especially Africa, to deal with extreme inequality exacerbated since the 1990s by structural adjustment and reduced aid from the North. The essay briefly notes a critical response to the impact of capital on performance by an African scholar, and a performative illumination of its US impact by an American practitioner. In the first case, David Donkor’s Spiders of the Market analyzes the glocal pressure of financialization on social welfare and performative practices in Ghana while offering critical insights that apply to increasing inequality in the North. In the second, Paul Durica and Pocket Guide to Hell’s site-responsive reenactments illuminate historic conflicts between U.S. capital and labor from the 1886-7 Haymarket Trial to the 2011 Occupy Movement and attempt to clarify the obscure workings of capital as an economic and cultural force in contemporary Chicago, whose nineteenth-century markets were the first to develop derivatives and other instruments that have spawned financial speculation to the present time.

• Editorial Comment: Informal Archives, Remediations, and Disciplinary Desires
• Laura Edmondson

The 75th anniversary issue of Theatre Journal is replete with pleasure, praise, critique, and desire. The journal’s invitation to think through the past, present, and future of the journal as articulated in the Call for Papers generated a robust response as demonstrated in the fourteen essays that appear in the print issue and six interviews published online.¹ These contributions oscillate between hopes for the journal and aspirations for the field as a whole—a slippage that speaks to the journal’s ability to shape and reflect its many publics over its seventy-five-year history. In these pages, I chronicle the tensions and debates that have played out in the journal since its founding, which sets the stage for imagining the iterations yet to come. I then draw on the rich contributions to this issue to theorize a framework of informal archives, remediations, and disciplinary desires. These concepts not only illuminate the specifics of this issue but also help to shed light on the tensions, turns, and hopes embedded in the field(s) of theatre, dance, and performance studies.

Across its many iterations and publics, editors have consistently commented on the capaciousness of the journal and its “free-wheeling eclecticism.”² As noted by both Sean Metzger and Isaiah Wooden in this issue, founder Barnard Hewitt expressed the hope in the 1949 inaugural issue of the journal, then called Educational Theatre Journal (hereafter ETJ), that it would be “of the greatest possible use to students, workers, and the teachers of educational theatre and drama in all aspects and at all levels.”³ In 1960, incoming ETJ editor Oscar G. Brockett limned this expansive mission with the explanation that the journal seeks to publish “in all aspects of theatre and drama (theatre history, dramatic literature, theory and criticism, acting, directing, all areas of design and production), and it is concerned with all levels of interest (university, community, secondary, children’s theatre).”⁴ This breadth translated into issues in which, to name one representative example from 1964, a discussion of Gordon Craig’s acting theory and an overview of contemporary state-subsidized Swedish theatre coexisted with essays that explored the potential of fiberglass for costume armor and Mixing [End Page xi] Latex Liquid as a paint base for scenery.⁵ Such articles accompanied a plethora of the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA) reports, lists of college and university productions, obituaries, and repeated requests that contributors follow MLA citation guidelines.⁶ In the late 1950s, edit

Abstract:

For decades, Theatre Journal has served as an important venue for documenting what made past theatrical productions or performances compelling and significant. As the journal commemorates its achievements over its first seventy-five volumes, this essay reflects on the vital contributions of the performance review section by considering its enduring impact on the field. In addition to tracing the evolution of the section from its earliest days as a single-authored article highlighting productions from the Broadway season to its current iteration, the essay argues that performance reviews have afforded authors crucial opportunities to hone their critical voices and vocabularies. It further contends that, even as performance reviews have been instrumental in introducing the journal’s readers to artists and events that they might not have otherwise known about, the influence of the section has also manifested in more practical ways. For example, it has been key in cultivating a pipeline of editors, thereby shaping how we think, read, and write about drama, theatre, and performance critically. Central to the essay is a consideration of the meaningful ways that the performance review section has advanced and enhanced the journal’s rich legacy of accomplishments.

Abstract:

Drawing on the print contributions to the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of Theatre Journal, this essay argues for a performance studies reorient. Rather than stabilize the field, this gambit attempts to encourage continual disciplinary reinvention that would expand the parameters of critical concern as theatre and performance studies scholars attend to widening geographies, new modes of historiography, and theoretical innovations. Emphasizing the “orient” in reorient, the writing places Asian American critique, understood as a transnational and intersectional knowledge project, as a central methodology to guide the future of the fields that the journal supports.

Abstract:

Through a case study of the creative process on the thirtieth anniversary revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in 2023, this essay argues for centering theories of power in theatre practice as well as scholarship. The limits of mainstream US theatre models manifested in the workings of structural racism and what Gayatri Spivak calls “zones of sanctioned ignorance”—structurally overdetermined blind spots—about race, history, acting theory, and the division of labor in the “creative”/ labor process. Knowledge of cutting-edge “theory,” the continuing critique of our own worldmaking assumptions, and expansive visions of “theory” integrated with “practice” could disrupt mind/body dualism and lead us to reimagine conventional US theatre protocols, opening possibilities for progressive change.

Reviewed by:

• Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda
• Jennifer Tyburczy

Michelle Castañeda’s book Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law is a tour de force that clearly demonstrates how the study of cultural performance provides an indispensable tool for understanding social performances and everyday life. Castañeda diagnoses various institutions at the sites of their theatrical manipulations—the disappearing rooms in her title—to show how immigration law, the prison-industrial complex, and even sometimes immigration activists stage these institutional mise-en-scènes in ways that play into the [End Page 590] (in)visibility of carceral power. At its core, the book is a decolonial love letter toward the abolition of what Castañeda, borrowing from Michel Foucault, refers to throughout the book as the prison heterotopia. Viewed through the scenography of the various rooms (e.g., the removal room and immigration courtrooms inside detention centers) that make up the primary sites of Castañeda’s analysis, this prison heterotopia operates through a “strategic investment in incoherence” that incites a “delirious impression” and “the feeling of living among absurdly derealized forms [that come] to define the experience of imprisonment itself” (58–59). This absurdity, Castañeda deftly explains, is calculated, stylized, and carefully choreographed in high stakes environments where life-altering decisions are made. Who can enter and who cannot enter the US, yes, but also the rooms she details, hangs in the balance.

In addition to a writing style that is clear, engaging, accessible, and theoretically rigorous, Castañeda’s words perform alongside the illustrations of artist, activist, and journalist Molly Crabapple, who depicts many of the scenes that Castañeda vividly describes and unpacks in each of her three chapters. These illustrations, based on Crabapple’s interpretation of what she was told by volunteers such as Castañeda who accompany (im)migrants, make visible what Castañeda evocatively elicits in her prose: the absurdity of immigration’s “hidden theaters” and the ways in which those detained and contained by these rooms navigate, view, and perceive the colonial spaces of immigration law. The result is a uniquely innovative and interdisciplinary performance studies text that shows the intricate scenographic details of rarely seen environments and does the urgent work of accompanying people through the marked and unmarked doors of courtrooms and detention centers. Disappearing Rooms will be an indispensable text across several

Reviewed by:

• 1776
• Jennifer A. Low

A row of shoes on the lip of an empty stage was all there was for spectators to look at while waiting for Roundabout Theatre’s production of 1776 to begin. Then about twenty women came onto the stage, dressed in ordinary street attire. As the spectators watched, they began dressing up, putting on knee-breeches, white stockings, and the long coats that gentlemen wore in the late eighteenth century, many with frogging and gold braid. Last of all, the women stepped into their shoes.

With that act, the women became living props, standing in for almost monumental historical figures as actors do at “living history” sites. The figures they portrayed included well-known men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin, as well as lesser-known figures like Robert Livingston, Stephen Hopkins, Samuel Chase and Josiah Bartlett. Directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, this much-heralded revival of a musical in which almost all the roles are male featured a cast with no men at all. Instead, the ensemble consisted of non-binary people and women, some of them trans. Is 1776 worth staging in this way, or was it, as detractors have said, simply a gimmicky “woke” version? I found the effort decidedly worthwhile.

The actors in the production played the role, not the gender of the character, and, while they played male roles as men, made no attempt to efface their own gender. Nonetheless, for much of the time, the illusion held, and spectators forgot the actors were playing across gender. Periodically, however, as in all theatre, that illusion was broken—and, in this case, to good effect. The characters of 1776 are more than men and more than historical figures—they’re representatives of thirteen colonies. It’s true that every member of the 1776 Continental Congress was male, but the same was not true of the people they represented. In separating male interests from male bodies, this production drew attention to the usual conflation of the two.

The company of Roundabout Theatre Company’s 1776.

[End Page 558]

The dramatic action of 1776 grows out of the conflicting interests of the colonies whose representatives are present onstage; at the time, these interests were gendered male—property, business, economics, and freedom of speech. Though John Adams extols independence throughout the musical, almost all the other characters speak more about these other issues, wh

Abstract:

This essay is a personal and self-reflective account of how disciplinary and sub-disciplinary formations operate within the field of theatre and performance studies materially, politically, and economically. Reflecting on the five years since the publication of the author’s Theatre Journal article, “Feeling in Counterpoint” (2018), the article addresses how disciplinary formations work to enact harm on racialized and minoritized scholars in the field. Writing from the perspective of the field in the United Kingdom, the essay reflects on two significant moments in the author’s experience. First, the collective writing and publication of the open letter “White Colleague Listen!” in 2020, when UK theatre, dance, and performance studies scholars of the Global Majority articulated their experiences and desires for change in the field. Second, the author’s work of community building with the New Earth Performer’s Academy, a program for emerging East and Southeast Asian actors and performers. Between these two events, the essay argues that in order to transform itself, the field must come to terms with desire—in other words, scholars must be explicit about the desire that compels them toward their subject matter and their research.