Post 11 on Casting and Exhibit B

We'll start with a prompt question by Alexandra--

Question:
Do you think the coalitional casting process, as discussed in Herrera’s “But do we have the actors for that?”, should be adopted by more universities? Could you see LSU participating in this? Explain.

She copies the video Quinn posted for Wednesday where Miranda discusses casting In the Heights, a topic covered in Brian Herrera's article. About coalitional casting: I'll also post as an optional reading the article by Patricia Ybarra where she first proposes coalitional casting. That may help tie down what that concept means.

Brandon references an extra report article also by Herrera, "Miranda's Manifesto." The article is worth a look if you want to see how Miranda and the Hamilton team navigate casting for a show where not having white bodies playing the characters is central to the dramaturgy (that is, it is both a dramaturgical choice and a production choice). As Brandon's summary says, Miranda faced some pushback about this choice, particularly as he began advertising auditions for the show. Herrera tells especially how at one point Backstage (an online hub for posting auditions) required anyone posting auditions to check an ethnicity box for each role. Yet there was not an "any nonwhite" box. There was "all" or "none of the above." So what Miranda did at that point was simply check all the boxes except "white," "all," and "none." Here's Herrera:

Compare the breakdown for Angelica Schuyler, the role originated by Renée Elise Goldsberry. In the broadly circulated nonwhite version it reads: “angelica schuyler: Non-white, 20s – 30s, Mezzo — Soprano, must be able to sing and rap well. Fierce, dazzling, brilliant, can read a room and everyone in it instantly. Deeply in love with Hamilton, who is married to her beloved sister Eliza. Nicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt.” In the Backstage version, the same notice reads “angelica schuyler: female, 20 – 39, African American, Hispanic, Asian, South Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian / Pacific Islander, Ethnically Ambiguous / Mixed Race, African Descent, fierce, dazzling, brilliant, can read a room and everyone in it instantly,” and so on, while still concluding: “Nicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt.” (Brian Eugenio Herrera, "Miranda's Manifesto," Theatre, vol. 47, no. 2, 2017, p. 30.)

I note that the Backstage version for the 2016 Chicago call reads differently, with "Ethnicity: all" but also with "nonwhite" at the start of the description.

As Herrera points out, all isn't what Miranda is going for. Viewed in isolation, the act of excluding an ethnicity from consideration seems unfair ("any but white"). But we have to zoom out, taking into account the history and context surrounding casting in the US. Too often--even, alas, here at LSU--saying "any ethnicity" for a role in practice results in "white." A quirk of whiteness in culture is that it can often masquerade as "unmarked," as a neutral or "normal" non-ethnicity ("Do you want this character to be a person of color or just normal?"). Thus, without anyone consciously being bigoted, the structure of casting in US theatre and film can be seen as baking a silent preference for whiteness into its cake. Remember: neutrality tends to benefit the group that's already most privileged. To resist that silent, structural privilege as Miranda does takes extra work. 

Brandon asks:

In my mind, I have an idea of who was offended/upset with the original casting call. Why was this such an issue for some people? Would there be the same backlash if a casting call was posted asking for only white actors? Would it have been as big of an issue if the casting call was more specific, asking only for black actors or Asian actor? Could the subject matter of the show have caused the issue? Could the fact that Miranda was "altering history" been the cause of the outrage?

Juicy as the question of casting is, I'd hate for us to go without spending time talking about Megan Lewis's riveting article on Exhibit B. Y'all, I can't overstate how big a splash this installation made. I've heard loads of conference presentations and read lots of articles, blog posts, and twitter rants about it. Part of what Lewis does that's so good (from a scholarly point of view) is refuse to make this a simple, either-or, villains-and-heroes controversy. It's deeply complicated and messy. Is it just a racist replication of racist images? No. Does it (can it) avoid replicating the racism it portrays/critiques entirely? Also no? Should it be done at all? Should it be done by a white South African director?

The show/piece raises a lot of questions, among them Can theatre represent the ugliest, most awful parts of human history without participating in that evil? Can you show how evil bigotry, rape, torture, slavery, abuse, and exploitation are without replicating those evils on some level? Staging an extremely graphic scene of torture, for instance, risks becoming--at least for some audience members--something like entertainment (see movies like Hostel). Yet abstraction can sometimes leave people thinking that the evils in the past weren't that big of a deal.

Feminism has a long history of engaging this question. The feminist performance scholar Peggy Phelan (in her amazing work Unmarked: The Politics of Performance) warns that representation is tricky. It always falls short of meaning everything you might hope it does, and it always means more than (or other than) only what you might intend. My ironic criticism of X might be taken un-ironically as endorsement of X.

Add to these evergreen questions the history and context that specifically haunts South African performance and you have a very, very complicated bit of performance to unlock. Take a look.

See you all tomorrow,

JF

PS: it's been a while since I've posted some music, so here: Superorganism. They work remotely from each other, exchanging sound files and ideas until they have a song developed. Despite this, they've worked out a realization of their music live that is so fun to watch. The sound sound effects make me want to see them in person:

Post 11 on Performances of Race

We'll start with Thomas's great prompt:

Juicy Question:
Greyeyes's piece stood out to me as a reflection on how even in the empathetic and progressive sector of theatre, it is still white-washed in what is considered "canon" (i.e. Shakespeare and ballet.)  They also spoke on diversity and representation in a university setting, and how there is still plenty of areas of growth.
How is race discussed in different contexts of academia? For example, how is the conversation of race through the lens of sociology versus how we are approaching it from a theatrical standpoint? How does the conversation change if the professor is white versus a person of color?
\Artifact:
https://www.lsu.edu/diversity/use2019campusclimatesurvey.pdf
I'm posting LSU's Campus Climate Survey from last year. It's pretty interesting to see how different groups of people view how helpful different campus departments are, how people are affected by their faculty vs. student interactions, and the overall takeaways of the survey. 

I confess I'd not seen the Campus Climate Survey. Take a skim through it. Fascinating stuff.

From Monday's forum posts, I'd like to signal boost a couple of ideas about colorblind casting. This is one of those things that, when you first hear about it, you think, Oh, that sounds fair and cool! If you have a problem with the representation of people of color on stage, just start casting them in the shows you're already doing! Take racial considerations off the table completely; just cast on talent! Isn't the point of fighting racism to get to a place where we don't take race into account at all?

As Harvey Young points out, though, humans in 2020 USA can't turn off the social programming that makes us see race (and sex, gender, sexuality, class, disability, etc.). Or, as Lou Bellamy (founder of the Penumbra Theatre) once said, "The thing about color-blind casting is, we're not." We aren't color-blind. Nor should we be. Human difference and cultural specificity are things to celebrate, not eradicate. As Audrey Lourde said (as Kendall quotes from this famous essay), "Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic." 

Neither is history or social context color-blind. As we have seen, history, context, and even spaces (as Alexandra's extra report notes) are marked not just by seeing race but by racism: systemically valuing one race above others. Be very careful of ideas or arguments that seem great but rely on everyone involved blocking out a whole lot of history and context. You often hear arguments against affirmative action for race (and sex) making an appeal to equality. Isn't the most racist thing to take race into account when making decisions about hiring, awards, opportunities, etc.? Again, that appeal sounds logical, right? Sometimes anti-racist messages we get in school can seem to boil down to "Try not to notice race at all."

But when racism has been and continues to be part of the structure of society, it's irresponsible not to take that into account. President Lyndon B. Johnson (who was not exactly the most progressive president ever), put it well in his 1965 Commencement Address to Howard University, where he was explaining the rationale for measures that became affirmative action:

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

 Well-intentioned as it may be, colorblind casting often ends up leaving unjust aspects of the present system unchanged. It can also prevent us from asking deeper questions: not just what race are the actors on stage but whose stories get to be told, and by which artists, and for what audiences? As we will see in Friday's readings, sometimes a color-conscious casting or "coalitional casting" is the better response.

A quick "for instance." Some of you may be familiar with the musical Miss Saigon. It was the big follow-up musical in the 80s from the guys who got famous for writing Les Misérables. The show started in London on the West End and then transferred to Broadway. When it came time to cast one of the big parts, a half-Vietnamese villain called The Engineer, the producers went with Jonathan Pryce, a well-known Welsh actor who originated the role in the UK. The producers' defense: he was the best actor. We tried to find an equally good actor of Asian descent but failed. Asian American actors collectively went WTF?! Given how hard it was for Asian-American actors to find work at all in the US, the casting was a slap in the face.

To add insult to injury, the production used yellowface. (Think blackface, but applied to caricature people of Asian descent.) That is, Pryce wore bronze makeup and prosthetic eyes to make him seem more Vietnamese. Here is Pryce in the late 80s describing his makeup:

 Yellowface has a long and awful history in US theatre and beyond. Yet, whereas theatre artists usually (thankfully) recognize and revile blackface as racist, yellowface continues to be practiced on US stages and screens (see here and here for examples). To be clear, yellowface (like blackface, brownface, and redface) is not color-blind casting. No attempt was made in the original Miss Saigon production to suggest that Pryce's character was actually white. Rather, Pryce was pretending to be Asian, which could not help but be a kind of screw you from the producers to Asian performers.

It should be mentioned, also, that Miss Saigon, based loosely on Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, isn't exactly a wonderful, realistic portrayal of Vietnamese personhood. (For a great takedown of the white-Western savior complex that Madama Butterfly and Miss Saigon both play into, see David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Hwang also wrote a superb comedy about colorblind casting, Yellowface. For a better representation of Vietnamese culture--well, there's lots, but see Vietgone by Qui Nguyen. Ask Dr. Fletcher for the scripts for either of these shows.)

The Miss Saigon story has a bit of a happier coda. In the recent revival, The Engineer was played by Filipino actor Jon Jon Briones, who was in the ensemble for the Pryce production. He reflects on his casting and on the controversy here:

Here's Briones and Pryce sharing the stage (and somewhat poking fun at the controversy) in the 25th anniversary gala for the show:

As pleasant as it is to see these two actors getting along so well on stage, questions about who gets to represent whose story remain with us. This in fact is the heart of Herrera's article that you're reading for Friday, so I'll hold off on that for now.

For Wednesday, you're reading two things: a performance piece by Michael Greyeyes and a description of a performance by Catherine Ming T'ien Duffly, Hands Up: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments. Here's a YouTube of a reading of the piece she focuses on (I've cued it up), "How I Feel," by La'Tevin Alexander:

Watch it. It's, like, 10 minutes. If you feel like it (no one will know #pandemicprivacy), do as Alexander asks and keep your hands up through his monologue. See if you can identify with what Duffly discusses.

We'll talk on Wednesday!

JF

Post 10 on Race and Theatre

Greetings, all--

It's our last week of readings (and therefore of postings).

So here's the thing: I could have chosen a final week of "fun" readings--articles and videos about lighthearted topics or just fluff pieces. But instead I'm throwing some race at ya, even though we already have several classes in the curriculum that take longer, deeper looks at this topic that I'm giving but three days to. Why?

Well, in part it's because race, in the USA at least, is one of the primary lenses through which we view the world. It's like gender. We can't not see it. We can't not have it be part of how we interpret our immediate social contexts.

And, in this country and beyond, race isn't merely about an individual's appearance. It's "haunted" by elements bigger than any one individual: histories, contexts, larger realities and institutions.

When we represent worlds on stage, then, race is inevitably, undeniably part of what we're staging and presenting. It's inevitably, undeniably part of what our audiences see and hear. You cannot "approach the stage" to watch or produce without having some notion of racial representation in your mind.

Another reason I'm including race has to do with the consistent feedback I get from graduating seniors in 4010 (the capstone/touchstone class for people about to graduate) about this department. So many people (of all backgrounds) note that the representation of people of color on our stages and in our classrooms is lacking. (We're not just talking about Black people. When's the last time you saw a play with a Native American character fairly represented? When's the last time you read a play of, by, or about Native American people?)

Baton Rouge and LSU are especially haunted by the legacies of race and racism in the US. It's not an accident that the city is over 50% African American, but the 100+-year-old state school at the heart of Baton Rouge is only 13% African American. Baton Rouge's (and Louisiana's, and the USA's) racial history is built into the landscape. Such history is in no one individual's power to change with a snap of their fingers; neither is it credible to dismiss that history as irrelevant or "just in the past."

This history and its present effects are especially relevant now. As experts note, COVID-19 is hitting African Americans especially hard. This NPR story tracks the likely reasons why. Being African American correlates with poverty and higher stress, factors which correlate in turn to obesity and diabetes, which in yet another turn correlate to higher risk of complications from COVD-19. And, since poor people have a much rougher time finding quality medical care, you can see how this pandemic can create a vicious circle for African Americans and other people of color.

Now, no single play or season is going to undue centuries of racism and settler colonialism. But I do believe that part of being a well-rounded theatre artist involves an awareness of how performance and race interact.


SO: some challenging material for Monday. For the Harvey Young selection, pay particular attention to the three elements Young suggests combine to make for a performed embodiment of race (they're on pages 10-17 especially). For the Bethany Hughes reading, pull out what it is that makes the Native American's performance of Plimoth's history more responsible (can you think of similar such performances of history here in Louisiana about race and/or Native American culture)? For the W. Kamau Bell piece--what does he learn from his thinking about what happened at the restaurant?

Quinn starts us off with this prompt:
Do you think colorblind casting is more important than being historically accurate (in regards to race) with theater/ film shows that are based on history?

When reading Harvey Young’s selections from Race and Theater, the thing that stuck out to me the most was Harvey’s description of the production of The Voysey Inheritance. While the play is a work of fiction and not a historical retelling of an event, David Mamet’s adaption of the play that Harvey witnessed stays as historically accurate to 1905, when the play was originally published, as possible. Harvey even describes it as “what a person might have seen if he or she had peered though the window and into the home of a Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, or Carnegie at a certain moment in history.” So, Harvey was caught off guard when the African American actor that he had mistaken as the maid turned out to be the daughter of Mr. Voysey. This led Harvey to ask himself many questions wondering why the daughter was black in this play that was creating a historically accurate 1905. This immediately made me think of Hamilton. In the show, Hamilton, all of the characters that were historically white were instead played by people of color. However, despite this historical inaccuracy, in regards to the race of the characters, the show was a major success and very popular, even winning many awards. I guess what I’m trying to ask is this. How important is race in casting for a historical theater or film piece?

For my artifact, I have a video of Lin-Manuel Miranda talking about race and its role in theater. This video was made before Miranda had finished making Hamilton and focuses more his show In the Heights but I think the points he makes in the video are relevant to this question. 

In addition to some great sparks (which you should definitely read on Moodle), Azha poses the following question and artifact:

Question: What are the benefits and disadvantages of colorblind/color conscious casting? Does the good outway the bad? How is this an issue for audiences versus producers?

Artifact -- Article
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-authenticity-in-casting-20170713-htmlstory.html
This is an article written for LA Times by Jessical Gelt. In the article Gelt responds to the controversy of Edward Albee’s estate denying permission for a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? because the director had cast a black actor to play a character Albee had specified as white.

We'll have two examples of performance pieces by people of color on Wednesday and then some great pieces about casting and appropriation on Friday. We'll Zoom, as usual, on Wednesday and Friday.

Until then, have some fun with this trailer from A Strange Loop, recently at Playwright's Horizons. Look up the soundtrack on YouTube or the music-providing app of your choice:

Dr. Fletcher loves ya--

JF

Forum Post 8--Taylor Mac and Ridiculous Theatre

Dear ones--

Erin has provided us with the trailer to Taylor Mac's show:

She also poses this prompt:

A 24-Decade History a Popular Music is a show written created by Taylor Mac. It shines a light on historical music from 1776 to the present day. In this show, Taylor Mac address is a lot of issues such as politics, racial discrimination, in the queer community. In this show, he sings over 200 songs in a 24-hour period. He also engages with audience participation such as throwing ping pong balls and in having them sit down during the second to act as they were on a boat. From my expected, I think learning about this was a great experience. I think that this type of art is not what we're used to, and it could have impacted so many lives. Also, as an ally of the LGBTQ community, I think this helped better educate myself on the social issues that some of my peers have gone through. This is the type of art that I love to support, and I feel as though we can all learn from this in some type of way. So, this leads me to a few questions that I have.

 Question: What aspect of Taylor Mac’s show stood out to you the most? Do you think he message would’ve been equally effective if the show was cut short?

Great question. Of course, as you know from the article, Mac spent years developing and trying out the show decade-by-decade (hour by hour), stringing them together into six-hour/six-decade stretches, and then finally performing the whole thing. It's like training for a marathon, Mac says. Would you want to see the whole thing or just a bit of it?

Here's Théo's prompt:

Can we find truth in the absurd and ridiculous? How does the heightened sensory experience of Taylor Mac's performance change the way these songs and poems are understood by the audience?

This performance falls squarely into the "Theatre of the Ridiculous". The length of the show reflects this. What sort of person wants to be on stage for 24 straight hours? What sort of person would want to watch that? It's an absurd idea, right? It's an impossibly long time, and demands a much larger commitment than most people are used to giving to media. Our shows, movies, podcasts, concerts typically last one to four hours. What Mac asks of the audience is not simply to experience the songs and poems of America's past, to passively enjoy them, but to live with them. A 24-Decade History of Popular Music brings the audience into the world of the show through audience interaction, but also simply by requesting a day of their life. It's the weirdest kind of meditation.

As I mentioned in Wednesday's zoom, Mac is often aligned with a tradition known as the Theater of the Ridiculous, a form that emerged in the US in the 1960s characterized by gay themes, camp, and a trash-fabulous aesthetic. Erin and Théo both share this article about Ridiculous Theatre.

Some of the best-known work to come out of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company are campy farces like Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep. Two actors play seven+ roles in a very silly supernatural melodrama with vampires, mummies, and even a werewolf transformation on stage:

Ludlam's style influenced playwright Charles Busch, especially his Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Here's Busch (who went on to become a Broadway playwright) describing his little show, which started as a last-minute lark and went on to be a cult classic of the stage:

Here's a clip from a production:

As you can see, it's high camp, tongue-in-cheek (but, as Busch notes in his interview, hard to play well).  Camp and parody were also important to lesbian theatre (as in, theatre of/by/for lesbians) in the 80s. See, for example Holly Hughes's Dress Suits to Hire or Split Britches/Bloolips's Belle Reprieve. 

Split Britches - Belle Reprieve from Hemispheric Institute on Vimeo.

Some of you may also remember The Secretaries by the Five Lesbian Brothers, a troupe that also traffics in camp and parody:

 The impressive thing about Five Lesbian Brothers and Taylor Mac is that, within the parody and tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top spectacle, they communicate a clear perspective. For Mac, that perspective involves re-telling American history from the perspective of the marginalized.

How does Mac's Ridiculous-influenced style--a cabaret show lasting 24 hours, with elaborate costumes built from discarded materials, with extensive audience involvement--affect the tenor and appeal of the message he's delivering?

Looking forward to hearing what you all think,

JF

Forum Post 7--lots of videos!

Greetings, all--

We're talking about time this week. To get us started, I'll post this brief little bit of humor many of you have likely seen already:

Fun times (SWIDT)?

For Wednesday, you have a chapter about watching performances of the group Forced Entertainment. It's from a book by scholar Jonathan Kalb about the experience of watching various kinds of long (loooooong) theatre. You also have the YouTube about the slowest music humans can hear and still recognize as music.

Quinn gets us started with this prompt:

When examining the material for today, one main question came to mind.


Is there a limit to considering something as art? Is it possible to push a piece of art so far past its boundaries that it is no longer considered the same form of art that it once was?

This question came to me after reading about Quizoola/Speak Bitterness and hearing about John Cages’ As Slow As Possible piece. All three works of art push the boundaries of their respected forms of art. With Quizoola, two performers sit in a chair next to one another taking turns asking each other questions.  This theater performance consisted of two people wearing clown makeup asking each other questions for hours on end. Speak Bitterness has a similar approach. It starts with six performers instead of the two that Quizoola uses. However, instead of asking questions, the performers take turns telling everyone in the room confessions. Both pieces are very different from traditional theater. There is plot or story arc in the performance. With Quizoola, it goes on for far longer than a traditional theater show. These two shows push the boundaries of what is considered theater. As slow As Possible does the same with music. The piece of music is one that is taking over 600 years to play, with a new note played each year. This piece, however, exist outside of the perceptual present, meaning that the listener will not be able to hear any connected notes or rhythms.  This piece pushes the boundaries of music by trying to take as long as possible to complete. Both of the theater works and this piece of music push their art forms to their absolute limit. Have they pushed so far that they can no longer be called theater or music? In the video about John Cage’s piece, the man says that Cage’s composition could be consider more as a performance piece than music. For my artifact, I have given a link to a clip of each of the three performances to reference when reading my question.

He includes three videos (which you should watch) of the Forced Entertainment pieces referenced as well as the John Cage multi-year piece.

A word about Forced Entertainment. I'll admit that the first time I heard about them was in an academic paper presentation at a conference. The presenter described one of their shows, shared their name, and I though, Holy crap, what a pretentious bit of torment that sounds like! I hated the whole idea. And then I kept hearing and reading about them. And I watched some of their videos. And I read Kalb's chapter. And now they're one of the companies that I reference most often.

The work they do--and they've been doing it for over 20 years--is often categorized as a kind of postdramatic theatre. Like "Absurdism," postdramatic theatre is one of those scholarly terms offered by a critic (in this case Hans-Theis Lehmann) to describe a the work of a cluster of performers and groups all doing . . . something . . . that our normal categories of theatre/performance don't have words for. Lehmann's book Postdramatic Theatre lays out a dizzying array of qualities that this kind of performance may exhibit. Among these are the idea that the written script isn't the primary (first or most important) element of the production.

Many postdramatic theatre pieces originate not as a fixed script but rather as the result of a set of clearly defined rules. In Quizoola, the rules are: one person asks questions and the other person answers them. Occasionally the question-asker asks if they'd like to switch, and if the answer is yes, they do. This goes on for some set amount of time. For Speak Bitterness, the rules are that performers each take a turn reading a confession from an impossibly long list of confessions.

Here's a longer taste of Quizoola (try skipping around and seeing how different performers handle the challenge):

Forced Entertainment does a multitude of other kinds of shows. See if you can catch the "rules" for their And on the Thousanth Night . . .

Or 12 AM: Awake and Looking Down

 


Or Complete Works: Tabletop Shakespeare

 (another clip)

Sometimes the rules (and the appeal) are obvious. Other times, if you're like me, a Forced Entertainment show is something you need someone else to explain to you. Consider Real Magic (here's Tim Etchells, a FE member, explaining it with some clips):

I wasn't sold on this show until I read this account of the performance, which makes it sound funny, haunting, and glorious. I actually love hearing these kind of secondhand descriptions of shows, the kind of "wait, I know this sounds silly/boring/pretentious at first, but hang on: here's what it was like." A lot of really good theatre, I think, is like that. After you experience it, you have to share that experience with someone else.

Have you experienced a show like this? Not for everyone, a hard sell, but you loved it so much you had to share it?

I encourage you look at the work of other postdramatic theatre artists and groups, like Elevator Repair Service

or the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.

Cool stuff.

See y'all tomorrow.

JF

 

Post 6: Short plays and microdramas

Hey, dear ones--

We're turning away from epidemics and communicable diseases to deal with some more traditionally theatre theory sort of topics. This week? Time.

I don't see any posting prompts from discussion leaders up yet on the discussion board, but I have faith they'll be there soon. Rain, meanwhile, sent a good extra report about the other articles for tomorrow about The Fifteenth Line, the Twitter play that John Muse writes about in his article. Her question that she ends with is cool:

Question: Given the pandemic, theatres across the country are shut down and shows are on hold until further notice. Do you think there’s a creative place for theatre in your Twitter feed today? Would it be so realistic, like The 15th Line, that the characters are aware of the state of the world and that users like us may not even be aware they are participating in theatre? Or perhaps would it be an obvious performance, like Next To Normal did: perhaps a play that normally would have taken place but was shut down due to the pandemic enlists its actors to play their characters over a Twitter thread? Do you think this sort of play is practical in a non-pandemic setting when the need for theatre of social media is lower? 

On that note, it's interesting how different theatres are responding to the pandemic shutdown. Some, like the National Theatre in the UK, are posting YouTube vids of their latest productions. Here, for instance, is a new production of Jane Eyre:

Here's the Public's Much Ado about Nothing: https://www.thirteen.org/programs/great-performances/much-ado-about-nothing-rahlxp/

Dr. Sikes has been watching streams from the Metropolitan Opera just about every night.

I'm sure you can find more. Most of these handle the challenges of space pretty well. But all of them keep the challenge of time. To watch any of these is an investment of 2, 3, or 4 hours. I don't know about you all, but part of what this locked-down state has meant for me is that my mental staying power is much drained. I can barely last a movie, let alone a filmed 3-hour production. 

In a way, then, micro-dramas like John Muse talks about seem like just the thing: bite-sized little plays to enjoy on Twitter. Of course, that's just one kind of Twitter play. The Fifteenth Line, as Rain points out, requires some commitment to follow as it unfolds, bit by bit, day by day. 

When I think of other modes of micro-drama (at least on screen), I think of past forms like 5 Second Films, or the late, lamented Vine.

(Of course I've seen all these, re-cut and re-re-cut and re-re-re-cut into hundreds of compilations. Of course I watched these all again as I posted this.)

Tik-tok has its moments, I guess. Still miss Vine, but that's The Old for ya.

Seriously, though, between the "I just happened to catch this funny moment" vines, there are some with some amazing dramaturgy and timing. Take this one:

Or this one:

Or this one: 

Doubtless many of you have your own suggestions.

What makes for a good, ultra-brief drama? Do microdramas only work in cinematic media, where you can quick-edit different shots? Can you imagine live theatrical microdramas? More interesting: can you imagine microdramas that are both effective and dramatic rather than comic?

Looking forward to reading your comments and zooming this week Wednesday (and maybe Friday?).

'Til then, here's some music for the day:

Nick Harper's "Shadowlands":

Dr. Fletcher loves ya!

JF

Post 5: later AIDS plays

Hey, all--

Such great responses to the last few posts!

Here's prompts from people for tomorrow's readings, Lonely Planet and The Baltimore Waltz

From Grant:
These plays are done closer to the closing of the aids issue. The people in these plays experience the sorrow first had the deaths of people all around them and a death of a close one. Time passes the more advanced we become the world is nothing like it use to be we can do extraordinary things in the new world we live in. The truth is though that we lie on the technology that has advanced our lives to the better and the worst. The times of the aides crisis this was not available but to what it seems the people hire up did not want it to be available for the gay community. The dent it left was staggering and horrifying because it was not a priority it was thrown out and put on the back burner and this is why these to plays east. The lack of advancement and help for the aids crisis. My question is are we going to create plays like this art like this about our loved ones or, Will the world let it disappear because most people are not being drilled by it just seeing it online? My artifact is a painting from ww2 after the war and how it destroyed there homes and left them with nothing this is to show how much damage the virus is doing but not everyone gets to see first hand families being destroyed by this cover 19 pandemic. This damage is equivalent to the physical damage that destroyed all the towns and places in Europe leaving destruction in everyone's wake. That is my curiosity: will this ceased to be remembered and shown through physical art and representation or will it be just a digital blip?

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From Jackson:

Both plays for today focus on what life was like for those who lived through the AIDS epidemic, rather than those who were killed by it. Dr. Fletcher has advised more than once that we keep a journal throughout this period of our lives, because it will be quite historic to review once we're past it.

In Lonely Planet, Jody's map store can be taken as a metaphor for his mind. There are several mentions of it being "cluttered", and Carl prods him for never leaving the map store, never getting out of his head. The chairs themselves serve as artifacts that permanently occupy space in Jody's mind, and the more the chairs pile up, the less space is left for Jody to conduct normal operations, like serving customers (metaphorically dealing with daily demands).

How much will our headspace be permanently altered by this period of our lives? Do you feel qualified to write such a play about these current events, or do you feel too removed from the real disaster zones to do so?

My artifact is this article which describes an exhibit of the US Holocaust Museum of family artifacts, similar to the chairs from Lonely Planet. What do you think the artifacts from the covid-19 period will look like? Tweets? Tik-toks?
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From Noah:


"Maybe its comforting to us because we too have our blind spots. We too have things on the periphery of our lives that we distort - in order to best focus on the things in front of us. In order to best navigate through our days." - Jody from Lonely Planet
This line gave me the words I needed to recognize my own distorted mind. There are days when I feel I am on autopilot, trapped in a room of my own fear like Jody; finding comfort in my blind spots, that I don't have to face my reality.

Both plays are connected in that aspect. They both present a character that takes refuge in a distorted reality in order to not face whats in front of them. For Anna, in The Baltimore Waltz, she fantasizes about a trip across Europe with her brother where she was the one with the illness instead of him. For Jody, in Lonely Planet, he isolates himself within his map store in order to hide from the rising death tolls in his community.

The thing about fantasies is that they are fantasies. They are lies. They are not real. At the end of the rainbow there isn't more rainbow, there is just cold, hard reality. Greenland isn't that big on the map, its smaller. The world is terrifying and lonely and stressful. However, both of these plays don't end like that. They refuse too. Instead, they show that we can face our scary realities hand in hand. Its our relationships that make us brave enough to step outside.

To quote Steven Dietz, the playwright of Lonely Planet, "I believe...our legacy is our friends. We write our history onto them, and they walk with us through our days like time capsules, filled with our mutual past, the fragments of our hearts and minds."

Do you agree with Dietz? What other things might be our legacy? Have you ever felt like you were distorting your reality? How can we break through our distortions to see the truth?

Artifact: Here is a link to Ian Mckellen and Patrick Stewarts' version of Waiting for Godot. I noticed it had many similarities to Lonely Planet; for instance, the two characters are two halves of a whole, the dialogue is absurd and at sometimes trivial, there is a sense of isolation and waiting and sometimes moments where nothing happens. From this scene, can you recognize any other similarities? Do you think this could have been an inspiration for Dietz?

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From Ashley--

Vogel of the Baltimore Waltz suffered the sorrow of losing her brother to AIDS in 1988. The play was written the following year and contains memories of Carl in pain of loss. In the play, we find traces of her emotions dealing with the loss of a loved one.  She’s not just expressing the illness and death tragically, but she’s also showing wit in her own unique way. In a way, she is dramatically reenacting her past experience using her readers as an audience. Maybe she’s showing how to heal her pain through the creation of the play.
The play demonstrates criticism of homophobia in mainstream society through conflicting factors such as death and desire, disease, and fantasy. Her unique technique brings the audience to face the issues of the times.
Through children participating sports part, Vogel makes the play a place where people can feel the existence of the community is marginalized. In addition to this part,  where else is Vogel’s therapeutic gesture we can find at the play? Also, how can we dramatize the importance of the community experience that she stressed into the present society as a therapeutic function of theatre through disease plays and dramas?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/paula-vogels-aids-era-baltimore-waltz-sings-a-slightly-different-tune/2019/01/23/b552d190-1ea0-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html

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For your musical zen for the day, here's NOLA's own Tank and the Bangas. I find them best served lived, as in their three-set performance at NPR's "Tiny Desk" performance (where artists perform in NPR's tiny office. Tank and the Banga's won the 2017 Tiny Desk contest for top group.)

As an extra, here's Tarriona "Tank" Ball with a pandemic coffee desk mini-concert

Love!
JF

Post 4 for April 8

Greetings, all--

I'm looking forward to seeing all of you tomorrow in our zoom meeting.

It's heavy stuff we're dealing with Wednesday and Friday. Well, it's heavy for me, at least. Imagine twenty or thirty years from now, and you're facing a group of 20-somethings who have absolutely no reference for what it was like to live through the COVID-19 pandemic. It's fictional for them. They get that it was a big deal, but they probably don't know it in the same way that you all know it.

That's something like what AIDS is. When I was your age, AIDS was The Scary Thing, a plague that was as far as we knew 100% deadly. You got it, and it was a death sentence. And, somewhat similarly to the coronavirus, you could have it for a while and not have any symptoms, spreading it unknowingly to others. If you were sexually active, an intravenous drug user, or--early on--someone who received blood transfusions, every cough, sneeze, blemish, fever, or illness made you wonder, is this it? Unlike, COVID-19, AIDS also had an aura of shame around it. If you had it, many people in the 80s and 90s thought, you kinda deserved it. (One of the first times I heard about AIDS on the news in the 80s was as "Gay Cancer" or GRID--Gay-Related Immunodeficiency.)

Watching the documentary (Théo is doing the extra report on it) How to Survive a Plague was difficult for me, though I highly recommend the movie ($4 rental on Amazon Prime). The shame and fear and anger and hope and pride and desperation of the people featured brings back lots of memories, and I say this as someone who came in late to AIDS awareness. (Also--I was shocked to see a young Dr. Anthony Fauci as such a prominent figure in the story. I had forgotten that. He's been around for a long time.)

AIDS is still with us. Baton Rouge remains at or near the top of the nation in terms of new HIV infections. Access to the lifesaving drugs that make AIDS manageable is starkly limited by income here and abroad.

For Wednesday, though, we're diving into the initial, intensely scary phase of AIDS in the US. We weren't sure what this disease was, how it was spread, whether a treatment/vaccine was possible. There was a ton of silence and shame about having it or being at risk for it. And, unlike coronavirus, no one in power seemed to give a damn.

From a theatrical point of view, consider how the two plays we're reading, As Is and The Normal Heart, each take a different stylistic approach to this crisis. As Is uses a bit of distancing/theatricalization. Normal Heart opts for realism/naturalism. Consider what each stylistic choice enables the play to do.

For another taste of this period in the AIDS crisis, see this poem, "How to Watch Your Brother Die."

For more on the state of AIDS treatment, prevention, and research today, see this video:

For another dramatic portrayal of the early AIDS crisis, see the 1993 movie And the Band Played On, based on a memoir by Randy Schilts. It's available free on YouTube:

Here's Kendall's prompt for post 4:
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After reading The Normal Heart and As Is it is clear that they are very similar in many ways. They both show the realities of the AIDS crisis for the gay men at risk, they showcase a couple where one man has AIDS, they even both show a brother that is unable to properly be there for his gay brother in the crisis. The main difference that I found between the two plays was the level of abstraction. The Normal Heart is painfully realistic showing just how many people these men knew that were dying and how scary it was that no one would listen to them. The dialogue is realistic and all of the characters are played by one person. On the other hand, As Is is much more abstract with a chorus-like group of 6 people playing many parts, multiple scenes happening at once, and, what I thought was the most compelling choice, the "cliffhanger" ending by not letting the audience know if Rich did in fact die. Why do you think each playwright chose to write his play as he did? What is the purpose for the abstraction or the realism? What effect does As Is have that The Normal Heart doesn't have an vice versa?

Artifact: 

So here's a fun lil video of a Butoh performance in Japan. Butoh, which means "dance of darkness", is a form of abstract dance that came about in Japan after World War 2 as a means of coming to terms with the atrocities their country had experienced. We have talked a little bit about how abstraction can help us deal with emotional things sometimes better than realism can, which explains why so much abstract art came about after each of the World Wars as well as other traumatic events in history. 

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Here's Rain's prompt/artifact:

In both plays, the phrase “you’re being a hypochondriac” is said to a character that is having anxiety about getting sick, downplaying the pandemic for not being as serious as it is. At the same time, there are characters, like all the friends and family of Rich in As Is, who scream “don’t touch me” as soon as he gets near them and refuse to even be in the same room as him. We see this today in the pandemic we are living through: there are people refusing to quarantine saying they don’t care about contracting (or spreading) the virus and others who are buying up every store’s supplies of toilet paper as if the apocalypse were truly beginning. Why do you think there are always two polarizing extremes when it comes to caring about a pandemic? Where else can we see this sort of thing? Is fear the only factor and if so, why do some seem to not have any? 

Artifact: 

https://time.com/5803273/hoarding-toilet-paper/

This is an article from Time that delves into why people have been hoarding toilet paper, of all things, during a world pandemic. It goes into the comfort of always having it around and even the primal instincts humans have adapted since they were babies. This may provide more insight on the question I asked and help relate the play to today’s events. 
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From Hannah:

These AIDS plays brought me back to a good old Script Analysis favorite of mine, Marburg. In that play, a 17 year old boy seeks sex with a HIV positive man. Buck hopes to be infected on the premise that infection is inevitable, so he may as well have unprotected, or, what he considers to be "real" sex without fear and uncertainty. 

Marburg takes place in a later time than Normal Heart. Much more is understood about AIDS and HIV in Marburg, but to even consider this option of wanting HIV is difficult to digest after reading the devastating and largely autobiographical Normal Heart. 

I read As Is after Normal Heart. In As Is, Rich has a fit of frustration with everyone’s fear of being near him/his condition and (sarcastically-but maybe not) yells about wanting to infect the whole city. This is followed by scenes in a bar, where a version of him fantasizes about having risky sexy with "clones". This scene is jarring after reading about Larry Kramer’s efforts during the epidemic. This scene abstractly addresses the idea of loss that the gay community felt not only literally, but in their sense of community. Even the scene in Marburg where the boy says that he “wants to feel human again,” touches on this in a different way than Normal Heart was able to through its autobiographical realism.

Can we compare those who took no preventative measures against AIDS to those who are not taking preventative measures against COVID-19? Many say that it was a right for those with AIDS to have consensual sex with negative partners. Transitively, could one argue that a group of friends hanging out together exclusively during COVID is their right? Consider the likeness of the viruses-contagious, life threatening, and the differences in national response-complete dismissal vs. quarantine.

 Artifact: a dream that my friend had LAST NIGHT. 

"I was a nurse who purposely sought out coronavirus so that I could catch it and become immune. I wanted to be able help more people and take the weight off my fellow staff members. I don't even know if that's how this virus works. I'll look it up.

..... hm. You can build immunity, at least for a short amount of time. Wow, I was doing the lord's work. It could have mutated and I would have been responsible for ending the human race, but what good intentions!" 

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Finally, here's your relaxing musical moment of beauty, from the incomparable Brandi Carlile:

Dr. Fletcher loves ya.