Theatre and Dance

A panel of highly esteemed female scholars aimed specifically at mentoring women entering the field
Participants:  Sarah Bay-Cheng, Cheryl Black, Dorothy Chansky, Esther Kim Lee, Rosemary Malague,  Kimberley Marra, Heather Nathans, Beth Osborne, and Judith Sebesta

In the process of researching and writing my dissertation, I have repeatedly found myself dealing with adaptations of various kinds -sometimes even when I didn't realize it at first. But the truth is, this should not be surprising. After all, adaptations are everywhere. As Linda Hutcheon notes in her book A Theory of Adaptation: "Adaptation has run amok" (xiii).

Cheryl Crawford was a successful, independent Broadway producer and a key player in shaping contemporary American theatre practices, yet her accomplishments have been all but forgotten. This essay will show that Crawford’s pivotal role in theatre history has been largely ignored due to four basic principles: gender discrimination, prejudice based on sexual orientation, the role of the producer as a somewhat invisible martyr, and her failure to leave a written legacy of her unique methodology.

This essay examines and compares two contemporary American plays, Mrs. Packard, by  Emily Mann, and In the Next Room or the vibrator play, by Sarah Ruhl, analyzing their  engagement with the concept of “using madness to represent women’s rebellion”—a metaphor that has long been championed, but has more recently come under scrutiny as feminist disability theories seek to disrupt this “almost monolithic way of reading mental illness within feminist literary criticism” (Donaldson 93-94). Though they approach their subjects in vastly different ways—one a tense drama based on a true story, the other a somewhat bawdy, yet heartbreaking comedy—both Mann and Ruhl seem to set up, but then ultimately subvert, the madness-as-rebellion metaphor.

At the end of the Fall 2013 academic term, I assigned the students in my postgraduate seminar on dramatic criticism the performance reviews in Theatre Journal. In keeping with the journal's mission, the productions reviewed are international, often off the beaten path, and, presumably, significant in some aesthetic or ideological way. The students' collective response could roughly be paraphrased as "Why don't we know more about theatre like this? Why don't we do more work like this at our university? These shows take on racism and history and gender inequity with guts. Who supports these artists?" One might well have the same response to the productions Helene P. Foley discusses in her synoptic Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, the project of which is to "try to define and isolate central developments in the history of America's ambivalent relation to Greek tragedy on the professional stage from the nineteenth century to the present" (3). Foley is in a unique position for this huge undertaking. She is among the best-known and most influential of American classics scholars of the last two decades (prior to Reimagining Greek Tragedy her most recent book was Female Acts in Greek Tragedy); she is, also, the New York Times' "go to" person for comments on reworkings of the classic Greek plays on the New York stage. In Reimagining, Foley deploys both areas of expertise, albeit with a light touch. She foregrounds major socio-cultural themes and illustrates them with dozens of rich production examples. Her own critical voice regarding any individual show is generally muted. (My only minor disappointment in the book is that the author does not speak out more often, but for purposes of what she wants to accomplish she doesn't really need to, as her exhaustive sleuthing and lucid reporting do the job.) The book's overarching thesis is that "American theater has tended to respond to Greek tragedy and its central figures in an idiosyncratic fashion that reflects its own changing history and ideology and modifies our understanding of the possibilities for and implications of the tragic genre itself in the modern world" (11). Rather than opting for either a strictly chronological or a strictly thematic arrangement, Foley does both, gracefully intertwining chronologically arrayed case studies under topical rubrics. Two of these rubrics are characterological-a chapter on Medeas and one on Oedipuses. Two are political-a chapter looking at uses of Greek tragedy during the revamping of progressive aesthetics largely under Modernism's aegis and a chapter on the use of Greek tragedy to lobby for the pursuit of a better American democracy, especially during times of war.

post-Wall resilience: "Aware of the history of its clients, the cola expresses solidarity. It too had to go through the experience [...,] the pains suffered by citizens of the GDR following the transition: devaluation, removal, declassification and de-industrialization" (). Drawing on methods from postcolonial theory, gender and media studies, as well as performance studies, contributors challenge fundamental oversights that undermine meaningful dialogue between the former Eastern Europe and the evolving West. Not unlike the migrant subjects of Goldstein's ethnography, these scholars pose a crucial question:"Who are 'we'? We are those who have survived everything despite everything and those who must be reckoned with in the future" ().