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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
The March 2024 issue of Theatre Journal comes on the heels of the landmark seventy-fifth anniversary issue (December 2023, coedited by Laura Edmondson and Sean Metzger) and is my first issue as coeditor. To say that I sense the weight of the journal’s history as I step into this role is an understatement. It has been my good fortune that the four essays that were waiting for me exemplify Theatre Journal’s commitment to publishing new historiographic and theoretical interventions into performance. The March issue features two essays that take up distinct sites in Asian American popular performance and demonstrate the diversity of experience, expectation, and intervention found therein, and two essays that theorize performance from very different locations: dirt and drone, other-than-human performers that complicate foundational assumptions about subject, spectator, and actor. As a quartet, the essays energetically mark the beginning of the journal’s next seventy-five years, offering exciting vectors of inquiry that speak to current and evergreen concerns of theatre, dance, and performance studies. Individually, each offers to readers a distinct model of careful, enthusiastic research that broadens the scope of performance studies inquiry.
Maria De Simone’s essay introduces (or reintroduces, as the case may be) the reader to the early twentieth-century figure Jue Quon Tai, tracing her performances across North American vaudeville stages and in immigration courtrooms to demonstrate how performance culture impacted the conceptualization of immigration law. De Simone’s essay joins a vibrant conversation in performance studies about performance and the law while also restoring Jue’s fascinating career to already-robust but generally separate histories of early twentieth-century popular entertainment and immigration and citizenship law. In De Simone’s analysis, Jue mobilized her hyphenated Chinese American identity to navigate racist and exclusionary policies on stage and in the courtroom, yet of equal significance is how the extant archive of Jue’s performances documents racialized regimes of perception that were mutually reinforced across aesthetic and legal domains.
The entwinement of geopolitics and popular performance continues in Donatella Galella’s exploration of David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s 2019 musical Soft Power. For both De Simone and Galella, Asian American identity, critique, and experience form a kind of limit test for the promise of US American democratic inclusion. Galella activates a welcome critique of musical theatre’s affective influence on its audiences and of the ideologies that find support through the deployment of affect and attachment. Through examining the dramaturgy of Soft
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.
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