Theatre History Focus Group Sessions, 2008, Denver

Shaping Dialogues Among Theatre and Non-theatre Disciplines

Session Coordinator:
Cindy Brizzell-Bates, Siena College/UAlbany
"Incorporating Theater into 1st Year Humanities Courses'

Susan Kattwinkel, College of Charleston
"Theater's Inherent Disciplinarity"

Susan Russell, Gettysburg College
"Using Theatre to Discuss Presence and Absence in "Understanding the Holocaust through Literature and Film""

Leah Garland, SUNY Geneseo
"Theatre and Soceity: A Study of Trance and Character."

C. David Frankel, University of South Florida
"Theatre and Science: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Doing."

Marilyn A. Hetzel, Metropolitan State College of Denver
"Theatre as Equipment of Living."

Lee Devin, Swarthmore College
"Dialogues Between Theatre and Computer Science."

Robert Lapides, Manhattan Community College, CUNY
"Stand-Up Pedagogy:  Overcoming Shame in a Writing Course."

Susan Mendelsohn, Southern Connecticut State University
"Dialogues Between Theater and Religion."

This session responds to the 2008 conference focus on “difficult dialogues” by asking how and where theater engages in dialogues with other disciplines.  Many colleges have instituted 1st year student programs where students are taught basic critical thinking and writing skills for not only a successful college career but also for “learning for a lifetime.” Where does theater fit into such programs? Alternatively, what does theater offer to general education courses? How can theater enter into a dialogue with other disciplines and what are the possible results of such conversations?
 

Pornography? Why Not? A Staged Reading of the Erotic, Award-winning play Richmond Jim
Sponsored by Theatre History, American Theatre and Drama Society, and LGBT Focus Groups

Chair:
Robert Schanke, Professor Emeritus, Central College
"The Lost Legacy of Pornographer Cal Yeomans"

Cast:
Lionel Walsh, University of Windsor
Biddy

Alan Sikes, Hunter College
Richmond Jim

Bud Coleman, University of Colorado
Mike

Theatre History Debut Panel

Three new scholars in theatre history present papers adjudicated by a committee of three scholars chosen by the Theatre History Focus Group: Natalya Baldyga, Tracy C. Davis, Suk-Young Kim.
 

The Ultimate "Difficult Dialogue:" Theatre Riots

Chair:
Kevin Browne, University of Central Arkansas

Session Coordinator:
Rick Jones, Stephen F. Austin State University, "Of Pre-Meditation and Precedent: Thoughts on the 'Bottle Riot' of 1822"
This event, triggered simply by the presence in the audience of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, ultimately led to court rulings regarding the theatre as a site for social protest, providing such outbursts are "noisy but not riotous," and that they be spontaneous rather than pre-meditated.

Research:  Improvisation--Historiography in the Moment
Multi-Disciplinary

Chair:
Terry Brino-Dean
Seton Hill University

Eileen Curley, Marist College: "'An Archival Travelogue through Amateur Theatre"

Jane Baldwin, The Boston Conservatory: "On the Trail of Jean Gascon's Life and Career"

Nicholas Zaunbrecher, Southern Illinois University--Carbondale: ""Leave No Trace":  Seeking the Historical Narratives of Ephemeral Performance"

In the spirit of the Links topic, this multidisciplinary panel examines the notion of “Improvisation” and its sometimes troublesome relationship with historiographical research.  This becomes a “difficult dialogue” on many levels, particularly since the end result or goal of most research, publication, seems so contrary to the open nature of improvisation.  These three papers examine the ways in which historiographical and theoretical research either revel in or are limited by improvisational moments, techniques, or methodologies.
   
The papers should spark a broader discussion to address a number of questions related to historiography and research:  How do research and writing become improvisational; how is the process of writing history or theory improvisational?  How might the typical “rules” of theatrical improvisation (such as “yes, and…”) apply to the research process?  How must a researcher be open to where the research leads?  What evidentiary discoveries in pursuit of a research question require a change in the direction of that research and/or the writing that might result?  How might world events shape or change the research focus?  What are the dangers of a lack of improvisational openness in research methodology?  What are the dangers of too much improvisation?
 

Theatre v Law:  Theatre's Engagement with Legal Histories

Chair:
Joel Bassin, Hunter College, CUNY

In THEATERS OF INTENTION (2000), Luke Wilson demonstrates how the theatre can absorb, transform, and itself be transformed by legal language and legal conceptualizations of human action (166). Indeed, as theatrical and legal discourses engage one another, the difficult dialogue that ensues allows for a dynamic historiographic process, in which the legal record--a powerful and authoritative discourse in the telling of history--might be challenged and altered. Our three-paper panel, "Law v. Theatre: Theatre's Engagements with Legal Histories" thus examines some of the constant and mutual rupturing that manifests itself between a legal and a cultural field in their intersecting engagement to record history. Gad Guterman considers the Oscar Wilde trials and various representations of these (like Maurice Rostand's LE PROCES D'OSCAR WILDE and Moises Kaufman's GROSS INDECENCY), focusing on how the stage and the courtroom, sharing several generic conventions, feed each other's imaginaries and thus shape each other's histories. Paul Thelen looks at the legal documentary work of Richard Norton-Taylor, analyzing his methodology and inquiring into theatre's ability to manipulate and transcend law's archives. Finally, Marla Carlson investigates current history and theatrical attempts to contest the state's power over the individual, such as GUANTANAMO and THE PILLOWMAN, against the Bush's administration's exceptionalist position with regard to torture and international law. Together, we hope the essays will illustrate some of the recent work being undertaken that complicates and problematizes the often simplified relationship between theatre and law.

Dialogical Difficulties: Performance and the Audience in U.S. History

Chair:
Terry Brino-Dean, Seton Hill University

The audience always has a role to play in most any performance, but what happens when the nature of a particular audience (its historical moment, size, demographics, diversity or lack thereof, etc.) causes that audience to create an especially difficult dialogue with the performers, within the audience, with people outside the theatre, and/or all of the above?  This session features three papers that highlight three different events in U.S. history in which the audience, through radical inclusion or exclusion, created difficult dialogues that had long-lasting impact.  

Participation:
Rachel Tracie, Azusa Pacific University
Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Miami University
James M. Brandon, Hillsdale College
Marla Carlson, Rutgers Newark
Rick Jones, Stephen F. Austin State University
Marijean Levering, Utica College
Karin Maresh, Washington & Jefferson College

"Unfinished Business":  The Legacy of the Scholarship of Bruce Kirle

Theatre History Membership Meeting

All welcome!

Please join us for our yearly meeting in which we elect officers and discuss future and current projects.

9:45-11:15am

Speaking to the Power through Imporvisational Performance

Chair:
Kaarin Johnston, College of Saint Benedict

Session Coordinator,
Paulette Marty, Appalachian State University: "George Gascoigne's Improvisational Feats for the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester"

Claudia Wilsch Case, Lehman College/CUNY: "Nurturing Internal Critique: The Theatre Guild and the Garrick Gaieties"

Khai Thu Nguyen, University of California, Berkley: "'Journey to Identity' in Ho Chi Minh City."

Providence vs. Progress:  The Difficult Dialogues of Religion and Science

Session Coordinator:
Kate McConnell, Colgate University: "The Modern Morality Play: Biological Figuration and Viewing the Invisible"

Michael Winetsky, CUNY: ”A Playwright of Pragmatism: The Unity of Science and Religion in Susan Glaspell's Plays”

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, University of Washington, Bothell: ”Regenerating Body Maps: Crossing Lines between Religion and Science”

Kelly Rafferty, University of California, Berkeley: ”Critical Art Ensemble's 'Cult of the New Eve': Biblical Metaphor and the Public Understanding of Science”

Religion and science often seem to be at odds in the cultural discourse, and yet the narrative of contemporary science is fundamentally shaped by the stories, symbols, and ideas of religion, Christianity in particular.  This panel seeks to explore how the narratives of science and religion come into dialogue with each other through the mediums of performance.  The papers investigate disparate topics across the range of twentieth century science and performance, from the plays of Susan Glaspell and modernist, industrial rewritings of the Garden of Eden to contemporary performance art dealing with the dependence of biotechnological rhetoric on Christianity’s utopian narratives.  The panel aims to explore how theater and performance examine and challenge the religious narratives of the sciences, particularly the biological sciences, and to raise questions of performance’s role in engaging with the dialogues between religion and science, particularly as they enter the political discourse.
 

Expressing the Depression:  The Theatre of the Thirties

Session Coordinator:
Meredith Malburne, Universty of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: "Replication, Revision, and Reconsideration:  Reading Lorraine Hansberry’s "A Raisin in the Sun" through Clifford Odets’ "Awake and Sing!""

Kelly Carolyn Gordon, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, ""Charity Begins at Home:"  How Stage Actresses Sought to Rescue Theatre Workers in New York During the 1930s."

Anne Fletcher, Southern Illinois University--Carbondale, "Giving it Away and Letting Go:  Joe and the Arab in "The Time of Your Life.""

Roxanne Schwab, Saint Louis University, "Expression of the Depression: Arthur Arent's “One Third of a Nation” as Theatrical Expressionism"

As early as 1959, Harold Clurman declared “There is a tendency nowadays to downgrade the thirties.”  Indeed, the literature of the 1930s has been continually categorized as predictably reactive and negatively dated by its concern with the Great Depression.  Yet this decade opened myriad “difficult dialogues” in the American theatre that dealt not only with economic concerns, but also with societal ills, the importance of art, and the “problems” of race and gender.  This panel seeks to examine the impact of the theatre of the thirties—in terms of its art, its message, and its means—by addressing the following questions:  How did the theatre of the 1930s reinvent itself to remain artistically and economically viable?  How did the theatre respond to, challenge, and, at times, exacerbate existing views on the female and minority “other”?  How did the theatre use Expressionism, radicalism, and the developing American “history” to shape its movements and its momentum?  And finally, how did the theatre of the thirties set the precedent for decades to come?
We scrutinize these questions by closely examining the role of Expressionism in Arthur Arent’s "One Third of a Nation," the categorization of the Arab and the need for redemption in William Saroyan’s "The Time of Your Life," the impact actresses had on actor-driven charities and the “True Woman” ideal, and the connections between the economic and social conditions of Clifford Odets’ "Awake and Sing" and Lorraine Hansberry’s "A Raisin in the Sun."