THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

{"title":"Performing Copyright: Law, Theatre and Authorship by Luke McDonagh, and: Owning Performance | Performing Ownership: Literary Property and The Eighteenth-Century British Stage by Jane Wessel, and: Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911 by Derek Miller, and: Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951 by Brent Salter (review)","authors":"Elena Cooper","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943420","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Performing Copyright: Law, Theatre and Authorship</em> by Luke McDonagh, and: <em>Owning Performance | Performing Ownership: Literary Property and The Eighteenth-Century British Stage</em> by Jane Wessel, and: <em>Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911</em> by Derek Miller, and: <em>Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951</em> by Brent Salter <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Elena Cooper </li> </ul> <em>PERFORMING COPYRIGHT: LAW, THEATRE AND AUTHORSHIP</em>. By Luke McDonagh. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury, 2021; pp. 256. <em>OWNING PERFORMANCE | PERFORMING OWNERSHIP: LITERARY PROPERTY AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STAGE</em>. By Jane Wessel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022; pp. 228. <em>COPYRIGHT AND THE VALUE OF PERFORMANCE, 1770–1911</em>. By Derek Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; pp. 289. <em>NEGOTIATING COPYRIGHT IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE: 1856–1951</em>. By Brent Salter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; pp. 280. <p>What is the relationship between copyright law and the theatre, both today and historically? How does law influence the theatre and how does the theatre shape the law? Until recently, there was relatively little in-depth and longitudinal literature addressing these questions (an exception being Anthea Kraut's <em>Choreographing Copyright</em> [2015], about nineteenth-century dance and US copyright). Copyright scholarship saw a historical turn in the late 1990s, following the publication of the now seminal <em>The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law</em> by Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently (1999). Copyright history soon became a burgeoning interdisciplinary field drawing together scholars from law and the humanities, primarily literature and book history; the focus was long on the history of laws protecting books and literary works as the first subject matter protected by copyright. It was only in 2018 that the first monograph-length studies of copyright protecting the visual arts were published (Elena Cooper's <em>Art and Modern Copyright</em> and Katie Scott's <em>Becoming Property</em>), which illustrated that a shift in focus to new subject matter—the visual arts—could provide new and distinct perspectives on copyright history. Such scholarship also implicitly highlighted the continued absence of scholarship in theatre. What new perspectives might be gleaned from a history of dramatic copyright and theatre centered on the value of ephemeral performance?</p> <p>In view of these long-standing gaps in the scholarship on theatre and copyright, the significance of four recently published monographs cannot be stressed enough. These studies by legal scholar Luke McDonagh, humanities scholars Derek Miller and Jane Wessel, and Brent Salter, a scholar with both legal and humanities training, offer sp","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"76 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"8 to abolition to infinity (8 => abolition => ∞)","authors":"Aaron Moore Ellis","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943396","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> 8 to abolition to infinity (8 => abolition => ∞) <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Aaron Moore Ellis (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>How do I hold a systemic analysis and approach when each system I am critical of is peopled, in part, by the same flawed and complex individuals that I love?</p> <p>This question always leads me to self-reflection. If I can see the ways I am perpetuating systemic oppressions, if I can see where I learned the behavior and how hard it is to unlearn it, I start to have more humility as I see the messiness of the communities I am a part of, the world I live in.</p> —adrienne maree brown<sup>1</sup> </blockquote> <h2>(a) identiteas(er)</h2> <p>Situating oneself at the forefront of an academic offering can sometimes serve to simply check a box; a basic requirement for \"good, balanced\" scholarship. Perhaps at its best, situating oneself evinces humility and reflective acknowledgment of identities and lived experiences, which critically inform the scholar's goals, methods, subjects, and sensitivities in their work. So who am I? aaron moore ellis. I take the lead from trailblazers who refuse capitalization. Who am I to do so? A wyte, nonbinary, ashkenazi jewish, irish, AMAB, m@sc-presenting person born into relative privilege, a sett!er on stolen land. … Who am I *not* to do so? What's at stake? What's at promise? And as to spelling: why write \"wyte\" instead of spelling out the color? Some may be familiar with the practice of intentionally respelling words associated with pain, trauma, and oppression, so that the experiences of those impacted by those words' referent is acknowledged and their reading experience softened. For those with privilege enough not to feel the resonant impact of these words, I invite you to consider my respelling as a reminder that privilege comes with built-in blinders to others' experiences, others for whom words matter in specific ways and whose lived experiences are deeply impacted by violence and oppression; that those people with those experiences matter; and that we—all of us—can seek ways to make life more breathable, more livable, more joyful. Who am I *not* to respell these words? What's at stake in respelling, or not?</p> <p>These are recurring questions—questions that don't stop me in my tracks or silence me, but rather stay on the move with me. I keep these questions with me as an <strong>[End Page E-19]</strong> invitation to others to see consonance—or dissonance—between how they witness me identify, what they hear me proclaim, and what they see me embody. That is to say, these questions invite myself into accountability—to my decisions, actions, identities, privileges, responsibilities, and abilities to respond to those most impacted by structural and interpersonal oppression, close by and across the world.</p> <p>As I write and edit this reflection between u","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Confessional Performance: Remorse and the Affective Economy of Parole","authors":"Jisha Menon","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943400","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Taking the popular podcast series <i>Violation</i> as its point of departure, this article examines the dramaturgy within the parole system, its affective politics, and its performative speech acts to consider its role in the perpetuation of mass incarceration in the United States. By training an eye on the affective economy of parole hearings, this article explores the retributive turn in the criminal legal process in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms. It focuses on the anxious performance of remorse within parole hearings as a key form of affective currency that could potentially secure release from incarceration. In the process, the article examines the significant role that remorse plays in parole hearings in entrenching a dispositional conception of personal responsibility in the criminal legal system.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editorial Comment: Abolition and Performance","authors":"Ariel Nereson","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943395","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Editorial Comment:&lt;span&gt;Abolition and Performance&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Ariel Nereson &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;[A]bolition has to be the way to relate to one another. So, not a tool to implement, but a posture and a way of life.&lt;/p&gt; —Ashon Crawley&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Theatre, dance, and performance studies offer many methodological tools for understanding practice and interpreting theories embedded in and arising from practice. Attending to time, space, embodiment, affect, energy, and lived experience is a foundational commitment of our fields. In bringing abolition and performance together as paired keywords, this special issue seeks to understand how interventions in theatre, dance, and performance studies can be tools that help us reorient our individual and collective postures toward abolition. Abolition is a set of relations, a doing, a way of life, as Ashon Crawley writes, that seeks the undoing of the forms of relation we currently live under in the racial capitalocene that presume the necessity of carcerality in order to recompense harm.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; In other words, rejecting modes of social organization oriented around punishment (and hegemonic assertions of whom can be punished, and how) requires practicing the postures of \"restorative justice, abolition, hospitality, [and] joy,\" both as individual alignments and in community.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This special issue explicitly connects theatre, dance, and performance studies with the carceral turn in the humanities and social sciences, where, as Robert Fanuzzi writes, \"abolition\" refers to a \"horizon of change\" that encompasses \"an end to traditions, or epistemologies, that normalize centuries of racial oppression and gender inequality as inevitable, if regrettable, features of modernity and which center or overrepresent Western European male concepts of humanity as their default.\"&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; Taking up \"carcerality\" &lt;strong&gt;[End Page xi]&lt;/strong&gt; as a keyword, Beth E. Richie defines the term as \"a condition or set of social arrangements that advances a reliance on punishment or incapacitation.\"&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; Across disciplines, performance is a flexible analytic for understanding the circulation of power. In an address to members upon becoming president of the American Studies Association, abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore recounted the many intersections between her study in drama and her work in abolitionist thinking and organizing, encouraging listeners to think of public policy as a \"script\" for the future.&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As a focus of theatre, dance, and performance studies, abolition has a short but powerful bibliography. Abolition and performance intersect memorably in a foundational contribution to Black performance studies from Daphne Brooks in her chapter \"The Escape Artist: Henry Box Brown, Black Abolitionist Performa","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"160 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"It Feels Like Being in Jail All Over Again\": Staging the Criminalized Liminality of Sex Offenders","authors":"Ryan Donovan","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943403","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Two plays focusing on the postincarceration experiences of sex offenders opened in 2018: Life Jacket Theatre Company's <i>America Is Hard to See</i> and Bruce Norris's <i>Downstate</i>. Both plays ask spectators to recognize the humanity of sex offenders while also keeping in mind the harm they caused. The questions at the heart of these plays are ultimately about ethics and space: how close do we as a society want to allow sex offenders? These plays stage the movement, space, and time—the spatiotemporality—of postincarceration carceral geographies and the embodied state of what I term \"criminalized liminality.\" In this article, I pursue a two-pronged approach to examine how these plays explore the spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality: primarily, I employ critical spatial perspectives to address how the focus on the ethics of space in <i>America</i> and <i>Downstate</i> emphasizes theatre itself as a space of ethical engagement for artists and audiences; and, secondarily, that as a result of their content and form, each play invites spectators to consider what it means to act on and offstage. I ultimately conclude that although these plays invite consideration of alternatives to the criminal punishment system like abolition, their real power lies in their ultimate ambivalence. Each unsettles spectators without providing clear answers. The spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality and the slippage created by acting produce a certain generative uncertainty.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"112 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142645955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Jungle Book Reimagined by Tariq Jordan (review)","authors":"Alexandra A. Rego","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943414","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Jungle Book Reimagined&lt;/em&gt;by Tariq Jordan &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Alexandra A. Rego &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;THE JUNGLE BOOK REIMAGINED&lt;/em&gt;. By Tariq Jordan. Directed and choreographed by Akram Khan. Music by Jocelyn Pook. Animation by YeastCulture ( Adam Smith and Nick Hillel). Akram Khan Company, Rose Theater, Lincoln Center. 11 &lt;day&gt;18&lt;/day&gt;, 2023. &lt;p&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Jungle Book Reimagined&lt;/em&gt;premiered at the Curve (Leicester, UK) in 2022 and has since toured internationally, with further performances booked through January 2025 (Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, UK) at the time of writing. In a 2021 conversation with writer Amitav Ghosh (on \"Art, Storytelling, and the Environment\") and in numerous journalistic interviews since, director and choreographer Akram Khan relayed his daughter's insistence both on a genderswapped Mowgli and on a production that in effect practiced the ecocritical concerns it preached. Khan and his company went to great lengths to limit the production's carbon footprint, from their sets and props to their rehearsal spaces. The production thus traveled relatively light—the set was composed of various cardboard boxes arranged into specific towers and architectural configurations. Each performance venue involved a new set of boxes taken from local recycling bins and sometimes from storage from the theatre. The linear animations, voiceovers, and Jocelyn Pook's atmospheric, earthy score were transferred and stored digitally.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;\"There was a jungle,\" one of the wolves recalled in passing, \"but nobody knows when the jungle was, anymore.\" Indeed, the production opened in water and skyscraper ruins (animated by YeastCulture's Adam Smith and Nick Hillel), in a world where global catastrophic flooding drove inland migration from every coast. Views of animal and human migration, heavy rains, and rising sea levels provided glimpses of various cities before they vanished under the water: the Kremlin, the Oriental Pearl Tower, Big Ben, and the Empire State Building appeared only briefly. This ambiguity elided, or perhaps erased, both temporal and geographic specificity. The scenes of global flooding barely offered enough time to positively identify and locate particular landmarks, let alone time enough to consider where it was that Mowgli washed ashore. These landmarks rose and fell, etched in white light upon a dark green, nearly black backdrop.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Amid this catastrophic milieu, pseudojournalistic reports detailed rising sea levels and corporate profiteering, interspersed with audio clips of climate activist Greta Thunberg. The fact that the production is in the process of an international tour complicated this temporal and geographic ambiguity somewhat: the sight, however brief, of the Empire State Building stirred fellow New Yorkers in the audience. &lt;em&gt;The Jungle Book Reimagine","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Looking at/for Disappearing John Brown","authors":"Ben Spatz, SAJ, Eero Laine, Michelle Liu Carriger, Henry Bial","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943399","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Looking at/for Disappearing John Brown &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Ben Spatz (bio), SAJ (bio), Eero Laine (bio), Michelle Liu Carriger (bio), and Henry Bial (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;br/&gt; Click for larger view&lt;br/&gt; View full resolution Figure 1. &lt;p&gt;John Brown BBQ in Queens, New York City, https://www.johnbrownbbq.net.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(Photo: Eero Laine.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In the mid-nineteenth century, John Brown (1800-59) riveted the United States and earned himself an execution with his radical abolitionist tactics encompassing murder and armed insurrection against the United States at Harpers Ferry (present-day West Virginia). Today, his extreme measures ensure his continued circulation across a variety of images and through various investments in his legacy and history. We began thinking together about John Brown precisely because of the promise of collaboration for considering the multifaceted figure that is performed and reperformed on murals and buttons, in sports arenas and bars, on television and in film. The work of abolition is collective and shared, and the political possibilities of the university add up to very little if they remain solitary endeavors. John Brown impels us to gather, to think and work together. Perhaps any one of us alone could have written our article, \"The Unbearable Whiteness of John Brown: Theatrical Legacies and Performing Abolition,\" &lt;strong&gt;[End Page E-37]&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Theatre Journal&lt;/em&gt;'s special issue on \"Abolition and Performance.\" But maybe we would not have done so without the others. This is a coalitional approach to political and abolitionist work in the academy. The reading group as a form has a long political history, and in some ways, our collaboration is not so different. From the beginning, however, our work was oriented toward research inquiries and the potential to then share that research with a yet larger circle. It was an opportunity not just to have a few conversations about John Brown, but to make something (an article) about John Brown.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The project began with a semi-open call posted to Facebook. The post was visible only to some, but it encouraged viewers to forward the call to friends and colleagues who might be interested in working toward an article-length piece of writing on John Brown. Many commented on the post, and the current authors were those who indicated their interest in working together. Once the five of us were all on the same email thread (albeit spaced as far east to west on the planet as northern England to California), we met via Zoom and began by discussing our interest in John Brown as a political, historical, and theatrical figure. Our initial interests were varied, and the wide-ranging examples we found of Brown were key to thinking through the article in terms of the multitude of possible John Browns and his persistent performance—of abolition, of w","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vanessa in Bed by Diana Grisanti (review)","authors":"Gina M. Di Salvo","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943411","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Vanessa in Bed&lt;/em&gt;by Diana Grisanti &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Gina M. Di Salvo &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;VANESSA IN BED&lt;/em&gt;. By Diana Grisanti. Directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh. Audible Theater. Digital audio production released 09 &lt;day&gt;23&lt;/day&gt;, 2023. Downloaded 02 &lt;day&gt;10&lt;/day&gt;, 2024. &lt;p&gt;Finally, a comedy about dead mothers, millennial flailing, and the legacy of colonial wealth that spans from an abortion clinic along the Ohio River to a bed-rest study in a Texas swamp. Diana Grisanti's new audio play, &lt;em&gt;Vanessa in Bed&lt;/em&gt;, centers on the existential and physical stasis of Vanessa, a 37-year-old who recently lost her mother, terminated an unwanted pregnancy, and had a falling out with her cousin Brigid. The titular bed in which Vanessa lays is not the one she shared with the neurotic trustfund hobby pilot who impregnated her during a fling. Vanessa has committed to stay in bed alone for ninety-one days with her head at a sixdegree decline. She expects to incur digestive issues and muscle atrophy. Vanessa's trial of endurance is not for penance but rather for a bedrest study that simulates the effects of antigravity on the body. The space exploration division of Paralax, a commercial enterprise founded by a descendant of Dutch colonizers, aims to launch commercial travel to Mars once the earth has been fracked to bits. This is no science fiction play. It is a financial reality play. Vanessa is giving her body to Paralax to earn $80,000 to fund Brigid's divorce. If she can be a hero, she can win back her cousin. But Vanessa only makes it to Day 49. Her failure is as spectacular as the fall she experiences when she gets out of bed in a fit of anti-neoliberal self-righteousness, breaking her contract. Wheelchairbound with a herniated disc and staph infection on her face, Vanessa is ultimately saved by Brigid.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt; &lt;em&gt;Vanessa in Bed&lt;/em&gt;switches back and forth between the bedrest study and Vanessa's recent past. At home, Vanessa's life is filled with a chorus of women: seven paternal aunts, Grandma Jane, and Brigid and Mary Beth, two of her twenty-seven cousins. Brigid is a stayathome mom and an volunteer escort at an abortion clinic, and Mary Beth is a nun. The cousins grew up together in the What Happened to Aunt Colette Club. Aunt Colette, the missing eighth paternal aunt, disappeared when she was 17 and pregnant. The cousins' investigation centered on scouring the contents of &lt;em&gt;The New Woman's Survival Catalog&lt;/em&gt;for the addresses of communes and collectives that Aunt Colette might have joined. Grisanti stretches the mystery of Aunt Colette through the play. Although it is never solved, the biggest clue—that book of secondwave feminist resources—provides salvation for the cousins.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The impact of Aunt Colette's absence is a site of intergenerational trauma and reverberates in Mary ","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theatre Blogging: The Emergence of a Critical Culture by Megan Vaughan (review)","authors":"Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943422","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Theatre Blogging: The Emergence of a Critical Culture&lt;/em&gt; by Megan Vaughan &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;THEATRE BLOGGING: THE EMERGENCE OF A CRITICAL CULTURE&lt;/em&gt;. By Megan Vaughan. London: Methuen Drama, 2020; pp. 280. &lt;p&gt;Hiya. I'm Kevin. Thanks for reading this review. I figured if I was gonna review a book on theatre blogging that reproduced a bunch of theatre blogposts, I might as well approach it as its own blog post. So there's gonna be some stream of consciousness, some digressions, and less-than-academic-butreal-as-shit spellings and language, so buckle up!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In sitting down to read the book for this review, I had in mind a recent TV commercial mocking older generations for \"printing out the internet.\" Is that what this book would be? Just printing out the internet? (Spoiler alert: nope, it's not. I was wrong—it's so much more). In fact, some of the pieces in the book are no longer available online, so you kinda gotta read the book to see 'em.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Author/editor/curator Megan Vaughan argues that the pieces in the book are \"'outsider' criticism\" of theatre production, offering alternatives to the failing and fading \"mainstream\" media theatre criticism (9-10). (Point of order: I agree that mainstream media theatre criticism has dropped in quantity and quality—when I moved to Los Angeles over two decades ago, you could count on the &lt;em&gt;Los Angeles Times&lt;/em&gt; and independent weeklies to review dozens of local productions every week. The weeklies are now gone, and we're lucky if the &lt;em&gt;Times&lt;/em&gt; does three productions per week.) Vaughan is a blogger herself, having published a London theatre blog, &lt;em&gt;Synonyms for Churlish&lt;/em&gt; (synonymsforchurlish.tumblr.com), from 2008 to 2016. Vaughan argues, \"The theatre blogosphere has made a more significant and far-reaching contribution to theatre—its practices as well as its profile—than anything else in the twenty-first century\" (3). Yes, a rather huge claim, one that says traditional theatre reviews in mainstream media are their own fossilized, gate-keeping institution set within very traditional (read: conservative) understandings and definitions of what theatre is and what good theatre is. Blogging is inclusive, community-based, and doesn't require a privileged, connected background to practice (although, as Vaughan admits [and points for honesty here], many bloggers &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; come from privileged racial and economic backgrounds). I'll leave it to the individual to decide if Vaughan is correct in asserting the primacy of blogging's significance (which, after all, is also what all theatre scholars do—\"What I do is important and significant!\" we cry), and like theatre scholarship, how much of it is a conversation within a small, self-selecting community. &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 413]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater by Carla Della Gatta (review)","authors":"Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943418","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater&lt;/em&gt; by Carla Della Gatta &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;LATINX SHAKESPEARES: STAGING U.S. INTRACULTURAL THEATER&lt;/em&gt;. By Carla Della Gatta. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023; pp. 265. &lt;p&gt;For too long, a decidedly multicultural Shakespearean analysis that foregrounds European and white ontologies has marked Latine adaptations, appropriations, and concept productions of Shakespeare plays. One of the most detrimental consequences of this ethnocentric analysis is the occlusion of the impact of Latine directors and their work on US theatre. To alleviate this obscuring, Carla Della Gatta offers &lt;em&gt;Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater&lt;/em&gt;, a text that frames Latine Shakespearean performance not as foreign, but as integral to the fabric of US theatre. The text refreshingly employs both Latine and Latin American theorists to examine over 140 Latine-themed productions staged in both large repertory and small community venues across the United States from the 1950s to the present. Through meticulous research, the text acknowledges, validates, and values the presence, influence, and contributions of Latine theatremakers in the &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 404]&lt;/strong&gt; United States through ethnographic, archival, and textual analysis.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The text begins with an introduction to its central idea, defining it as \"Latinx Shakespeares,\" or \"textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx\" (1). Helpful to those wishing to understand more about the history of mobilizing Shakespearean performances in communities of color is the text's inclusion of the initiatives implemented by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1960s, including the Spanish Mobile Theater unit and the Festival Latino. &lt;em&gt;Latinx Shakespeares&lt;/em&gt; focuses on adaptations both textual and performative that inject Shakespearean characters, plays, and stories with Latine-minded aesthetics, strategies, sounds, and techniques.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The first chapter, \"Division: The &lt;em&gt;West Side Story&lt;/em&gt; Effect,\" provides the text's most incisive intervention, which gives a name to \"the staging of difference of any kind in Shakespeare\" (29). The &lt;em&gt;West Side Story&lt;/em&gt; effect is also developed in later chapters as it pertains to various Shakespearean adaptations. Ultimately, the chapter focuses on the way &lt;em&gt;West Side Story&lt;/em&gt;'s legacy has informed subsequent Shakespearean stagings inclusive of race and ethnicity throughout theatre history. It also features a fascinating section underscoring the fact that &lt;em&gt;West Side Story&lt;/em&gt;'s original conception had nothing to do with Latine culture, because the central conflict was to be between \"(New York-based) Catholics","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}