{"title":"Staging Race and Gender in the Era of Contemporary Crises: Dramas of African American Women Playwrights","authors":"Ifeta Čirić-Fazlija","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Starting from the premise that contemporary crisis is a pervasive continuation of the modern “series of interrelated crises” (Fernández-Caparrós and Brígido-Corachán vii), this article examines the manner in which the US theater has responded to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously considering crises as “agents of change and transformation” (xvii) and bearing in mind the #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter movements, the article questions the likelihood of contemporary American theater overcoming its own crisis of representation. Relating modern and current crises, the essay first outlines twentieth century dramatic literature and theatersi against the backdrop of the World Wars, the 1918 health crisis, economic depression, and post-war (racialized) society, focusing on plays by American women of color. The study then centers on dramatic and theatrical developments brought about by the annus horribilis of 2020, surveying new genres, authors and performances, and discerning no significant improvement in systemic discrimination on Broadway stages. The essay also offers complementary reading of Trouble in Mind (1955), a meta-drama mirroring systemic racial and gender discrimination in American theaters, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) which unravels similar issues, albeit in the film industry.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85555465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Race Crisis to Race Celebration: Online Body Politics and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theateri","authors":"M. Alexandru","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Throughout the history of the United States, there have been many critical times associated with racism. When other forms of crisis overlap the existing ones – as the Covid-19 pandemic – even more challenges appear, calling for a more complex artistic response. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is well known across the United States and the world not only through their innovative ballet style (which builds on classical choreography and enriches it with creatively processed blues, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean tones), but also through what Thomas F. DeFrantz calls Alvin Ailey’s “embodiment of African American culture” in the subtitle of his book (Dancing Revelations, 2004). This essay looks at Ailey Theater’s politics of the dancing body, with a focus on recent productions included in the Ailey All Access online project, meant to replace a Fall 2021 United States tour that could not take place because of the pandemic. I will argue that the company’s choreographic overcoming and even beautifying sorrow through dance expands Ailey’s healing narrative about African American history to the Covid-19 pandemic. Their recent projects propose a desirable post-racist world, in which those who have been through much sorrow can support those who have been through less, and thus promote a politics of human togetherness, hope, and reconstruction.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76567231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Roy Youdale. Using Computers in the Translation of Literary Style: Challenges and Opportunities. Routledge, 2020. ISBN: 978-0-367-14123-3. Paperback £39.99","authors":"Alexandra Mitrea","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75119889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Activism of Dance Performance in Appalachia: Utilizing the Arts to Address Social and Environmental Crisis and Injustice in the Mountains","authors":"Theresa L. Burriss","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For well over a century, the human and more-than-human of Central Appalachia have endured oppression and exploitation, primarily due to natural resource extraction. In spring 2008, the author led a dark touri to a mountaintop removal coalmining site in Southern West Virginia for colleagues, which included Dance Professor Deborah McLaughlin. As a result, the two collaborated on three evening-length dance/theater works highlighting social and environmental crises and injustices in the region. The performances incorporated contemporary dance, poetry, the spoken word, and the visual arts, as well as contemporary and traditional music. The first, Eating Appalachia: Selling Out to the Hungry Ghost, focused on mountaintop removal coalmining and its environmental and cultural destruction. With Sounds of Stories Dancing, the duo paid homage to millions of mountain residents forced to leave the region to find stable employment, despite longing to remain. In the final piece, The Shadow Waltz, they honored the lives of coalminers with black lung disease, as well as their families. This essay discusses the challenges of creating art that critiques socially constructed messages portrayed as given truths, as well as the educational and social successes of daring to dance truth to power.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86024444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Fall of the House of Weston and the Crumbling of the American Dream in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County","authors":"Raluca Moldovan","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Tracy Letts is one of the best-known and most successful American playwrights of the 21st century, having won critical and popular acclaim both for his writing and acting. August: Osage County, probably his most celebrated play, premiered in 2007 and introduced the theater-going public to the dysfunctional Weston family, who reunite in a stifling, decaying Oklahoma mansion after the family patriarch’s suicide. The Westons’ familial crisis is manifested through addiction, violence, aggressiveness, adultery, rape and incest, each member having their own secrets and troubles. The present article aims, first, to examine how the characters deal with their personal crises and second, how the perceived sense of crisis and decline in the American society at large (both in a longer historical sense and in a sense contemporary to the events of the play) pushed family patriarch Beverly Weston to commit suicide out of a sense of profound hopelessness and disillusionment. Letts, by bringing familial crisis and conflict into the spotlight, shows how the disintegration of the Westons’ family ties mirrors, to a significant extent, the crumbling of the American Dream.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88315430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reviews: Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni, eds. Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-1-78661-097-3 (paperback); 978-1-78661-098-0 (electronic)","authors":"Dragoş Ivana","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0023","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74829072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Staging (during) Crisis: Indigenous Zoomlets in the Pandemic","authors":"C. Waegner","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic with its lockdowns and social distancing whirled theaters worldwide into an economic and cultural crisis. The San Francisco Playhouse, however, implemented an experimental theater genre based on computer-mediated communication (CMC) that proved to be highly productive and successful. The “Monday night Zoomlets” presented short plays by, among others, Indigenous authors, embedded in discussion by director, actors, and playwright, with a second reading of the play applying the insights gained. The presentations took advantage of technical finesses, as well as informality and humor, and the Zoom spectators in their home settings could interact via a chat function. This article analyzes three of the innovative Zoomlets focusing on crises in contemporary Native American families, crises that have arisen through the “slow violence” (Nixon) of centuries-long hegemonic colonization. DeLanna Studi’s Flight, Claude Jackson Jr.’s Cashed Out, and Lee Cataluna’s Funeral Attire. All these plays show young Native Americans attempting to reclaim rituals or knowledges through forms of “remembering,” a feature of twenty-first-century Indigenous theater according to engagé drama theorists Jaye Darby, Courtney Mohler, and Christy Stanlake’s Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance (2020). Relevant theories of transformations of chronotope, fourth wall, and third skin in performance within the Zoom environment are considered.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84189890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editors’ Note: Crises on Stage: Imagining New Worlds","authors":"F. Londré, D. Benea, Ludmila Martanovschi","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88954644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The N-Word and Other Sticky Issues: Considering Alice Childress’s Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Relationship in Black and White in the Black Lives Matter Era","authors":"T. L. Bennett","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Alice Herndon Childress’s 1962 play Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White mines many of the issues that the most recent US race crisis has brought to the forefront, but in the twenty-first century, a long overdue shift in political climate has raised new questions regarding what is acceptable, even in the realm of art. Childress investigates oppressive forces through realistic, compelling characters and setting, and electric dialogue, yet in doing so, she employs the N-word and other disturbing epithets that discomfit contemporary students, actors, and audiences. In a time when use of such words can result in one’s being fired or sued, do the lessons of this play outweigh the turmoil that such terms can cause? This study argues that they do, with an important caveat: just as words’ meanings are contingent on their context, the positive power of the play is contingent on careful treatment of it, suggesting that current US sociopolitical crises, like those of the past, cannot be satisfactorily resolved by simple rules or mandates.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85509215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cuban Rafter Crisis on Stage: Humanizing the Experience of Refugees in María Irene Fornés’ Manual for a Desperate Crossing","authors":"Araceli González Crespán","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Cuban-born playwright María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) repeatedly dealt with migration in several plays throughout her long career in theater, sometimes presenting characters who were immigrants living in New York (Sarita) or resorting to correspondence between distant relatives separated in different countries (La Viuda, Letters from Cuba). Manual for a Desperate Crossing was her response to the Cuban Rafter Crisis of the mid-1990s. The article analyzes how the playwright makes use of a combination of objective and subjective strategies to counteract the dehumanizing effect of media coverage, shifting the focus to the individuals who risked their lives in the perilous crossing of the Caribbean Sea in rickety rafts from Cuba to the Florida shores. The emphasis on the transit as a theme and the mixture of instructional, technical discourses with highly stylized stage design and different audiovisual media forces us to look in a different, immersive way that generates empathy towards the refugees.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84135849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}