Deprovincializing Brian Friel's Drama in America, 2009 and 2014: Dancing at Lughnasa in Fort Myers, Florida, and Faith Healer in Houston, Texas

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-116
Author(s):  
Richard Rankin Russell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Population ◽  
Faith Healer ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
Catch Up ◽  
National Profile

While American regional theatre has flourished for decades, hardly any critics with a national profile pay attention to it, but theatre critic Terry Teachout has recently argued that criticism must catch up with this ‘deprovincialized’ drama, drawing upon his viewing of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa in a memorable 2009 production by the Florida Repertory Theatre in Fort Myers. I tentatively explore through that production of Lughnasa what implications its staging in a locale with a strong Hispanic concentration might have for American theatre and for its growing immigrant population as the United States becomes ever more divided, yet still idealizes plurality and immigration. I then assess the Stark Naked Theatre Company's stirring 2014 production of Faith Healer in Houston, Texas. Actors and local critics mostly neglected Irish aspects of the play – unlike their supposed more enlightened New York critics and audiences, who tend to read Irish drama through outmoded stereotypes – and instead privileged its spiritual qualities and its potential for showcasing theatre as an art form.

Latin American(ist) Theatre History: Bridging the Divides

2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-215
Author(s):  
Jean Graham-Jones
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
English Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Latin American Theatre ◽  
The U.S

In October 2004, I edited Theatre Journal's special issue on Latin American theatre. In addition to five essays on subjects ranging from sixteenth-century Amerindian performance to a twenty-first-century Mexican adaptation of an Irish play, that issue included a forum on the state of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the United States today. Even though the thirteen respondents resided, independently or as affiliates, in different disciplinary homes (theatre, performance, languages, and literature) and took multiple points of departure, a common thread ran throughout their comments: the need for the U.S. academy to study and teach the diversity that is known as Latin America.1 Tamara Underiner succinctly notes that “Latin America has never answered easily as an object of inquiry for theatre studies.”2 Indeed, studying Latin American theatre and performance poses very specific challenges: the region encompasses some twenty countries whose national borders obscure larger geographical, cultural, religious, political, and socioeconomic networks; a multiplicity of languages—European, dialectal, and indigenous to the hemisphere—are still spoken, written, and performed; and numerous intersecting histories extend back far beyond the five hundred years since the Europeans arrived and precipitated what today we euphemistically refer to as “contact.” Latin America does not terminate at the U.S.–Mexican border; thus although I'm cognizant of the attendant complications when including the U.S. latino/a communities in a discussion of Latin American theatre, the cultural network is such that I consider any arbitrary separation counter to the purposes of this reflection. Otherwise, how can we take into account the larger networks navigated by such U.S.-based playwrights as Guillermo Reyes (born in Chile but raised in the United States and the author of plays about Chilean history as well as specifically U.S. identities) or Ariel Dorfman (born in Argentina, raised in New York City and Santiago, Chile, now a professor at Duke, and author of English-language plays whose subject matter is frequently authoritarian Latin America)?

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

Mafias on the Move

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Varese
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
At Will

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.

Bringing the Real World of Science to Children: A Partnership of the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Compulsory Education ◽  
Development Program ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Museum ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.

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