«Lemma»: Jay Wright’s Idiorrhythmic American Theater

This essay presents Jay Wright’s play Lemma as a historiographical challenge and also as a piece of idiorrhythmic American theater. Consonant with his life’s work of poetry, dramatic literature, and philosophical writing, Lemma showcases Wright’s expansive intellectual framework with which he constructs vivid, dynamic, and complex visions of American life. The “America” conjured here is steeped in many traditions, traditions typically kept distinct by academic discourse, such as West African cosmology, Enlightenment philosophy, jazz music theory, Ancient Greek theater, neo-Baroque modifications of Christian theology, pre-Columbian indigenous ways of knowing, etymological connections between Spanish and Gaelic, the materiality of John Donne’s poetry, and the lives of enslaved Africans in the New World. What is the purpose of Wright’s theatrical conjuration? How do we approach a text with such a diverse body of intellectual and literary sources? The author answers these questions and ends with a call to treat Lemma as a much needed point of view that opens lines of sight into Black and American theater far outside the well-worn territory of the Black Arts Movement.

Theresa J. May. Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater.

In Earth Matters on Stage, Theresa J. May explores a range of significant plays and productions from crucial moments in the United States’ environmental history to demonstrate the myriad ways that American theatre has represented, challenged, and been complicit in environmental imperialism.

Countering Post-9/11 Stereotypes: Arab American Playwrights Make Their Voices Heard

Before 9/11Arab-American drama was sporadic and inconsistent in the sense that there was a relative absence of Arab-American theater or playwrights who made their voices heard across the USA. However, after 9/11 the American theater scene witnessed a surge of Arab-American drama and theater that aimed at addressing the American audience in order to voice the concerns, fears and anxieties of Arab Americans. They wanted to dispel much of the stereotype attributes which have been wrongly associated with them because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This study intends to examine the dramatic endeavors of Arab-American playwrights to make their voices heard through drama, performance and theater in light of transnationalism and diaspora theory. The study argues that Arab-American dramatists and theater groups write back to the hegemonic polemics against Arabs and Muslims, which has madly become characteristic of contemporary American literature and media following 9/11. Viewed in light of the anti-Arab American literary discourse, Arab-American playwrights and performers have taken giant steps towards changing the stereotypes of Arabs, and countering the loud voices of those who try to add fuel to the blazing flames of Islamophobia. To assess the contribution of Arab-American dramatists and performers to make their voices heard loud and clear in countering the stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, Yussef El Guindi (1960-) is going to be discussed in this paper because he has been fighting the stereotypes of Arab Americans and Islamophobia in his drama and theater. El Guindi has devoted most of his plays to fight the stereotypes that are persistently attributed to Arabs and Muslims, and his drama presents issues relating to identity formation and what it means to be Arab American. A scrutiny of his plays shows that El Guindi has dealt with an assortment of topics and issues all relating to the stereotypes of Arab Americans and the Middle East. These issues include racial profiling and surveillance; stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in the cinema and theater; and acculturation and clash of cultures. Keywords: Arab American, Identity, Theater, Stereotypes, Diaspora, Acculturation

Alcoholism and Identity Change in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey into Night

Although much research has been written on the idea of substance abuse in the American theater, this paper presents a new perspective by discussing how the abuser can undergo an identity change. Drug and alcohol addiction is one of the salient themes of twentieth-century American theater. Playwrights like Eugene O’Neill depicted this social problem in their plays by drawing upon their own personal experience in substance abuse. The paper examines alcoholism and drug addiction in O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey into Night. It shows how addicts experience identity change during the course of their addiction. The main argument, in this paper, is based on some sociological research on alcoholism and identity change proposed by Tammy L. Anderson. Identity transformation of the addicts may result from the existence of various personal and environmental factors, which correlate to personal and social identity respectively. These factors will be used in relation to the characters of the play to show how addicts and alcoholics pass through several stages to reach their final identity change. Those characters, by immersing themselves in substance intake, cease to belong to ‘normals’ and in their search for a new identity they liaise with ‘deviants’ where they find affinity. When the curtain is drawn, the addicted characters have already embarked on their journey which will end, both literally and figuratively, in haziness and fog, a strong indication of their loss of sense of existence and self-awareness.

Taking Hamilton to the Streets

Brief live shows, later called Ham4Ham, preceded the ticket lottery held during every preview performance of Hamilton on Broadway, and then later, on two-show days. This chapter examines how creator Miranda used the Ham4Ham shows to take Hamilton to the streets as part of a long lineage of Latinx theater-making traditions. This chapter coins the term “aesthetics of accessibility” to describe a Latinx theater-making philosophy of accessibility that finds its roots in the early work of El Teatro Campesino and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. Ham4Ham officially ended in 2016, so this essay also looks to the future of aesthetics of accessibility and how Latinx theater and performance continues to be at the forefront of evolving the American theater. Ultimately, Ham4Ham blurs the lines between commerce and generosity; this essay questions what happens when the aesthetics of accessibility are produced in a commercial Broadway context.

Life According to Popular Children's Films

This content analysis uses data gathered from the 150 top-grossing children’s animated films from 1990 to 2020 (based on North American theater sales) to examine the gender disparities and stereotypes in children’s media. The study shows that female characters are underrepresented in lead roles (14%), main gangs (28.1%), and speaking roles (27.2%). The central female characters are portrayed stereotypically. When female characters appear, they are more likely to be portrayed in a romantic and family relationship than male characters. However, films with a greater percentage of women writers are correlated with more speaking roles for female characters. The impact of media on children’s development is indisputable due to the way technology has become ingrained in day-to-day life. The lack of representation of female characters reinforces the stereotypical portrayals that negatively affect the self-esteem of girls and train boys to expect an androcentric world. The skewed and stereotypical portrayal of female characters fails to accurately represent the diversity of other parts of the world. While many of these films are produced in the West, they are widely distributed and consumed all over the world.

Broadway Goes to War

The American theater was not ignorant of the developments brought on by World War II, and actively addressed and debated timely, controversial topics for the duration of the war, including neutrality and isolationism, racism and genocide, and heroism and battle fatigue. Productions such as Watch on the Rhine (1941), The Moon is Down (1942), Tomorrow the World (1943), and A Bell for Adano (1944) encouraged public discussion of the war's impact on daily life and raised critical questions about the conflict well before other forms of popular media. American drama of the 1940s is frequently overlooked, but the plays performed during this eventful decade provide a picture of the rich and complex experience of living in the United States during the war years. McLaughlin and Parry's work fills a significant gap in the history of theater and popular culture, showing that American society was more divided and less idealistic than the received histories of the WWII home front and the entertainment industry recognize.