Northeastern University

Addressing the Tragic Flaw: Dramaturgy and the American Citizen

An Honors Thesis Submitted to Dr. Nancy Kindelan

By Heidi R. Nelson

April 2006

Northeastern University

Addressing the Tragic Flaw: Dramaturgy and the American Citizen

An Honors Thesis Submitted to Dr. Nancy Kindelan

By Heidi R. Nelson

April 2006

Contents

Preface 4

Chapter One: Introduction 5

Chapter Two: Theatre Studies and American Citizenship 9

Chapter Three: Dramaturgy and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge 32

Chapter Four: Conclusion 55

Appendices

Appendix A: Sample of Abbreviated Actor Casebook: Marco 62

Appendix B: From Eddie’s Casebook: Excerpt from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman 93

Appendix C: Cast Handout: “Sicilian Peasant Culture” 95

Appendix D: Photograph: “Light and Shadow Down Under the Manhattan Bridge” 98

Appendix E: Photograph: Set Model by Justin Townsend 100

Selected Bibliography 102

Preface

Both serving as student dramaturg for the Northeastern University Theatre Department’s

production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (October 12-15 and 19-22, 2005) and completing this honors thesis have been life-changing experiences for me. Working on the play fed my passion to pursue production dramaturgy as a profession, while working on this thesis gave birth to questions and ideas that I will surely continue to explore throughout my life. Because this project has meant so much to me on a personal level, those who have offered me their guidance and support deserve my deepest gratitude.

I owe many thanks to the faculty, staff, and students of the Northeastern

University Theatre Department, as well as to Faith Crisley and the staff of the Honors

Program, for their practical and moral support. I also wish to thank Scott Edmiston, Ryan

McKittrick, and Craig Watson, whom I interviewed as part of my research. The cast, designers, and crew of A View from the Bridge merit my thanks for their enthusiastic work and their encouragement. I owe immeasurable gratitude to Dr. Nancy Kindelan, my mentor, for her profound guidance. Lastly, I extend my deepest thanks to my parents,

Dian Nelson and Daniel Nelson, my brother, Hans Nelson, and members of my extended family for their endless love and support.

4

Chapter One

Introduction

In his autobiography Timebends: A Life (1987), Arthur Miller (1915-2005) wonders “how

many times a country [can] be disowned by a vital and intelligent sector of its youth

before something [breaks], something deep inside its structure that [can] never be

repaired again…how many times before memory catches up with the latest swelling of

the ideal and squashes it with cynicism before it can mature?”1 My eyes widened as I

read these words. I reread the paragraph, my mouth falling open, as Miller’s musings

reverberated in my mind. I paused, staring at the page, recognizing with surprise and

some sadness that Miller had somehow foreseen the tragedy of my own generation’s

apathy.

Various studies on voter participation and civic engagement show an increasing

political indifference among generations X and Y (defined in Chapter Two: Theatre

Studies and American Citizenship). In Making Good Citizens (2001), William Damon discusses how “the civil disaffection felt by many of our young resembles their moral confusion in many ways: it has led to a similar sense of indirection—indeed, paralysis—

1 Arthur Miller, Timebends: a Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 102. and it feeds on the same general sense of skepticism and uncertainty.”2 Educators, political scholars, and even everyday citizens have been moved to research this apparent

“civil disaffection” and to address the “urgent problem of fostering civil identity among young people growing up in a time of skepticism about public life and public service.”3

The purpose of this research paper is to investigate how theatre practitioners can help address this problem as well. Theatre has a rich history of functioning as a social agent, from ancient Greek festivals attended by the entire polis, to modern tragedies, composed by Arthur Miller—one of America’s greatest writers. Unfortunately, as more and more Americans are inclined to pay better attention to their televisions than to events at the local playhouse, today’s theatre practitioners are faced with two major challenges: the first being how to draw audiences to the theatre in the first place; the second being how to provide those audiences with theatre experiences that will meet their needs as human beings and as members of a common society.

In American theatre these challenges are increasingly being addressed through a process called dramaturgy. Dramaturgs are hired by theatre companies to help decide which plays are appropriate for their communities, to assist their directors, designers, and actors in keeping productions true to the playwrights’ ideas, and to research the backgrounds of the plays and provide audiences with whatever information will best help them understand and connect to the plays on psychological, historical, and sociological levels. Theatrical scholar and critic, Martin Esslin (1918-2002) emphasized that “the dramaturg must be a highly knowledgeable individual, widely read and cultured, familiar with the demography, sociology, and psychology of his environment. But, above all, he

2 Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, eds., Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 133. 3 Ravitch and Viteritti, 133.

6 or she must be a person of authority, able to command the respect of writers and

directors.”4

My experience as dramaturg of the Northeastern University Theatre Department’s production of A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller not only helped me learn about

the practical tasks of production dramaturgy, but also showed me how dramaturgy

amplifies the impact a play can have on its audience members. The work I did on the

production impelled me to explore how dramaturgy can be used to create plays that will

encourage good citizenship in college-age Americans. After all, if one of the major

problems my generation faces is their own political indifference, why not use theatre, and

college theatre in particular, as an opportunity to instigate student thought and dialogue

about our predicament.

In examining ways in which dramaturgy can be used to create theatre that

encourages good citizenship, my research has dealt with: the meaning and nature of

American citizenship, the political indifference of the younger generations of Americans,

theories on civic education, theatre’s relationship to citizenship in history and in

contemporary society, and how theatre studies, especially dramaturgy, can promote good

citizenship. Investigating the role of dramaturgy in American theatre also led me to

question how dramaturgs gauge their level of success at communicating ideas to their

audiences; thus, I conducted interviews with three professional dramaturgs in the region

who provided me with profound insights on the role of dramaturgy and of theatre as a

whole in our society.

4 Susan Jones, ed, Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997), 30.

7 My research, combined with the incredible experience of dramaturging A View from the Bridge (Fall Semester 2005), has reinforced my beliefs that live theatre is a fantastic medium for addressing the social and political concerns of Americans. I am additionally determined that dramaturgical work provides the key to successfully generating civic reflection and discussion in audiences of Generation Y college students.

This thesis paper therefore details both my research on “Theatre Studies and American

Citizenship” and my personal experiences with “Dramaturgy and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge,” as well as some concluding thoughts on my future work in theatre.

8

Chapter Two

Theatre Studies and American Citizenship

During the rich history of theatre across the world, theatrical performances have often been used to instigate civic dialogue and to encourage social action. From Sophocles

(circa 497-406 BCE) in ancient Greece to Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) in war-torn

Germany to Arthur Miller in 1950s America, playwrights throughout time have written dramas that examine the causes of social ills and explore the possibilities for addressing them. Through public performances of their plays, such theatre practitioners also gave voice to individuals and groups within their communities that otherwise would not have been heard by the rest of society. This chapter discusses the democratic origins of theatre in ancient Greece, the differences between democratic citizenship in ancient Greece and in America, the way twentieth-century American theatre has dealt with (or ignored) social ideas, the efficacy of citizenship education in America, and how theatre studies can be an effective means to educate American youth about citizenship and democratic participation. Theatre’s Relationship to Citizenship

“Theater can function as a tool for social change. But its interaction with and effect on social change is, in the U.S. at least, rarely a conscious one. That’s part of the problem.” 1 —Doug Paterson

Ancient Greek Theatre: A Social Corrective

In its most ancient form, theatre was aimed at improving democracy. According

to Oscar G. Brockett’s History of the Theatre, the “connection between theatre and state

is usually said to have begun in 534 BCE, at which time Athens apparently instituted a

contest for the best tragedy presented at the City Dionysia, a major religious festival.”2

The occurrences of a tragic play are designed to arouse the audience’s pity for the tragic hero and fear of his tragic end, producing a purgation (catharsis) of these strong emotions, so that the members of the polis could experience the tragic consequences of human folly through live theatre, reflect rationally upon their own flaws and actions, and take care to avoid a tragic fate in their own lives and in the city-state as a whole.

Besides the members of the audience, the people performing the tragedies were ordinary Greek citizens as well, including “the choregoi (singular is choregos)…who performed this duty [helping organize and fund the plays] in rotation as a part of their civic and religious responsibilities.”3 The performance of tragedy was therefore intended

to secure the functionality of a healthy democracy by reminding its citizens of their duty

to govern their community with compassion, impartiality, and careful reasoning.

Furthermore, the main reason Greek theatre is still so widely studied and explored today

1 Kushner, Tony, et. al. “How Do You Make Social Change?” Theater 31, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 62-93. 2 Oscar G. Brockett, History of the Theatre: Ninth Edition (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), 13. 3 Brockett, 16.

10 is, according to literature professor and contemporary author Alan Ackerman, because the performance of “Attic tragedy is…to assert kinship with an ancient genre that explicitly provokes and explores questions about citizenship and the state in ways that are always contingent.”4 Theatrical investigation of these questions causes each citizen to reflect, critique, and take action to fix society’s tragic flaws. Noted international director

Peter Sellars enjoys Greek plays as well, for he is moved by their inherent “aspiration towards the care and maintenance of democracy.”5

Another way this attention to democracy was manifested in the Greeks’ theatrical activities was through the festival contests themselves. Brockett reports that “at some time prior to the festival, a list of potential judges…was drawn up….After witnessing the plays, each judge placed his vote in an urn, from which the archon drew five. On the basis of these five votes, the winner was declared.”6 The winner at each contest was therefore selected through the democratic process of voting. Beyond being merely a competition to discover the most entertaining plays, the performances could “give citizens both the information they need to vote in a way that has some depth of perception and at the same time [have] them hear voices they don’t normally hear.”7 The citizens of ancient Greece gathered for festivals to witness the tragedies so that they could be educated as well as entertained. Such was the goal of the civilization that built the first theatre in the shape of a “giant ear carved into the side of a mountain—a listening space” that had “a seat for every citizen.”8

4 Alan L. Ackerman “Liberalism, Democracy, and the Twentieth-Century American Theater” American Literary History 17, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 765-780. 5 Peter Sellars and Bonnie Marranca “Performance and Ethics: Questions for the 21st Century” A Journal of Performance and Art 27, no. 1 (January 2005): 36-54. 6 Brockett, 32. 7 Sellars and Marranca, 37. 8 Sellars and Marranca, 37.

11 Greek tragedies generally have a universal power and appeal because they portray

fundamental issues, situations, and emotions that are experienced by each human being

on a personal level. The plays written and performed by the Greeks are full of political

references, complicated social situations, and philosophical ideas. Brockett asserts that

“perhaps the most important aspect of Greek culture, unlike that of any people who

preceded them, was its concern with humanity. The Greeks systematically raised and

sought answers to almost all issues.”9 The system the Greeks used for composing the

tragedies that raised these issues is most completely documented by the famous

philosopher, scientist, and scholar Aristotle. According to Aristotle (384-322 BCE),

whose Poetics (circa 330 BCE) is revered as the seminal writing on both the proper form

of tragic plays and the art of theatre in general, a tragedy is composed of a protagonist

who has a tragic flaw (hamartia) that sets in motion a sequence of events that lead to a

reversal of his fortune (peripeteia) and consequent recognition (anagnorisis) of his tragic

flaw. As contemporary theatre author Dr. Nancy Kindelan notes in Shadows of Realism

(1996), however, the Greek word for the so-called tragic flaw, hamartia, has been “more recently interpreted” by translator Gerald F. Else “as an error in judgment.”10

Through the events of the play (plot) and the attitudes of its characters

(psychology), the tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles, for example, explores: letting personal bias interfere with political judgment, the social stigma of incest, and the consequences of one human being’s blindness to his own situation and actions. In

Oedipus, as well as his other works, Sophocles’ “personages are complex and

psychologically well motivated. The protagonists, noble, but not faultless, are usually

9 Brockett, 13. 10 Nancy Kindelan, Shadows of Realism: Dramaturgy and the Theories and Practices of Modernism (Westport: Praeger, 1996), 86.

12 subjected to a terrible crisis that leads to suffering and self-understanding, including the perception of a higher than human law behind events.”11 Oedipus Tyrannus deals with the ruler of Thebes who through the course of the play discovers that he has unknowingly killed his father (the previous king of Thebes, Laius) and married his mother (the queen,

Jocasta). Although the audience would have known the entire background of the story, none of the characters including Oedipus are aware that Oedipus is actually both the murderer of King Laius and Laius’ biological son.

Many years prior to the starting point of the play, events were set in motion that culminated in the tragic fate of Oedipus, as told by the play. Firstly, fearful of a prophesy that their son would murder his father and marry his mother, Laius and his wife Jocasta sent their infant son off with a shepherd to have him left in the wilderness to die. The shepherd, however, took pity upon the infant and gave him to the ruling family of Corinth to raise as their son. After growing up and learning of a prophesy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus left Corinth, unaware that the king and queen of that city were not his biological parents. On the road from Corinth, Oedipus crossed paths with Laius and killed him out of rage when Laius’ caravan would not let him pass first—the custom being that a traveler of less noble birth should allow the other to pass before him. When Oedipus reached Thebes, a sphinx was guarding the gates to the city, not allowing anyone to enter unless they could solve her riddle and devouring those who answered the riddle incorrectly. When Oedipus was able to solve the riddle and thereby defeat the sphinx, the people of Thebes were so grateful to him that they made him their king, and Oedipus took the widowed queen Jocasta as his wife.

11 Brockett, 16.

13 The incidents of the play begin with the people of Thebes begging Oedipus to

figure out how to lift a plague that has been afflicting them. Oedipus has sent his brother-

in-law Creon to the Delphic oracle to discover why his beloved city is suffering, and

Creon returns near the start of the play to report that the plague will not end until the man

who murdered Laius, the former Theban king, has been found and punished.

Unfortunately, as the play progresses, Oedipus discovers that the criminal he seeks is

himself—he is both Laius’ biological son and his murderer, which also makes him his

mother’s husband. By the conclusion of the play, Jocasta has killed herself, and Oedipus

has blinded himself in horror at his crimes. The dialogue of the play explores the causes

of Oedipus’ downfall, citing hubris (excessive pride) as Oedipus’ tragic flaw—the fault in his character that brings about his ruin. Oedipus’ “error in judgment” is that he haughtily assumes he is infallible, scorning and punishing those, such as the prophet

Teiresias and the queen’s brother Creon, who warn him that pursuing the Laius’ killer will only end in his own destruction.

The entire polis of a Greek city-state would have attended such a performance to listen, consider, and discuss the various issues presented within the play. As Brockett states, “fantasy or fiction (of which drama is one form) permits people to objectify their anxieties and fears, confront them, and fulfill their hopes….The theatre, then, is one tool whereby people define and understand their world.”12 Greek tragedies like Oedipus

presented circumstances and dialogue aimed at motivating audience members to take

action in their own lives and communities in order to avoid the tragic consequences

portrayed onstage. The plays that the Greeks valued so highly “paid little attention to the

physical and sociological aspects of characterization, concentrating instead on the

12 Brockett, 5.

14 psychological and ethical attributes of their personages.”13 The theatre was therefore originally a place in which a highly intelligent civilization gathered as a community to explore the facets of their existence as human beings and as citizens of a democratic society.

The Nature of American Citizenship

Although the civilization that gave birth to theatre had a truer democracy than our own in some ways, it also had a fairly narrow definition of citizenship by contemporary standards. Ancient Athens practiced the most perfect form of direct democracy, governing the polis through meetings of an assembly, which all citizens were permitted to attend, as opposed to the U.S. government, in which the citizens are represented by elected officials. At these meetings, the Greek citizens gathered to speak, debate, and decide issues concerning the city-state. Citizenship, however, was restricted to men only and also excluded illegitimate children, immigrants, and criminals. Brockett elaborates that the Greeks “did not hesitate to enslave others or severely restrict the role of women.”14 Whether or not ancient Greek societies were more or less egalitarian than our

own is thus dependent upon one’s definitions of democracy and citizenship.

In contrast to ancient Greece, The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution

legally defines the American citizenry as “all persons born or naturalized in the United

States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”15 U.S. law also confers basic human rights

and protections upon its citizens; yet, many feel that knowledge of only these basic facts

provides one with an insufficient comprehension of American citizenship. Analyzing the

13 Brockett, 15. 14 Brockett, 13. 15 U.S. Constitution, amend. 14, sec. 1.

15 legal aspects of citizenship can be useful and practical, but as education scholar Ryland

Crary (1913-2006) asserts, “citizenship is more than a formal, legal status. It is an understanding of the meaning of democracy. It is intelligent and effective partnership in the work of democracy.”16 Since the quality of a democracy is contingent upon the participation of its people, Americans are obliged to contribute to the wellbeing of the government, which can only achieve what it was created to do if U.S. citizens maintain an active role in American society. In their book The Good Citizen, David Batstone and

Eduardo Mendieta explain how “a strong democracy relies on its citizens to make significant decisions in court rooms, ballot booths, town hall meetings, army barracks, and newsrooms. But most important of all, the citizenry of a democracy must be sufficiently informed to keep all powers, be they commercial, legislative, or administrative, accountable to the public trust.”17

Aside from the basic function of supporting their democratic government, what does being a citizen, particularly an American citizen entail? Although participation in the U.S. political process through informed voting, pragmatic political criticism, and effective leadership (or the support of leadership) is of utmost importance to American democracy, political scholar J.M. Barbalet notes that “the non-political capacities of citizens which derive from the social resources they command and to which they have access” are of equal importance.18 To maintain a healthy society on a very basic level,

American citizens should at least respect their country and have compassion and consideration for their fellow citizens. In other words, “the ‘good’ citizen is…one who

16 Ryland Wesley Crary, ed., Education for Democratic Citizenship (Washington: National Council for the Social Studies, 1952), 94. 17 David Batstone and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., The Good Citizen (New York: Routledge, 1999), 40. 18 J.M. Barbalet, Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 1.

16 makes a life commitment to maintaining and sharing with other fellow citizens those

material conditions that enable political participation.”19 Citizens can realize this

commitment not only by staying aware and educated about American politics and

society, but also by reflecting upon and being responsible for actions or decisions that

will affect other citizens.

Unfortunately, many Americans have gotten into the habit of neglecting their

civic responsibilities. After studying early America’s system of government and way of

life, French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) concluded that “civic

participation…served as the young nation’s teacher and unifier….The citizens of early

America,” however, “might not recognize the complex system of representative

democracy that we have in place today. Our massive system of government has very

little in common with their own intimate, face-to-face form of civic involvement.”20 Not much of today’s political activity occurs person-to-person. Rather, most citizens get their political information from the newspaper, television, or internet, rarely engaging in a direct discussion with other citizens about their participation in the U.S. political system.

Tocqueville had the incredible foresight to predict this sense of isolation by hypothesizing “that there were at least two great dangers threatening…American democratic civil society, namely, schism and indifference. Schism pits us against one another in suspicion and enmity. Indifference invites us not to care about one another at all.”21

The less face-to-face American civic life becomes, the more citizens run the risk

of slipping into such indifference. In her book Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines

19 Batstone and Mendieta, 2. 20 Batstone and Mendieta, 48-49. 21 Ravitch and Viteritti, 268.

17 (2000), contemporary playwright, writer, and actress Anna Deveare Smith wonders

“what has happened that keeps us from talking to one another, even as we have so much equipment, so much technology to help us do that?”22 American citizens are ironically feeling more and more separated from community and civic life because of the very channels meant to connect them, namely, the various forms of mass media. After all, how can citizens be expected to care about issues that they only hear about through computers or televisions, instead of through their fellow community members? This lack of firsthand interaction with other citizens is the reason that the United States “is a nation with possibly the most sophisticated system of information ever in the history of the world, yet whose citizens feel disconnected from each other.”23 If we wish to continue enjoying the freedoms and privileges the United States has to offer, we Americans must make a concerted effort to maintain and improve the welfare of our society. American citizens need to be reminded that we are collectively responsible for participating in our governing bodies, addressing social concerns, and holding our leaders accountable to the

American people.

Twentieth-Century American Theatre

American theatre throughout the twentieth century has virtually ignored the democratic capacities of the theatrical medium. During the 1950s, theatre critic and director Harold Clurman (1901-1980) remarked “when a play is praised, it is usually spoken of as a delight, a hit, a thrill—terms that might just as appropriately be applied to

22 Anna Deveare Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines (New York: Random House, 2000), 28. 23 Batstone and Mendieta, 53-54.

18 a fashion show, a ball game.”24 Early twentieth century Vaudeville sought only to

entertain, while the films and musicals of the Depression provided much-needed

escapism to the vast population of Americans suffering from poverty. In his book

Theatre U.S.A.: 1665 to 1957, Barnard Hewitt describes how “under the double pressure

of the Depression and competition from the moving pictures…the number of stage

productions shrank from 190 in 1930-1931 to 80 in 1939-1940.”25

In an attempt to remedy this situation and to provide work for the nation’s

struggling theatre artists, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was created as a part of

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA); however, “the Project

was not intended to raise the level of theatre art but to raise the level of employment.”26

In other words, having working actors, directors, designers, and playwrights was of great importance to the WPA, while the kinds of plays that were produced and the quality of the artists’ work was of little concern. One of the FTP’s most successful projects was known as the Living Newspaper and involved productions that dramatized current events, such as One-Third of a Nation, in which the protagonist travels through time to investigate the root of America’s housing problems, as much of the nation during the

1930s had nowhere to live except in filthy, cramped, or dilapidated housing. By the end of the play, the protagonist has concluded that the only way to solve the problem was for the government to allot more money for housing; thus, the play was not only a depiction of the troubles facing American citizens, but also a commentary on how the government was handling (or failing to handle) the nation’s housing predicament.

24 Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A.: 1665-1957 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959), 442. 25 Hewitt, 423. 26 Hewitt, 400-401.

19 Giving theatre practitioners more opportunities to employ their skills was

essentially all the WPA had intended the Federal Theatre Project to accomplish; however,

the Living Newspaper approached another challenge facing American theatre—that of

recognizing and attempting to meet the needs of American theatre audiences. Hewitt concurs that “in its somewhat less than four years of existence, the Federal Theatre

Project made remarkable achievements, the most significant of which was perhaps demonstration of the fact that a large audience for live theatre existed all over the country, which the unsubsidized professional theatre was failing to tap.”27 Unfortunately,

these gains were not enough to ensure continued government support for the FTP because

such politically charged plays as One-Third of a Nation were “suspected of being a

political instrument, if not of communists, at least of Democrats.”28 Other politicians

failed to see the need of financially supporting the arts once the Great Depression began

to come to an end. Hewitt ironically notes that “the Depression was responsible for the

first important subsidized theatre, but the Federal Theatre Project, after showing that a

large untapped audience for theatre still existed, was killed by politics.”29

Next, America experienced a post-World War II economic boom, leading to

widespread consumerism—a consumerism that spread to the arts, degrading theatre to the

level of mere spectacle. Theatre became “part of the set of individual, optional activities

operating in spare time and by means of the entertainment and arts industries.”30 When

Arthur Miller became a playwright during the 1940s, he perceived that American

audiences needed to experience theatre that addressed deeper issues than the feel-good

27 Hewitt, 402. 28 Hewitt, 406. 29 Hewitt, 424. 30 Guglielmo Schininà “Here We Are: Social Theatre and Some Open Questions about Its Developments.” The Drama Review 48, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 17-31.

20 comedies and musicals of the 1930s. Arthur Miller strove to compose modern tragedies

in the Greek tradition, yet found that “for one reason or another, we [Americans] are

often held to be below tragedy—or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of

course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the

kingly”; hence, even theatre practitioners who wished to produce theatre for a purpose

higher than entertainment and spectacle had difficulty attracting audiences.31 When such brilliant American playwrights as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene

O’Neill came into their own, however, their plays proved both entertaining and thought- provoking, attracting large audiences despite (or perhaps because of) the profound content of their dramas. Miller had some theories as to why modern American audiences were attracted to these plays, and he published many essays and articles on the subject.

In the essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Miller expressed why he felt “that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy…as kings were” and why he attempted to compose modern tragic plays.32 Firstly, in regards to the celebrated plays of ancient

Greece, Miller concluded that “if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of

the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish

tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it,”33 and added that

“insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is

really but a clinging to the outward forms of tragedy.”34 Miller therefore believed that

the appeal of tragic plays is much more fundamental to human experience than the

average American acknowledges. Rather than deriving from some complex

31 Robert A. Martin, ed. And intro, The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller (New York: Viking, 1978), 3. 32 Martin, 3. 33 Martin, 3-4. 34 Martin, 5.

21 philosophical idea, “the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a

character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of

personal dignity…the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his

‘rightful’ position in his society.”35 In other words, a person is afforded the status of a

tragic hero through striving for what he or she believes is right, in spite of the majority

opinion within his or her society.

Miller offered a very simple definition of tragedy, one that could very easily be

applied to the plays of Sophocles, as well as those of Shakespeare. Miller believed that

“tragedy…is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.”36

Using this definition, one can easily understand why so many people are drawn to tragic plays—as human beings living in civilizations that are not always organized equitably or ruled impartially, we can identify with the impulse to act out against those institutions or individuals that constrict our lives. The form of tragedy is thus relevant to contemporary society because “there are among us today… those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them,” and as a result of “this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us…comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy.”37

After highlighting the relevance of tragic plays to the lives of modern Americans,

Miller explained why writing tragedies is imperative. From the ideas within tragedies,

“from this total questioning of what has previously been unquestioned, we learn. And

such a process is not beyond the common man. In revolutions around the world…he has

35 Martin, 4. 36 Martin, 4. 37 Martin, 4.

22 demonstrated again and again this inner dynamic of all tragedy.”38 Theatre can be used

to educate, especially in the sense that “tragedy enlightens and…points the heroic finger

at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which

exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. In no

way is the common man debarred from such thoughts or such actions.”39 In fact, this

kind of exaltation is what “common” American citizens are most in need of today. The

younger generations of citizens must learn to question their environment, to struggle

against that which curtails freedom, and to strive towards improving American

democracy, just as the heroes and heroines in tragedies strive to correct the flaws in their

societies.

In describing one of Miller’s most famous plays, one American critic declared

that “Death of a Salesman succeeds…as a character drama and an exceptionally good example of so-called ‘middle-class tragedy.’ It follows the fate and final reckoning of a commonplace man in a commonplace environment.”40 Miller experienced great success

with his modern tragedies, verifying his notion that America is in need of the kind of

theatre that the Greeks esteemed. Similar to the intended results of Greek tragedies, one

critic remarked that “Death of a Salesman…moves its audience tremendously, it comes

close to their experience or observation, it awakens their consciousness, and it may even

rouse them to self-criticism.”41

Although the content of both Greek tragedies and Miller’s modern tragedies may

seem far removed from the tastes of the contemporary American citizen living in the age

38 Martin, 4-5. 39 Martin, 5. 40 Hewitt, 444. 41 Hewitt, 447.

23 of the digital revolution, the richness and depth of these works merit a second

examination of both the plays and theatre in general. If part of the trouble with American

society is that its citizens are too isolated from one another to notice or care about

concerns that they share, a medium through which citizens are brought together and their

common issues are presented onstage actually seems an ideal way to connect them.

Through theatre one can create “the potential of a democratic public space.”42 Beyond that, theatre can also instigate civic discussion and action by providing information, exploring possibilities, and developing ideas onstage. After all, as contemporary playwright Tony Kushner says, “art is not merely contemplation, it is also action.”43

Attempting to Solve the Citizenship Crisis in America

“What we too often lack is civic competence….This then is not mere lack of knowing in the abstract sense, but of knowing what to do, or how to act.” 44 —Ryland Crary

Civic Education in Public Schools

For the most part, the latest generations of American citizens think of theatre

either as boring and old-fashioned or as elitist and overpriced. Educators throughout the

decades of America’s history have been concerned with how best to educate American

children about their duties as citizens. Post World War II education scholar Ryland Crary

believed “that education for democratic citizenship…should encompass the entire school

42 Sellars and Marranca, 37. 43 “How Do You Make Social Change,” 62. 44 Crary, vii.

24 program and permeate all aspects of school life.”45 Because determining which subjects should be taught in public schools and which matters should be taught at the discretion of parents became a point of fierce contention in subsequent years, civic and moral values have been addressed less and less frequently within the context of public school curricula, as well as within the context of theatre studies.

A few programs, however, have been more recently introduced in public schools that address citizenship as a fundamental component of “good character.” Many schools across the nation have adopted the principles of the “Character Counts! Coalition” in an effort to confer a greater importance on moral values in their curricula and school climates. In its “six pillars of character,” the Character Counts! Coalition names citizenship as its sixth; the first five pillars being trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, and caring.46 To uphold the pillar of citizenship, a student should strive to “do

[his or her] share to make [his or her] school and community better, cooperate, get involved in community affairs, stay informed, vote, be a good neighbor, obey laws and rules, respect authority,” and “protect the environment.”47 This comprehensive description of the duties of citizenship generally matches the descriptions of many scholars for the ideal involvement of American citizens in their democratic society. Time will tell if “Character Counts!” is successful in reviving a civic conscience in our young.

On a more curriculum-specific level, author William Damon from Making Good

Citizens: Education and Civil Society (2001) offers some astute advice, specifically in regards to civic education through the humanities. He conveys the concern that today’s

45 Crary, v. 46 Character Counts! Coalition, “The Six Pillars of Character,” Josephson Institute, http://www.charactercounts.org/defsix.htm. 47 Character Counts! Coalition.

25 “students need a positive exposure to the history, cultural heritage, core values, and

operating principles of their society if they are to become motivated to participate as

citizens in that society.”48 Damon additionally declares that “the capacity for constructive criticism is an essential requirement for civic engagement in a democratic society, but…this capacity must build upon a prior sympathetic understanding of that which is being criticized.”49 This requirement poses a serious challenge because “at this

moment of cultural decay, it is difficult to find places where those ties of sympathy may

be nurtured.”50 Lastly, if “dialogue is the lifeblood of democracy,” as was true in the

democratically-oriented ancient Greek theatre, the dilemma contemporary educators face

is how to recreate a relaxed forum for such dialogue and thereby foster students’ trust of

and respect for one another, so that at a young age Americans can become comfortable

with democratic discussion and action as part of their culture as citizens.

Teaching American Citizenship in Higher Education

Although many are inclined to dismiss political indifference as typical of college-

age youth, several studies on the civic participation of Americans in past generations

versus today’s youth have concluded that the lack of involvement of America’s youngest

citizens is unique to generations X and Y (Generation X is usually defined as individuals

born between the 1960s and early 1980s, while the birth years of Generation Y range

from the 1980s through the year 2000). Damon remarks that “young people’s current

lack of dedication to broader civil purposes is unusual by any historical standards that we

48 Ravitch and Viteritti, 136-137. 49 Ravitch and Viteritti, 135. 50 Batstone and Mendieta, 10.

26 have.”51 In “a study of political apathy and avoidance of traditional political news among

young people in the United States of America,” contemporary professor of political

science Stephen Earl Bennett concurred, reporting that “today’s young Americans, aged

18 to 30, know less and care less about news and public affairs than any other generation

of Americans in the past 50 years.”52

As this study targets undergraduate-to graduate-aged Americans, college appears

to be another environment that holds the prospect of remedying the growing indifference

of American citizens. Many colleges, however, are in desperate need of revamping their

approach to civic education. While educators of the 1950s, such as those who

contributed to Education for Democratic Citizenship (1952), understood the importance

of helping college students “realize that the democratic way of life not only cherishes

freedom but entails obligation and even sacrifice for its preservation,”53 contemporary

professors have generally narrowed their focus to teaching only information that relates

directly to their field of study. The discipline of theatre studies was not immune to this

shift in focus, for at the conclusion of the Second World War, “the most important factor

in the professionalisation of theatre curriculum was the university’s responsibility…for

training the nation’s future artists.”54

In discussing how a college ought to go about educating its students on citizenship, noted mid-twentieth century professors of education William Van Til and

George W. Denemark stressed that “citizenship education is too important to be left to

51 Ravitch and Viteritti, 126. 52 Sheilah Mann and John J. Patrick, eds., Education for Civic Engagement in Democracy: Service Learning and Other Promising Practices (Bloomington: ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies/Social Science Education, 2000), 12. 53 Crary, 95. 54 Anne Berkeley, “Phronesis or Techne? Theatre Studies as Moral Agency” Research in Drama Education 10, no. 2 (June 2005): 213-227.

27 any one program or division of the university….Rather it should be a matter of major emphasis throughout the entire university.”55 The problem with prescribing that all the areas of a university teach about civic issues, however, is that creating and monitoring curricula that is consistent across vastly different disciplines is a difficult feat. On the other hand, giving civic education its own department and providing for “increased integration and cooperation between citizenship courses or programs and other college courses and departments” emphasizes the importance of both good citizenship and interdisciplinary respect and cooperation.56 The risk on this end of the spectrum is that divisions of the university that do not focus on civic education may neglect their part in teaching students how to connect their chosen fields with their identities as American citizens.

Theatre Studies: A Unique Option for Teaching Civic Awareness

Since the Greeks, only a select few theatre practitioners have sought to use theatre for its original civic purposes, most notably the German playwright and director Bertolt

Brecht. Theatre historian and critic J.L. Styan (1923-2002) chronicled how Brecht and his colleague Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) “formulated a plan for a drama which could be used for the public ‘discussion’ of political and social issues. They named their new dramatic form ‘episches Theater,’ ‘epic theatre.’”57 To create such theatre, Brecht rejected the conventions of realistic sets, costumes, and acting styles that had become the norm in popular theatre, opting instead to create non-illusory productions that

55 Crary, 95. 56 Crary, 100. 57 J.L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Volume 3: Expressionism and Epic Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 128.

28 acknowledged and embraced the relationship between audience and actor, as well as the

paradox between reality and storytelling. Styan remarked that “epic theatre…does not

disguise the fact that it is…a piece of theatre.”58

Brecht furthermore tried to make sure that every element of his plays, from the

music to the acting, would distance the audience from the emotional content of the play

“in order to arouse a thinking, enquiring response in the spectator.”59 This distancing

technique is known as “‘Verfremdungseffekt,’ the ‘alienation effect’ of epic theatre.”60

The alienation effect would be evident in each element of Brecht’s theatre, from the director’s arranging the “groupings of actors on the stage…to clarify the structure of human relationships in the play” to the lighting designer’s allowing the lighting instruments to “be perfectly visible, so that the spectator would be conscious he was in a theatre.”61 Using these production styles, “the epic play was to be a rational, rather than

an empathetic, report on some social or political theme, and free from realism, it would

open out its content for inspection.”62

Brecht did not want his audience to become so emotionally swept away by his

plays that they stopped thinking about the situations and ideas that he was trying to

present. The humor in Brecht’s plays is thus often unexpected, catching the audience off

guard when they are in the midst of viewing a play on a serious subject matter. For

example, in what he called his “‘Lehrstücke’ or ‘teaching plays,’” Brecht explored sober moral issues, yet saw “no reason why a concern for morality should not be thoroughly

58 Styan, 141. 59 Styan, 140. 60 Styan, 141. 61 Styan, 143. 62 Styan, 131.

29 enjoyable.”63 Brecht made sure that his productions were entertaining and interesting, as well as thought-provoking. In sum, Bertolt Brecht’s “theories of a logical theatre, and his pursuit of multifarious devices for distancing the stage and manipulating his audience, have moved modern drama towards a new kind of comedy, dry and intelligent, but not necessarily without compassion, and often powerful as theatre.”64

In contrast to the other suggestions for solving the citizenship crisis, using theatre to address civic issues offers a medium that is both entertaining and thought-provoking for young adults. The Greeks created a sacred space in which to gather and be entertained while at the same time considering the social matters depicted onstage; likewise the theatre spaces at American universities have the potential to bring together the diverse members of student bodies for such civically-oriented experiences. College theatres are an ideal place for students to gather and share an evening of civic discourse, enhanced by the enjoyment of artistic presentation. Theatrical productions marry the theoretical to the practical and the academic to the aesthetic. I can think of few other fields in which one can be active as both intellectual observer and participating audience member, simultaneously studying and being entertained by a production. If the entertaining nature of theatre can draw American citizens to play productions, why not utilize this noble art form for presenting plays that also explore civic issues? Anna

Deveare Smith believes that Americans need to “find other ways to talk to each other than through reasoned discussion. Maybe even…the arts, which house empathy…can be useful for us.”65 Theatre often engenders thought, discussion, and criticism about the

63 Styan, 141. 64 Styan, 163-164. 65 Smith, 207.

30 ideas presented onstage; therefore, theatre has great potential for inciting civic dialogue and action among audiences made up of young American citizens.

Conclusion

Theatre grew out of the democratic practices of ancient Greek citizens who gathered to collectively explore and solve social issues. Although American theatre has branched off from these origins, great playwrights like Arthur Miller recognized our society’s persistent need for social thought, discourse, and action and wrote plays in attempts to help generate such activities. In contemporary America, the ever-increasing need for effective civic education of young Americans presents an opportunity for theatre to once again be utilized for its most primary and noble purposes—promoting social awareness and generating civic dialogue. Within the laboratory of the classroom, emphasizing the study and practice of theatre as a democratic activity can transform the way students view both theatre and American citizenship, causing them to take a more active role in their own communities. Theatre is unique in its capacity to simultaneously teach, question, and explore ideas within a community of people and is therefore one of the best ways to help students realize their fundamental responsibilities as citizens of

American democracy.

31

Chapter Three

Dramaturgy and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge

One of the key components in teaching students about the civic aspects of theatre is the practice of dramaturgy. Because dramaturgical tasks encompass examining and questioning society, dramaturgy can help educational institutions increase civic awareness and action. Within the useful and dynamic context of theatre studies, dramaturgical projects furthermore provide college students with a unique way to approach and learn about their civic responsibilities, thereby helping these young generations of Americans comprehend the true importance of their roles as citizens. The following chapter depicts the various tasks involved in dramaturgy, explains how they promote good citizenship, and furthermore describes my experience as a student dramaturg for the Northeastern University Theatre Department’s production of Arthur

Miller’s A View from the Bridge in October 2005. Dramaturgy: A Key to Civic Dialogue

“A cultural language…becomes a tool when, for example, its implicit educational capacities are identified, foregrounded, and used intentionally to educate.” 1 —Doug Paterson

What is Dramaturgy?

Although the field of dramaturgy has a long and rich history in European countries, such as Germany, France, and Russia, the fledgling dramaturgical programs in the United States have only begun to receive their due recognition in recent decades, despite their emergence in regional theatres in the tumultuous 1960s. Dramaturgy encompasses a wide variety of tasks and studies, ranging from textual analysis and imagistic research to educational outreach; yet, all the tasks have a common goal—to generate plays and the production of playscripts that are meaningful and revelatory experiences for their audiences, as well as artistically sound representations of a playwright’s world.

Firstly, dramaturgy includes studying human society and history. Oscar G.

Brockett described the first main goal of dramaturgy as “to promote integration of the knowledge and perception learned from theater history, dramatic literature, and theory with the skills and expertise needed to realize the potential of a particular script in a particular production in a particular time and place for a particular audience.”2 While the

actors, director, and designers of a production do not have time to research the historical

climate of the play, the dramaturg can provide this background information to the artists

1 “How Do You Make Social Change,” 66. 2 Jones, 42.

33 to help them clarify their thoughts, while making sure that their ideas are in tune with the

audience’s understanding and aesthetics. The second duty of a dramaturg is thus to help

facilitate the production staff’s progress in realizing the main concepts and goals of the

play production. The dramaturg is the one who, during the rehearsal process, keeps track

of whether or not a production has strayed from the playwright’s intentions, employed

artistic devices likely to forge connections with audience members, and explored ideas

and images that can generate thought and discussion among the play’s viewers.

Beyond this everyday task of assisting the artists through research and dialogue,

author and translator Martin Esslin stressed that a dramaturg “must be the critical and

artistic conscience of his or her theatre.”3 He or she must know the tastes, needs, and

interests of the people that attend his or her theatre. In other words, the dramaturg

“must…be an expert on the problems, demography, prejudices and prides of the

community he serves, to have his or her finger on its pulse.”4 Toward this end, dramaturgs usually provide the audience with tools, such as helpful program notes and effective lobby displays, to help community members better relate to, understand, and analyze the circumstances in a play. These creations moreover give the audience a context in which to view the play, so that they can think more clearly about the ideas presented onstage.

Finally, dramaturgs are responsible for facilitating audience talkbacks or discussions and building educational outreach programs that extend beyond the scope of individual theatre productions. Robert Brustein, contemporary director, critic and founder of both the American Repertory and Yale Repertory Theatres, notes that some

3 Jones, 28. 4 Jones, 28.

34 dramaturgs give “lectures on the texts, [design] special series, and [lead]…seminars for the audiences.”5 Otherwise, dramaturgs contribute to outreach mainly through their writing. For instance, Brockett explains that “if the theater has an outreach program that takes productions to specialized audiences or brings audiences to the theater, the dramaturg may be responsible for creating materials used to prepare the audiences for these theatrical experiences.”6 Dramaturgy incontrovertibly encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, each of which is critical to the vitality of American theatre companies.

How Does Dramaturgy Encourage Civic Dialogue?

Because theatre can be educational, thought-provoking, and intellectually stimulating, as well as entertaining and enjoyable, it is an ideal vehicle for generating thought, dialogue and action among Generations X, Y, and subsequent generations.

Younger Americans need an instigator for civic involvement to combat apathy, indifference, and cynicism, and theatre could serve exceedingly well as that instigator.

These generations also need a forum in which they can discuss, enact, and publicize civic, political, and social ideas, and the theatre is a good place in which to develop ideas.

For instance, theatre is by nature a collaborative and public endeavor, which allows audiences to experience situations, consider ideas, and discuss solutions as a community.

Beyond that, the various aspects of dramaturgy are a crucial part of collegiate theatre studies because they build the bridge between theatre and society. This role of artistic ambassador develops important critical thinking skills in students that need to recognize the value of paying attention to the problems and concerns facing American society.

5 Jones, 35. 6 Jones, 46-47.

35 By addressing the needs of society through the facilitation of informed and

creative theatrical productions, dramaturgical projects can show students that one

person’s work can, in fact, make a difference in a community and in the world. I

furthermore believe that dramaturgy is the key to clarifying and strengthening the

movement for theatre in civic education. Dramaturgical tasks promote good citizenship

primarily because examining and questioning human society is the first step towards

taking action to improve one’s society. Next, positively interacting with other

community members in this exploration leads to understanding and cooperation between

citizens. Finally, by facilitating the informed discussion of ideas, one helps fellow

citizens listen to themselves and to each other, encouraging them to participate in solving

their society’s problems. Evidently, the tasks that a dramaturg carries out are also

activities that a good citizen performs.

Learning How to Be a Dramaturg

“A dramaturg: a person who mediates between the intellectual, literary, and aesthetic aspects of the theater, on the one hand, and its practice on the other; a person who sits…on the nonexistent stool between the professional and the professorial, attempting to speak the languages of thought and action simultaneously.” 7 —Jonathan Marks

Mining the Playscript

My very first task as the dramaturg of the Northeastern University Theatre

Department’s production of A View from the Bridge (1955) was, of course, to read the play. A View from the Bridge follows an Italian family, living in the Red Hook

7 Jones, 31

36 neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York during the 1950s. Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman, and his wife Beatrice provide for Beatrice’s orphaned niece, Catherine, who is 17 years old at the beginning of the play. When two of Beatrice’s cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, come into the country illegally from Sicily, the Carbone’s graciously take them into their home as well. When Catherine and the younger cousin Rodolpho fall in love and plan to get married, however, Eddie is incensed and accuses Rodolpho of trying to steal Catherine, claiming that Rodolpho only wants to marry her to secure his

American citizenship. The true explanation for Eddie’s reaction is that he harbors lustful emotions for Catherine that he cannot face. Eddie is a simple, uneducated working man who is unable to understand his own psychology and has no idea how to deal with his own anger, disappointment, love, or jealousy.

Since Eddie cannot acknowledge his feelings for Catherine, he takes his frustrations out on the other characters in the play. When Eddie returns home from work drunk to find Catherine and Rodolpho emerging from the bedroom, he forcibly kisses

Catherine and then does the same to Rodolpho. These gestures are both the result of

Eddie’s pent up feelings for Catherine and an insinuation of Rodolpho’s effeminate nature and questionable sexuality. After all, to masculine, instinctual Eddie, a man like

Rodolpho, who sings, cooks, dances, sews, and helps Beatrice around the house, is most likely gay despite his apparent physical interactions with Catherine. Towards the end of the play, in a final attempt to break the engagement between Rodolpho and Catherine,

Eddie betrays Marco and Rodolpho to the Immigration Bureau.

Marco suspects Eddie of informing on him and Rodolpho, so before the

Immigration Officers drag him off to jail, he spits in Eddie’s face and accuses him of the

37 betrayal. Eddie’s neighbors witness this exchange and watch as Eddie frantically tries to deny Marco’s accusation—a statement that will cause Eddie’s entire community to shun him. Beatrice, Catherine, and Rodolpho try to persuade Eddie to make up with Marco because they know that Marco is planning to kill Eddie, but Eddie refuses to admit his guilt, even when Rodolpho tries to apologetically kiss his hand. When Marco is let out of jail on bail, he returns to Eddie’s house to confront him about the betrayal. In front of a gathering crowd outside his home, Eddie continues to deny the fact that he informed on the cousins, accusing Marco of dishonoring his good name. Marco and Eddie begin fighting, and Eddie draws a knife, which Marco presses into Eddie’s body, killing him.

After determining some preliminary research topics and beginning work on my honors proposal, I began rereading articles from Dramaturgy in American Theater: A

Source Book, which is a valuable text that Dr. Kindelan introduced me to through her

Script Analysis class. To refresh my knowledge of the specific tasks a dramaturg performs before and during a production, I examined “Dramaturgy: An Overview” by

Anne Cattaneo, “Towards an American Dramaturg” by Martin Esslin, “Dramaturgy in

Education” by Oscar G. Brockett, “Bristling with Multiple Possibilities” by Mark Bly,

“Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility” by Jane Ann Crum, “Exploration through

Imagery” by Gregory Gunter, “Conceiving the Forms: Play Analysis for Production

Dramaturgy” by Lee Devin, “Theory and the Practice of Dramaturgy” by John H.

Lutterbie, and “Rebottling: Dramaturgs, Scholars, Old Plays, and Modern Directors” by

Cary M. Mazer. This review of the literature on dramaturgy sharpened my comprehension of the field and helped me understand how to approach the play, my research, and the artists with whom I would collaborate on the production.

38 After discussing these articles and my unique position as a student dramaturg with

Dr. Kindelan, we came up with a basic schedule of deadlines for my project’s tasks, which encompassed researching the play, compiling actor casebooks, posting greenroom displays, writing program notes, and creating lobby displays. Before starting my research, however, I realized that reading a play for content and reading a play with an eye towards production are two distinct tasks. I therefore reread A View from the Bridge, writing down words, lines, and ideas that either provoked my curiosity or were points of confusion for me. This exercise helped me to determine my research topics, which included:

• The life of the playwright, Arthur Miller,

• Arthur Miller’s vision as a political and social playwright,

• Miller’s views of McCarthyism, as it relates to notions of loyalty within the play,

• Post World War II America,

• The setting of the play—the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn,

• The background of the characters—poor Sicilian immigrants, working class

longshoremen, and their families,

• 1950s immigration laws and labor union issues, and

• The Greek theatre.

Dr. Kindelan and I then met to discuss some of the questions I had about the language, characters, and structure of the play, as well as my first impressions. Dr.

Kindelan shared her thoughts on which ideas in the script she wished to bring to light as the director of the production—namely, notions of civic and moral responsibility, the differences between logical and instinctual action, and how a failure to resolve society’s

39 problems by reconciling psychological flaws can have tragic consequences. Lastly, she gave me a direction with which to start my research—begin with an “imagistic exploration.”

Exploring the images within a playscript helps readers recognize the metaphors constructed by the playwright, thereby furthering their understanding of the play’s abstract ideas. I thus wrote down every picture, sound, color, feeling, object, action, reference, or description that came to mind, as I studied the dialogue and stage directions of A View from the Bridge. Understanding the denotative value of the words used in a drama is relatively simple compared to investigating the connotative ideas and emotions evoked by these words. Listing the images of the play provided me with a much better grasp of the intricacies, subtexts, and implications of Miller’s writing.

Creative Research

In considering these images, I realized that a wide range of topics are woven into the play, encompassing themes of power, control, animal instincts, human nature, sexuality, masculinity, honor, religion, home and family, childhood, money, poverty, justice, and law. To comprehend these ideas as they pertain to the play, I began contextualizing them within the range of Arthur Miller’s experiences and theories. For instance, in his autobiography Timebends: A Life, Miller describes a trip he took after

World War II to Italy where witnessed the widespread hunger and poverty of the Sicilian peasants. In other sections of Timebends, Miller tells about his interactions with longshoremen and Sicilian immigrants, detailing how “at four-thirty on winter mornings,

[he] stood around with longshoremen huddling in doorways…waiting for the hiring boss,

40 on whose arrival they surged forward and formed up in a semicircle to attract his pointing

finger and the numbered brass checks that guaranteed a job for the day.”8 Learning about

Miller’s familiarity with the hardships of Sicilian longshoremen provided me with crucial

insights into the real-life basis of the characters and issues in A View from the Bridge.

One of the most important events that eventually led Miller to write the play,

however, was during the late 1940s when an Italian friend of his, Vinny Longhi,

“mentioned a story he’d recently heard of a longshoreman who had ratted to the

Immigration Bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally in his

very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece.”9

Although Miller did not recognize the tragic potential of this story for several years, when he began composing the full-length version of the play in the mid-1950s, he recognized how “it could move people…with pity for the protagonist [Eddie Carbone] and even identification with him, a man who does so many unworthy things.”10 Both

Miller’s musings in his autobiography and in his theatre essays reveal how he perceives

issues of control and justice and how he applies them to the tragic storyline of A View

from the Bridge.

Arthur Miller’s depiction of a personal experience concerning Elia Kazan (1909-

2003) and the House of Un-American Activities Committee also proved very telling in

terms of discovering Miller’s perspective on the law, the government, and betrayal.

When Miller was good friends with director Elia Kazan during the 1950s, Kazan was

summoned before HUAC, and told Miller that he was going to give the committee names

of other artists with possible communist ties to save his own career. Upon hearing this

8 Timebends, 147. 9 Timebends, 152. 10 Timebends, 412.

41 news, Miller realized with shock and disappointment that in spite of their brother-like

bond, Kazan would have informed on him, had he known of Miller’s collegiate socialist

activities. Despite the fact that Kazan had no knowledge with which to supply HUAC

about the playwright, Miller was eventually summoned as well. Both the knowledge of

Kazan’s informing on other artists and the experience of appearing before HUAC

drastically affected Miller’s concepts of the American government, justice, and personal

betrayal, and these issues are poignantly addressed through the struggles of the characters

in A View from the Bridge.

Aside from the background of the playwright, the next major component of my research consisted of finding information, pictures, and artwork that were relevant to the time period, location, and situation of A View from the Bridge, so that I could help the

designers and director sharpen their vision for what the set and costumes for the

production would look like. Some of my main resources included Seaport: New York’s

Vanished Waterfront (2004) by Phillip Lopate and New York Changing: Revisiting

Berenice Abbott’s New York (2005) by Douglas Levere. After gathering as many photographic images as I could of the Brooklyn Bridge, Red Hook, and 1950s longshoreman, Dr. Kindelan and I met with the designers of the production—Professor

Justin Townsend designed the set and lights, while Professor Frances Nelson-McSherry designed the costumes. My job as a student dramaturg in this setting was to observe and listen to the collaborative process between director and designers and to provide images that would be most useful to the designers in actualizing their concepts onstage.

Apart from supplying images for Dr. Kindelan to consider which were most useful to her and to the other artists, my last major research task was compiling pictures

42 and information that would be useful to the actors once the show was cast and they began building their characters. I studied books, ranging in topic from 1950s American culture, fashion, and slang; to Brooklyn, Sicily, and immigration; to the Red Hook waterfront, longshoremen, and union issues. A few of these books were Militants and Migrants:

Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (1988) by Donna Gabaccia, It Happened in

Brooklyn (1993) by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, and An Italian Grows in

Brooklyn (1978) by Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin. Much of the information I found was of practical use to the actors. For example, actors playing longshoremen needed to know what their characters’ jobs entailed, their characters’ social status, and the stresses of their characters’ day-to-day lives. On the other hand, the actresses needed information on 1950s Italian-American housewives; the actors playing immigrants needed extensive knowledge of Sicily; and the actor playing the narrator needed to know extra facts about Greek theatre and about Arthur Miller’s thoughts on modern tragedies.

Aside from this basic factual knowledge, I found ways to help the actors get more connected with their characters on an emotional level. For instance, I had a hunch to look up the meaning of each character’s name. I thought perhaps Miller had chosen these names for a reason, and I was correct in that each name reflected how the character was perceived by the others. Eduardo, means wealthy guardian—Eddie is uncle, guardian, and provider to Catherine; whereas Catherine means pure, virginal—Eddie treats

Catherine like a child, thinks she is innocent, and despises Rodolpho for taking a romantic interest in her. Such remarkable discoveries added an air of excitement to my research, as I scrutinized each book, article, and photo for material that would incite the imaginations of the artists.

43 Production Preparation

To prepare for the rehearsal process, I created nine casebooks (See Appendix A) for each of the nine actors who had major or semi-major roles in the play. Casebooks included pages with:

• the meaning of the character’s name,

• images of Brooklyn and Sicily,

• written information on 1950s American and Sicilian cultures,

• the Red Scare of the 1950s,

• the life of longshoremen,

• Arthur Miller’s biography, and

• Miller’s thoughts on A View from the Bridge and modern tragedy.

Every casebook was different, however, in that the information in each was tailored to the needs of each actor. For instance, I added some images and information on 1950s youth to Catherine’s and Rodolpho’s casebooks because they are the youngest two characters in the play and would be somewhat more assimilated into American culture than their elders, who would have only been first or second generation Sicilian-Americans. I also added an excerpt of Walt Whitman’s (1819-1892) thought-provoking poem “Crossing

Brooklyn Ferry” (1856) to Eddie’s casebook, since the sixth stanza of the poem (see

Appendix B) speaks to the darker side of human nature that Eddie has trouble confronting in the play.

My second major task in preparation for rehearsals, was decorating the greenroom with pictures that would inspire the actors and help them understand the world in which their characters lived. I designated four different sections of the room for four different

44 categories of images. The wall to the left of the door that actors first saw upon entering the greenroom was covered with photographs of Brooklyn, particularly the Red Hook area, and the column next to the wall had a few large prints of old rusty fire escapes to give the actors a feel for the kind of decayed and dilapidated neighborhood in which their characters lived. Farther down on the left wall, I posted photos of the Brooklyn waterfront—longshoremen laboring to unload the cargoes of enormous ships and the gaping windows of warehouses that stood along the docks of the harbor. The wall to the right of the door portrayed scenes from the poverty-stricken Sicilian towns of the 1950s, while the wall directly opposite the door was covered with images of the Brooklyn

Bridge—a web-like mass of cords, supporting an imposing and dark structure, beneath which one could catch a glimpse of the beautiful bright lights of Manhattan. These images immersed the cast in an imagistic exploration of the world of A View from the

Bridge, while also helping the ensemble actors (who did not receive casebooks) appreciate the background of their characters.

45 Production Dramaturgy

“The production dramaturg looks at how the whole is coming together, seeing where and how the play’s interpretation can be strengthened.” 11 —Anne Cattaneo

Working with the Artists

Watching the actors and director in rehearsal helped me determine which areas of my research had been lacking and what information I could provide to be more helpful to the cast. Fairly early in the rehearsal process, I was reminded of how much dialogue in the play deals with issues of justice and honor, and I began to wonder if “honor” in

Sicilian culture had a different meaning or importance than in American society. I began to search for more information on Sicilian culture, particularly Sicilian peasant culture, and eventually found a wealth of information on Sicilian social mores and interactions.

One interesting fact was that Sicilian peasants would morally excuse stealing if the perpetrator stole out of need. I also discovered that besmirching a Sicilian woman’s honor was an accepted reason for killing the man who tarnished her reputation.

Furthermore, Sicilian peasants often had a strong mistrust and fear of the government and the law. I condensed the information I had acquired about Sicilian peasants into a two- page handout for the cast (see Appendix C), giving them a new perspective on the motivations of their characters.

The actors were also encouraged to ask me any questions they had about the background of their characters. At one of the early rehearsals, the actor playing Marco inquired what level of education his character (a poor Sicilian immigrant) would have

11 Jones, 10.

46 had. I was surprised that I had not already thought to research such an important aspect of his character. I had taken for granted that each of the characters would have had at least high-school level learning; yet, after taking another look at some of the books I already had on Sicilian culture and history, I found that his character would likely not have had any education above an 8th grade level. As a poor peasant, Marco would have needed to be working and earning money to survive and to help feed himself, his parents, and his siblings. This fundamental information on Marco’s lack of education helped the actor understand his character’s work-ethic, somber demeanor, and simple sense of right and wrong.

Through this incident, I learned that though a dramaturg may not always be fully equipped to immediately answer all the questions of the actors, the ability to seek out and share information is just as important as having a ready storehouse of knowledge to recite. Another way I helped this actor connect to his character was by giving him a photograph of an impoverished Sicilian woman with her three starving children—in the play Marco talks about his wife and three children, starving back home in Sicily. The actor thanked me for the picture, explaining that he intended to construct his character’s biography that evening; thus, the information I provided for the actors aided them in the process of synthesizing factual information with dramatic action, as well as images with emotional states. At the next rehearsal when I watched the actor saying his lines about his character’s family, I could hear the sadness in his voice and see the true pain he was able to connect with after exploring his character’s love and concern for his family.

47 Connecting with the Audience

To help the audience members contextualize their experience of A View from the

Bridge, I wrote some notes to insert into the program. These notes included a brief statement, entitled “Why this Play Now?” to explain why the director felt the piece was crucial and timely for society to understand. The plays for a regional theatre company’s season are usually chosen with consideration for the present social and political climate, so that the company’s productions can confront and deal with issues similar to the ones facing today’s citizens. Similarly, my director Dr. Kindelan recognized subject matters in A View from the Bridge that she felt her audience at Northeastern University would find both relevant and thought-provoking. My explanation for this choice to produce A

View from the Bridge at Northeastern appeared in the program as follows:

Why this Play Now?

In an atmosphere where more and more American college students would rather watch an action movie than learn about or discuss America’s social and political issues, Northeastern University’s Theatre Department presents A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller—a play filled with ideas aimed at awakening social consciousness. Through this production, the Theatre Department attempts to generate a dialogue within the NU community regarding our collective responsibility to face social ills. After all, many of the problems addressed in Miller’s play (written during the 1950s), parallel those that we face in contemporary society. A View from the Bridge is a wake-up call and a warning to an American society that often turns a blind eye to social problems. One of Miller’s ideas in the play is to help the audience recognize how a lack of self-awareness keeps us from facing the truth about our actions. In this play the protagonist, Eddie, is a simple, uneducated, working man, who has no way of understanding his own psychology. He relies purely on his raw instincts to deal with his emotions. Unable to rationalize his feelings, Eddie seeks emotional outlets that not only fail to solve his dilemmas but also exacerbate his disastrous situation.

48 Like others, Celia Wren in “Miller Time: American Clock & A View from the Bridge” speaks about how Eddie’s situation resembles that of a Greek tragic hero—no matter how many people try to warn him about the consequences of his actions, he cannot avoid his tragic fate (Commonweal 125, no. 3 (1998): 20-21). Similarly, our fears, pride, and lack of self-awareness keep many of us from acknowledging and learning how to deal with the truth. Without the strength to face reality, people risk ending up like Eddie—destroyed by situations that they either deal with inappropriately or simply choose to ignore. Confronting the truth about human nature was a common idea in the theatre of the ancient Greeks. Audience members viewing Greek theatre often would know the play’s mythos (plot); therefore, they could pay more attention to the characters’ motivation and psychology, recognizing why characters make certain choices, as well as the consequences of those choices. The Greeks also recognized that a human shortcoming affecting one member of the polis was a burden to be addressed by the entire polis. Tragic stories were used as a reminder of the Greeks’ collective responsibility to their community; thus, A View from the Bridge, is aimed at using theatre for one of its most ancient purposes—raising a community’s social consciousness.

Next, I extracted quotes from my research that the cast and I had found to be interesting and thought provoking in dealing with the play and arranged them in the center section of the program insert:

For Your Consideration…

“In Greece the tragic victory consisted in demonstrating that the polis— the whole people—had discovered some aspect of the Grand Design which also was the right way to live together.” 12 —“On Social Plays” by Arthur Miller

“I am utterly convinced that Italian Americans throughout this country began life with all of the equipment needed to get ahead: drive, energy, intelligence. I am also utterly convinced that in every Italian neighborhood throughout this country…the pressures are murderous on the young from the family to get settled: find a rut and settle in a comfortable manner and stay there….Most Italian Americans most of the

12 Martin, 55.

49 time are at the mercy of someone else’s whim. They have learned nothing from the pain of growing up.” 13 —An Italian Grows in Brooklyn by Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin

“Hard as it is for most people, the sheer struggle to exist and to prosper affords a haven from thought. Complain as they may that they have no time to think, to cultivate themselves, to ask the big questions, most men are terrified at the thought of not having to spend most of their days fighting for existence.” 14 —“On Social Plays” by Arthur Miller

“Very well known and proverbial is the jealousy of the Sicilians for their own women….Woe betide anyone who stains the honor of a peasant, of his wife, of his daughter, his sister, his mother….A stain on his honor is not washed with a judiciary reparation, but only with blood.” 15 —Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants edited and translated by Rosalie N. Norris

“As with Greece, so with us—each great war has turned men further and further away from preoccupation with Man and drawn them back into the family, the home, the private life and the preoccupation with sexuality.” 16 —“On Social Plays” by Arthur Miller

“Nowhere in the world where industrialized economy rules—where specialization in work, politics, and social life is the norm—nowhere has man discovered a means of connecting himself to society except in the form of a truce with it.” 17 —“On Social Plays” by Arthur Miller

“Italians generally are secretive and never show the world what they’re really thinking. Somehow, Italians fostered the notion that they were fun- loving, perpetually singing, pasta-stuffing, laughing folks. Utter nonsense, but an illusion skillfully put out by the Italians to confuse the opposition….The Italian will talk behind any non-Italian’s back.” 18 —An Italian Grows in Brooklyn by Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin

13 Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin, An Italian Grows in Brooklyn (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1978), 198. 14 Martin, 64. 15 Rosalie N. Norris, ed. and trans., Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants (London: Associated University Presses, 1981). 16 Martin, 56. 17 Martin, 56. 18 Della Femina and Sopkin, 80.

50 “When men live…under any industrialized system, as integers who have no weight, no person, excepting as either customers, draftees, machine tenders, ideologists, or whatever, it is unlikely…that a dramatic picture of them can really overcome the public knowledge of their nature in real life. In such a society…man is not tragic, he is pathetic….the moment any individual is dramatically characterized and set forth as a hero, our common sense reduces him to the size of a complainer, a misfit.” 19 —“On Social Plays” by Arthur Miller

The last part of the program was a brief chronology of Arthur Miller’s life. I tailored this list of events from Miller’s biography to those incidents that pertained to the ideas of A

View from the Bridge. Some themes from the play that relate to experiences of Miller’s include: the hardships of longshoremen and their families (notice 1947 and 1948 below), the consequences of betrayal (notice 1950 and 1953), and definitions of honor and justice

(notice 1957 and 1970 below):

1915 Arthur Aster Miller born October 17th in New York City 1934 Enters University of Michigan to study journalism 1938 Joins the Federal Theater Project in New York City 1940 Moves to Brooklyn 1941 Takes extra job working nightshift at the Brooklyn Naval Yard 1944 The Man Who Had All the Luck premieres on Broadway 1947 All My Sons opens; Miller explores the Red Hook area and the world of the longshoremen 1948 Trip to Europe where Miller gets a sense of the Italian background he would use for the Carbones and their relatives 1949 Death of a Salesman premieres 1950 Screenplay The Hook (about corruption within the Longshoremen’s union) fails to reach production due to pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 1953 The Crucible premieres 1954 Invited to Belgian premiere of The Crucible but denied passport by the U.S. 1955 The one-act A View from the Bridge opens on a joint bill with A Memory of Two Mondays 1956 Subpoenaed to appear before HUAC; revises A View from the Bridge into two acts for Peter Brook to produce in London

19 Martin, 58.

51 1957 Convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names to HUAC 1958 United States Court of Appeals overturns contempt conviction 1964 Covered the Nazi trials in Frankfurt for the New York Herald Tribune; After the Fall and Incident at Vichy premiere 1970 Miller’s works are banned in the Soviet Union as a result of his work to free dissident writers 1972 The Creation of the World and Other Business opens 1977 The Archbishop’s Ceiling premieres 1983 Directs Death of a Salesman at the People’s Art Theater in Beijing, China 1984 Miller receives Kennedy Center Honors for his lifetime achievement 1987 Publishes Timebends: A Life (autobiography) 1998 Roundabout Theatre Company performs A View From the Bridge in NYC and wins two Tony Awards 1999 Death of a Salesman produced on Broadway and wins Tony for Best Revival of a Play 2005 Miller dies of heart failure in his Connecticut home on February 10th

The next way I tried to enhance the audience’s experience of the play was through two lobby displays. The first display was located in one of the cases on the wall of Ell

Hall, next to the stage door of the theatre. The case housed an eye-catching red background, a poster advertising the show, a cast list, a few photographs that inspired set and costume designs, several costume sketches, a picture of the original set model, and an image of the ruins of an ancient Greek theatre. The purpose of this display was twofold.

Firstly, the eye-catching colors and poster attracted passersby who might consider coming to see the show once they knew about it. Secondly, positioning photographs that helped motivate the designers next to the designs themselves created a juxtaposition that helped audience members understand how the process of creating sets and costumes evolved from images and concepts. For instance, the idea of a civically-oriented theatre, such as that of ancient Greece, resonated with the artists working on A View from the

52 Bridge, so by placing the photograph of the ancient Greek theatre alongside the designs, I attempted to illustrate how this underlying concept was effectively brought out through design elements, as well as through acting and direction.

As another example, one of the pictures I included in the display that had inspired both the director and the set designer depicted the dark steel structure of the Brooklyn

Bridge surrounding a small pool of light, through which a man was walking (see

Appendix D). This image, entitled “Light and Shadow Down Under the Manhattan

Bridge,”20 reminded the artists of how lonely and trapped the protagonist of the play must feel—stuck in a job, neighborhood, and family situation that he cannot find a way out of.

When Professor Townsend created a set model for the production, he thus incorporated this feeling of being trapped and the image of the dominating steel bridge into the design.

I also included a photograph of this set model (see Appendix E) in the display case, so that the audience could see how the atmosphere created by the image was translated into an effective set design. One idea that this dark and ominous vision of the set attempted to express was that despite America’s promise for a better life, people like Eddie are nevertheless frequently ignored and left to struggle in the dog-eat-dog world that lies beneath the mechanical workings of America’s industrialized economy.

Watching the Play Come to Life

As wonderful as I have always found acting onstage to be, none of my performance experiences compared to the thrill of watching a piece of art come together from information that I had gathered and from ideas on which I had collaborated. Each time I observed a rehearsal, I could see that the actors had used Dr. Kindelan’s direction

20 John B. Manbeck, The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1998).

53 and the information I had provided them to their best advantage, and as a result, their character-work improved immensely from week to week. After the play opened I continued my observation of the production process, attending as many of the performances as I could. Despite watching the play grow during rehearsals and watching the actors build their characters, each performance of A View from the Bridge was just as interesting, moving, and alarming as if I were seeing the production for the first time.

Each night I witnessed layers of meaning, depths of emotion, and moments of truth that I had never noticed before. Such freshness, profundity, and authenticity can only be achieved in a production when careful dramaturgical analysis has been applied to the playscript.

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Chapter Four

Conclusion

My appreciation for the invaluable knowledge and experience I have gained through undertaking this project has led me to pursue dramaturgy as a career. I have never been so thrilled and impassioned about any job or study as I was about nearly every task I performed as a student dramaturg and every subject I researched to complete my thesis paper. This last chapter, therefore, describes my discussions with professional dramaturgs, my thoughts on my level of success with my honors project, and my plans for after I graduate from Northeastern University this May.

The Next Step

“The ideal educational base for the dramaturg is probably summed up in what used to be touted as the goal of a liberal education—to prepare the student for continuous lifelong learning.” 1 —Oscar G. Brockett

Interviewing Professional Dramaturgs

Once all the performances of A View from the Bridge were complete, I was somewhat disappointed with the lack of direct feedback from the audiences I received on my work. Since my goal was to generate civic thought and dialogue among our collegiate audience, I wanted to know if the production had caused anyone to reflect upon the ideas in the play and upon how the situations in the play relate to those in our own society. Although by simply observing the actors, director, and designers at work, I could understand how they benefited from my research, I did not have many chances to engage audience members in discussions of what they thought about the production or to inquire whether or not they found my program notes and lobby displays helpful. I was furthermore at a loss for how to begin connecting my experience at Northeastern to the larger world of production dramaturgy in a professional theatre setting.

To better understand the connections between my experience as a student dramaturg and dramaturgy in the world of professional theatre, I interviewed three dramaturgs in the New England area about their experiences. I interviewed Scott

Edmiston, who had served as the dramaturg at the Huntington Theatre Company and currently teaches at Brandeis, Craig Watson from the Trinity Repertory Company in

1 Jones, 45.

56 Rhode Island, and Ryan McKittrick from the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) in

Cambridge. These three gentlemen were each asked eleven questions, among them:

• How did you get into the field of dramaturgy/literary management?

• Do you feel dramaturgy is a vital part of contemporary theatre and why?

• How do you get to know your audience and determine what kinds of tools

and information are helpful to them when viewing a play?

• How do you feel about theatre’s potential as a tool for promoting good

citizenship?

In answering how they got into the field and how they feel about dramaturgy, each of the gentlemen was inclined to discuss the nature of dramaturgy itself. Edmiston explained that he was a director and fell into the slot at the Huntington because they needed a dramaturg. He also elaborated on how dramaturgy explores the “essence and meaning of the work.” Watson talked of how some kind of dramaturgy always goes on in theatre. He said that the people who do dramaturgy have changed, but the activity is ingrained in theatre because dramaturgy is about the meeting of the form and the content.

McKittrick feels his work is important because dramaturgy aims to produce work that is stimulating, invigorating, and provocative.

When I asked the gentlemen about their relationships with their theatres’ audiences, Edmiston had interesting input, describing his “responsibility not to tell them what to think” or “what the play’s about.” Instead, Edmiston tries to provide a “range of possibilities,” “address points of confusion,” and “provide a doorway into the play” through his writings on the play. Craig Watson, on the other hand, spoke of getting to know one’s audience through living “among the common people.” He elaborated that he

57 gets to know his audience by talking to people in the world and trying to figure out “what should be done to make theatre more relevant.” Lastly, McKittrick described the “play back discussions” he hosts, which are forums for the audience to start thinking about the play right away. Mr. McKittrick believes he has a responsibility to provide a bridge between the production and the public and that a dramaturg has to be in dialogue with the audience. Watson likewise spoke of being in conversation with the audience.

In one of my more provocative questions that relates directly to the subject of my thesis, I received quite varied responses on how the dramaturgs feel about using theatre as a tool to promote good citizenship. Edmiston remarked that one must first “define what citizenship means,” and Ryan McKittrick asked me outright what my definition of citizenship was. Both Craig Watson and Scott Edmiston balked at the idea of using theatre as a “tool.” Edmiston did say, however, that artists have a “responsibility to society” declaring that art has the “power to make us more human” and “awaken humanity.” Before I asked Watson this question, he had been musing on how the primacy of having a social experience has gone down, and when I asked him about theatre and citizenship, he replied that whatever the reason humans go to the theatre should be theatre’s purpose, but conceded that promoting good citizenship is an inevitable by-product of theatre.

In contrast to these responses, after I explained my definition of citizenship for the purposes of this thesis, Ryan McKittrick spoke on how a good citizen asks questions about the world around them and how if dramaturgy helps promote dialogue, discussion, and questioning, then it promotes good citizenship. McKittrick also recognized that the dramaturg is the public voice for theatre, and in that role dramaturgs have an opportunity

58 to promote good citizenship. He furthermore mentioned that many dramaturgs teach; they offer something to the community.

Evaluating My Progress

Something I was very curious to learn from the dramaturgs I interviewed was if and how they measured their level of success at reaching their audiences. I explained to them how the small amount of audience response I was able to detect once A View from the Bridge opened was rather disheartening. Besides my attempts to observe reactions and try to listen to or participate in post-show conversations, obtaining audience feedback seemed difficult, if not impossible. I additionally expressed my eagerness to understand the full impact of dramaturgy on audience experience. Scott Edmiston does not believe there is a way to measure such results, and that this measurement is “not necessarily valuable.” He hopes that “ideas linger with [audience members] after” the play, but mused that gauging the impact of a play is like asking “if someone liked your painting” or your “piece of music.” Since plays are about a “feeling, an essence, an idea, an awakening,” one cannot measure when or how a play or one’s dramaturgical work will impact an audience member.

Craig Watson joked that I need to develop a scale, a scientific system, for measuring dramaturgical success, emphasizing that he feels he ultimately cannot gauge his level of success as a dramaturg. Since his primary task at the Trinity Repertory

Company is that of literary management (new play dramaturgy), Watson noted that he can gauge his success with playwrights and directors from working with them, but not with audiences. Although not “foolproof,” measuring success is apparently somewhat

59 easier for McKittrick, as the A.R.T. has a “vociferous” audience that is not afraid to express their opinions through e-mails, letters, and remarks in person. Mr. McKittrick also had an interesting insight on not wishing to “cater” to the audience, but rather lead them down artistic pathways and discover what they thought of the journey afterwards.

McKittrick would also consider a production successful if the artists were able to “shed new light on a classical play.”

In this vein, I believe I had a decent level of success as a dramaturg in helping generate some thought in my audience members. Knowing that I helped the other artists bring complex and emotional issues to life onstage and recognizing that many of the audience members read my program notes and noticed my lobby displays, gives me enough confidence to continue pursuing dramaturgy after the conclusion of my undergraduate studies this May. Several audience members with whom I spoke told me that A View from the Bridge was the best production they had ever seen at Northeastern; yet, I did not have the chance to ask them why the production was “the best,” and I have no way of knowing whether the play would have been equally successful without my dramaturgy. I do know that the director, designers, and actors greatly appreciated my work and that all the collaborators on a piece of theatre are responsible for the production’s accomplishments.

Realizing How Much Still Needs to Be Done

Completing my honors project and writing this paper have made me realize how much more work I need to do if I truly wish to create theatre that promotes good citizenship and fights the indifference of my generation. I have learned an immeasurable

60 amount from my mentor Dr. Kindelan, from the experience of dramaturging A View from

the Bridge, and from listening to other theatre artists. My next step in learning more about dramaturgy and about how I can make a valuable contribution to American society through theatre is to serve as the dramaturgy intern for the American Repertory Theatre.

In this setting I will be able to hone my research skills, observe some of our nation’s finest dramaturgs (Gideon Lester, Ryan McKittrick, and Arthur Holmberg) at work, and continue my journey in addressing my country’s “tragic flaw.”

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Appendix A (Sample of Abbreviated Actor Casebook)

Marco Means: warlike

A View from the Bridge By Arthur Miller Northeastern University Fall 2005

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“In the course of time Longhi mentioned a story he’d recently heard of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece. The squealer was disgraced, and no one knew where he had gone off to, and some whispered that he had been murdered by one of the brothers.” —Timebends: a Life by Arthur Miller

“In Red Hook, Brooklyn, at four-thirty on winter mornings, I stood around with longshoremen huddling in doorways in rain and snow on Columbia Street facing the piers, waiting for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and formed up in a semicircle to attract his pointing finer and the numbered brass check that guaranteed a job for the day. After distributing the checks to his favorites, who had quietly paid him off, the boss often found a couple left over and in his generosity tossed them into the air over the little crowd. In a frantic scramble, the men would tear at each other’s hands, sometimes getting into bad fights.” —Timebends: A Life by Arthur Miller

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“An old waterfront where the sun shone through dust and the acrid smell of steel, a slum where nothing looked complete or else was broken and falling apart.” —Timebends: a Life by Arthur Miller

“I lived with my parents and three sisters in a five-family building in Red Hook. The luckier families were on the floor with the one bathroom in the whole building. I was a bed wetter. I felt terrible about it. Instead of helping me, they beat the daylights out of me. There was never ‘I love you’ in that family. The only time you got a smile was when you brought in money. Everybody grabbed theirs. —It Happened in Brooklyn by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer

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“They waited for the ship to come in. When it did, they worked twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours at a clip. It used to take three hundred to four hundred longshoremen a whole week to unload and load cargo on a single ship. Then they got that big paycheck. They paid off the loan shark, paid off the bookie, got Mama’s wedding ring and the trumpet back from the hock shop, and paid off the clothing store for the new Easter outfits. It was a brutal life.” —It Happened in Brooklyn by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer

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“Most of the residents in the neighborhood were nervous in any kind of social or occupational situation that was different from their worker-bee situation. No one wanted to be in charge of a ten-man work force. Too much responsibility. And, as one uncle once said to me, ‘What the hell do I need that for? I’ll have to wear a tie.’ He couldn’t handle it. It was way beyond him. My uncle was expressing a neighborhood belief that the tie was a symbol of authority. The grandfather to the father to the child: beware of the man wearing a tie, he’s going to try and pull one over on you.” —An Italian Grows in Brooklyn by Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin

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“I am utterly convinced that Italian Americans throughout this country began life with all of the equipment needed to get ahead: drive, energy, intelligence. I am also utterly convinced that in every Italian neighborhood throughout this country…the pressures are murderous on the young from the family to get settled: find a rut and settle in a comfortable manner and stay there….Most Italian Americans most of the time are at the mercy of someone else’s whim. They have learned nothing from the pain of growing up….None of my friends had any control over his life and I would have thought someplace along the line they’d have learned a lesson.” —An Italian Grows in Brooklyn by Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin

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Red Scare Origins The roots of the Red Scare lie in the efforts of the U.S. government to suppress dissent and engineer pro-war opinion in the preparation for the American entry into World War I. In 1917 President Wilson established a “Committee on Public Information” to disseminate news favorable to the Allied cause and hostile to Germany. The arguments, institutions and laws which were used to support the war did not disappear after the Armistice but remained on the books and were turned against radicals. After the war, the investigations abated for a few months, but did not cease. They soon resumed in the context of Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Civil War and the Red Terror. On May Day 1919, the International Communist Workers Holiday, 36 bombs were sent by mail to prominent politicians, judges, and other “enemies of the left.” Later events, such as the Seattle general strike, the Boston police strike, and the organizing efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World, seemed to demonstrate the rise of radical labor unions. Furthermore, many of the organizations which supported the unions were not only associated with socialism or communism, but had already been persecuted for opposing WWI. Reactions In response to the bombings, the public flared up in a surge of patriotism, often involving violent hatred of communists, radicals, and foreigners. In Centralia, Washington, a Wobblie was dragged from a town jail and hanged. The largest government action of the Red Scare was Palmer Raids against anarchist, socialist, and communist groups. Left-wing activists such as Eugene V. Debs were jailed by government officials using the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. In a spectacle that exposed the paranoia, xenophobia, and fear of anarchism which much of the United States was experiencing, Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, were executed for murder in a trial seen as unfair and protested by left wing forces around the world.

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The Second Red Scare During the late 1920s through the 1930s, anti-communism in the U.S. died down, especially after the Soviet Union became an ally with the U.S. during World War II. As soon as the war ended, however, another Red Scare began in the McCarthy era from 1948 to the mid-1950s. Causes During the late 1940s, several news events caught the public attention, including the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for treason (which resulted in their heavily publicized executions); the acquisition of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union; the fall of China which had been an American ally during and World War II; and the beginning of the Korean War. Events such as these had a noticeable effect on the opinions of Americans in general regarding their own security, and gave rise to a subtle feeling of paranoia that centered upon a supposedly inevitable nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In support of their cause, anti-communists used actions by the Soviet Union and China as evidence of the evil of communism, namely the many millions killed in the Soviet gulags, the Stalin era purges, the deportation of over one million Polish to Soviet labor camps in Siberia, and the killing of hundreds of thousands in China. This was in addition to the fact that the Soviet Union had rapidly and forcefully spread its influence into Eastern Europe following the Second World War. Reactions The Red Scare manifested itself in several ways, notably through the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the acceleration of the arms race. There were also effects on America’s way of life as a result of the Red Scare, which contributed to the popularization of fallout shelters in home construction and regular duck and cover drills at schools. The Red Scare is also cited as one factor that contributed to the rise and popularity of science fiction films during the 1950s and beyond. Many thrillers and science fiction movies of the period used a theme of a sinister, inhuman enemy that was planning to infiltrate society and destroy the American way of life.

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“No one ever sat down and complained about his or her lot. They assumed the entire world lived as they did. In many respects, they were satisfied. They brought home a paycheck; people in the family were fed and housed and what more was there to life….Unlike other vast immigrations to this country, of men who wanted to better themselves, the Italians just wanted to get the hell out of a condition which was infinitely worse.” —An Italian Grows in Brooklyn by Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin

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Immigration The years 1910 to 1920 were the highpoint of Italian immigration to the United States. Over 2 million Italians immigrated in those years, with a total of 5.3 million immigrating between 1820 and 1980. Laws concerning immigration and naturalization The first naturalization law in the United States was the 1795 Naturalization Act which restricted citizenship to “free white persons” who had resided in the country for five years. The next significant change in the law came in 1870, when the law was broadened to allow both Whites and African-Americans. Immigration was otherwise unlimited. An 1882 law banned entry of “lunatics” and infectious disease carriers, and the 1901 Anarchist Exclusion Act kept people out because of their political beliefs. A literacy requirement was added in Immigration Act of 1917. On May 19, 1921, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas on immigration. The quotas were based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were living in the United States as of the 1910 census. A more complex quota plan replaced this “emergency” system under the Immigration Act of 1924. Immigration Act of 1924 The United States Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act or the Johnson-Reed Act, limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of person from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890 according to the census of 1890. The law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. As an example of its effect, in the ten years following 1900 about 200,000 Italians immigrated every year. With the imposition of the 1924 quota, only 4,000 per year were allowed. At the same time, the annual quota for Germany was over 57,000. 86% of the 165,000 permitted entries were from the British Isles, France, Germany, and other Northern European countries. The quotas remained in place with minor alterations until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

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The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) This act revised the quotas again, basing them on the 1920 census. For the first time in history racial distinctions were omitted from the U.S. Code. Nevertheless, most of the quota allocation still went to immigrants from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany. Its anti-subversive powers are still in force and have been used to bar the entry of countless individuals based upon their political expressions. Illegal immigration One consequence of laws restricting the number and ethnicity of persons entering the U.S.A. is a phenomenon referred to as illegal immigration, in which persons enter a country and obtain work without legal sanction. In some cases, this is accomplished by entering the country legally with a visa, and then simply choosing not to leave upon expiration of the visa. In other cases, people enter the country surreptitiously without ever obtaining a visa. Often, people entering in this fashion are economic refugees—a class of refugee not recognized by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; these persons have left their home country in a desperate bid to provide financial support for themselves and/or their families. This is particularly true in cases where “minimum wage” in the U.S. is several times what the average laborer earns in a given country; such immigrants often send large portions of their income to their countries and families of origin.

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“Somewhere in central Sicily on a beautiful sunny day in winter, I saw a dozen men standing around a well in the middle of a dusty piazza. They were in their twenties and early thirties, strong-bodied, with hard, hoe-curved hands and the burnt skin of peasants, masons, woodcutters. We had paused at a rotting country café for a glass of juice and learned that it was customary for men to come to the well around noon, just in case one of the surrounding latifundia might need an extra worker in the middle of the day, and for lack of anything else to do they just hung around until it got dark, when they went home. Always hungry, they were offering themselves, but all they were eating was time. Suddenly this image locked into place the story Vinny had told me months before about the Red Hook longshoreman who had betrayed some illegal immigrant relatives and had disappeared. This glimpse in Sicily of desperate, workless men standing in their hunger around that well made monstrous the ideas of their betrayal after they had succeeded in escaping this slow dying in the sun.” —Timebends: a Life by Arthur Miller

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“The hiring system on the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts had been imported from the Sicilian countryside. A foremen representing the landowners would appear in the town square on his horse; a crowd of job-seeking peasants would humbly form up around his spurs, and he would deign to point from favored face to favored face with his riding crop and trot away with the wordless self-assurance of a god once he had lifted from hunger by these barely perceptible gestures the number of laborers he required for that day.” —Timebends: a Life by Arthur Miller

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Sicily

Capital: Palermo

Sicily is an autonomous region of Italy and the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Geography The volcano Etna is the tallest volcano in Europe and also one of the world’s most active volcanos. Sicily has been noted for two millennia as a grain-producing territory; olives and wine are among its other agricultural products. The mines of the Caltanissetta district became a leading sulphur-producing area in the 19th century, but have declined since the 1950s.

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Arts Sicily is well known as a country of art: many poets and writers were born on this island, starting from the Sicilian School in the early 13th century, which inspired much subsequent Italian poetry and created the first Italian standard. Noto and Ragusa contain some of Italy’s best examples of Baroque architecture, carved in the local red sandstone. Palermo is also a major center of Italian opera. Its Teatro Massimo is the largest opera house in Italy and the third largest in the world, seating 1,400. Sicily is also home to two prominent folk art traditions, both of which draw heavily on the island’s Norman influence. Donkey carts are painted with intricate decorations of scenes from the Norman romantic poems, such as The Song of Roland. The same tales are told in traditional puppet theatres which feature hand-made wooden marionettes.

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History Sicily was colonized by Phoenicians and Punic settlers from Carthage and by Greeks, starting in the 8th century B.C.E. The Sicilian city states were an important part of classical Greek civilization. Sicilian politics was intertwined with politics in Greece itself. Palermo was a Carthaginian city, founded in the 8th century B.C.E. In the 3rd century B.C.E. the Messanan Crisis motivated the intervention of the Roman Republic into Sicilian affairs, and led to the First Punic War. By the end of war (242 B.C.E.), Sicily was in Roman hands. The initial success of the Carthaginians during the Second Punic War encouraged many of the Sicilian cities to revolt against Roman rule. Rome sent troops to put down the rebellions. For the next 6 centuries Sicily was a province of the Roman Empire. It was something of a rural backwater, important chiefly for its grainfields which were a mainstay of the food supply of the city of Rome. In A.D. 440 Sicily fell to the Vandal king Geiseric. A few decades later it came into Ostrogothic hands, where it remained until it was conquered by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 535. Sicily was then ruled by the Byzantine Empire until the Arab conquest of AD 827-965. The Normans conquered the island in 1060-1090, and the south German Hohenstaufen dynasty ruled from 1194. Conflict between the Hohenstaufen house and the Papacy led in 1266 to Sicily’s conquest by Charles I, duke of Anjou; opposition to French officialdom and taxation led in 1282 to insurrection and successful invasion by king Peter III of Aragón. Ruled from 1479 by the kings of Spain, Sicily suffered a ferocious outbreak of plague (1656), followed by a damaging earthquake in the east of the island (1693). Periods of rule by the crown of Savoy (1713-20) and then the Austrian Habsburgs gave way to union (1734) with the Bourbon-ruled kingdom of Naples as the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Sicily was joined with the kingdom of Italy in 1860. Despite some economic development in the half-century after Italian unification, Sicily was largely bypassed by the industrial growth which transformed the larger urban areas of northern Italy. The organized crime networks commonly known as the mafia extended their influence in the late 19th century. An autonomous region from 1946, Sicily benefited to some extent from the partial Italian land reform of 1950-62 and special funding from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the Italian government’s Fund for the South (1950-84).

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Sicilian people Sicily has been long known as a “melting pot” of ancient cultures and peoples, and highly valued for its location. The inhabitants of the island are therefore descended from numerous peoples, mainly Greeks, peninsular Italians, Phoenicians, Saracen Arabs and the pre-colonial indigenous peoples known as Sicans/Sicani. There is also the presence of Norman, Lombard, Provençal, Aragonese and Castilian blood in some Sicilians, due to either conquest of, or migration to, the island. Famous Sicilians • Archimedes (c. 287 BC – 212 BC), scientist • Vincenzo Bellini (1801 – 1835), opera composer • Luigi Pirandello (1867 – 1936), dramatist

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Additional Information • Sicily is in close proximity to Tunisia, as it is in the Mediterranean • The water offshore is often brightly turquoise colored • Ruins of ancient temples are all over the countryside • There are ruins of a few ancient Greek theatres • In English Andiamo means “we go” or “we are going” • Bari is a city located on the Southeastern side of Italy, just above the “boot heel”—it is on the Adriatic sea

“Without cooperation…a Sicilian family could expect little respect from the community. Social status literally grew out of a generous network of cooperative and reciprocal (thus moral) social relations.” —Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers by Donna Gabaccia

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1950s Events and Trends The 1950s in Western society was marked with a sharp rise in the economy for the first time in almost 30 years and a return to the 1920s-type consumer society built on credit and boom-times, as well as the height of the baby-boom from returning GIs who went to college under the Montgomery GI Bill and settled in Suburbia America. Most of the internal conflicts that had developed in earlier decades like women’s rights, civil rights, imperialism, and war were relatively suppressed or neglected during this time as a returning world from the brink hoped to see a more consistent way of life as opposed to liberalism and radicalism. The 1950s were also marked with a rapid rise in conflict with the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union that would heighten the Cold War to an unprecedented level which would include the Arms Race, Space Race, McCarthyism, and Korean War. Technology • United States tests the first fusion bomb • Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, and thus the Sputnik crisis Science • Francis Crick and James D. Watson discover the helical structure of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge • Polio vaccine War, Peace, and Politics • Korean War • Red Scare, McCarthy Hearings • The United States CIA orchestrated the overthrow of the Guatemalan government • Hungarian revolution of 1956 brutally suppressed by Soviet Union’s troops • Fidel Castro gains power in Cuba Culture • Television replaces radio as the dominant mass medium in industrialized countries • In the West the generation traumatized by the Great Depression and World War II creates a culture with emphasis on normality and calm conformity

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• Juvenile delinquency said to be at unprecedented epidemic proportions in USA • Traditional pop music reaches its climax; early rock and roll music embraced by teenagers/youth culture while generally dismissed or condemned by older generation • Beatnik culture • Optimistic visions of semi-Utopian technological future including such devices as the flying car • graffiti as an art form develops, especially among urban African Americans • The Twilight Zone premiers as the first major science-fiction show People World leaders • Chairman Mao Zedong (People’s Republic of China) • President Chiang Kai-shek (Republic of China on Taiwan) • Pope Pius XII • Pope John XXIII • Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union) • Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet Union) • King George VI (United Kingdom) • Queen Elizabeth II (United Kingdom) • Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (United Kingdom) • Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden (United Kingdom) • Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (United Kingdom) • President Harry S. Truman (United States) • President Dwight D. Eisenhower (United States)

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Entertainers • Abbott and Costello • Jack Benny • Chuck Berry • Humphrey Bogart • Marlon Brando • James Dean • Cary Grant • Audrey Hepburn • Charlton Heston • Alfred Hitchcock • Buddy Holly • Ernie Kovacs • Jerry Lewis • Dean Martin • Groucho Marx • Marilyn Monroe • Paul Newman • Laurence Olivier • Elvis Presley • Little Richard • James Stewart • Gale Storm • Elizabeth Taylor • John Wayne Sports figures • Alberto Ascari (Italian racing driver) • Rocky Marciano (American boxer) • Sugar Ray Robinson (American boxer) • Willie Mays (American baseball player) • Yogi Berra (American baseball player)

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Glossary Stool Pigeon: A decoy or informer, especially a police spy. This term alludes to a bird tied to a stool or similar perch in order to attract other birds, which will then be shot; however, one writer believes that stool is a variant for stale or stall, both nouns used for a decoy bird before 1500 or so. Syndicate: An association of people or firms authorized to undertake a duty or transact specific business; an association of people or firms formed to engage in an enterprise or promote a common interest; a loose affiliation of gangsters in control of organized criminal activities. Racket: A dishonest business or practice, especially one that obtains money through fraud or extortion; an easy, profitable means of livelihood. Canary: Slang: A woman singer; an informer, a stool pigeon. Punk: Slang: A young person, especially a member of a rebellious counterculture group; an inexperienced young man; a young man who is the sexual partner of an older man. Patsy: Slang: A person easily taken advantage of, cheated, blamed, or ridiculed (Perhaps from Italian pazzo—fool—from Old Italian paccio). Greenhorn: An inexperienced or immature person, especially one who is easily deceived; a newcomer, especially one who is unfamiliar with the ways of a place or group; an awkward and inexperienced youth. Razzes: To deride, heckle, or tease.

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Sicilian Gestures Nulla, Cosa da Nulla (Nothing): Point of the thumbnail, touching the internal extremity of the upper teeth, and suddenly hitting the teeth with an outward movement, as if to break them. This gesture, which produces a very small click, is typically accompanied by the vernacular expression, “You are not worth anything to me.” Beffeggiare (Derision, ridicule): With the mouth opened as wide as possible, the fist is brought up to it, acting as if to insert it there. A derisive and insulting gesture used by the lowest members of our populace: perhaps the large fist, that certainly would not be able to pass through a natural esophagus, serves to express the idea that the person to whom the gesture is directed is such a simpleton that he would swallow any gross absurdity. Chiedere Qualche Cosa (To ask for something): The fingers extended and joined in a point, turned upwards. The hand held thus is raised a little towards one’s own face, and one moves it several times directly from this position towards the person with whom one is speaking. Perhaps the meaning of this gesture arises from the fact that it is often used when questions are asked of persons who speak much, without making themselves understood, or who, in their presentation do not explain well what they are talking about (whether from ignorance or malice). In this case, by uniting the tips of the fingers together in a single point, one is understood to be saying, “bring your ideas together, collect all your words together in one, or in brief, in one point, and tell me what is it you wish to say?” In short, “what are you talking about?” Mano in Fianco (Hands on hips): Putting the hands on hips expresses a variety of meanings. Authority, self-assertion. Not only among Neapolitans, but among peoples of all nations, placing the hands on the hips with the chest pushed out and the head held high or even tilted back a little represents someone who, with or without foundation, claims talent, power or superiority of any kind. Sovereigns, generals, heroes and other haughty people are commonly depicted in this posture. Scorn. A proud look while the hands are on the hips is enough to denote scorn for someone who has fixed upon with one’s eyes. Malicious detachment. Placing the hand on one’s hip, allowing one’s gaze to wander and maintaining an expression of

86 indifference on the face can serve as a way of making a show of one’s own malicious lack of interest. Morte (Death): The sign of the cross is made in the air with an extended hand. This gesture can be used to mean physical death, but it can also refer to moral or political death, since it can be said of someone that he ceases to exist, as far as society is concerned or so far as the estimation of others is concerned. If the benediction is accompanied by a dejected and pained facial expression, and one deals with someone who is gravely ill, physical death will be understood. If the person being talked about is someone who enjoys great favor or who has a very showy job, it will be understood that he no longer enjoys either the one or the other. Perfetto (Perfect, perfection): Fingertips drawn together and carried to the mouth, which is disposed as if for giving a kiss. The lips are held tightly closed, pushed forward a little. The fingers are brought close to them, but do not quite touch, and then they are moved away, as in throwing a kiss. The eyes, however, must be opened wide, indicating surprise, and after giving the kiss, the hand is opened, and then returned to any position one likes.

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Arthur Miller Chronology 1915 Arthur Aster Miller was born on October 17th in New York City; family lives at 45 West 110th Street. 1920-28 Attends Public School #24 in Harlem. 1923 Sees first play—a melodrama at the Schubert Theater. 1928 Bar-mitzvah at the Avenue M temple. Father’s business struggling and family move to Brooklyn, 1350 East 3rd Street. Attends James Madison High School. 1931 Delivery boy for local bakery before school and works for father’s business over summer vacation. 1933 Graduates from Abraham Lincoln High School. Registers for night school at City College, but quits after two weeks. 1933-34 Clerked in an auto-parts warehouse, where he was the only Jew employed and had his first real, personal experiences of American anti-Semitism. 1934 Enters University of Michigan in the fall to study journalism. Reporter and night editor on student paper, The Michigan Daily. 1936 Writes No Villain in six days and receives Hopwood Award in Drama. Transfers to an English major. 1938 Joins the Federal Theater Project in New York City to write radio plays and scripts, having turned down a much better paying offer to work as a scriptwriter for Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood. 1939 Federal Theater is shut down and has to go on relief. 1940 Travels to North Carolina to collect dialect speech for the folk division of the Library of Congress. Marries Mary Grace Slattery. Meets Clifford Odets in a second-hand bookstore. 1941 Takes extra job working nightshift as a ship fitter’s helper at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Writes other radio plays, Joel Chandler Harris, and Captain Paul. 1944 Daughter, Jane, is born. Having toured army camps to research for The Story of G.I. Joe (a film for which he wrote the initial draft screenplay, but later withdrew from project when he saw they would not let him write it

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his way), he publishes book about experience, Situation Normal. The Man Who Had All The Luck premiers on Broadway but closes after six performances (including 2 previews), though receives the Theater Guild National Award. 1947 All My Sons premiers and receives the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award. Son, Robert, is born. Goes to work for a short time in an inner city factory assembling beer boxes for minimum wage to stay in touch with his audience. Explores the Red Hook area and tries to get into the world of the longshoremen there and find out about Pete Panto, whose story would form the nucleus of his screenplay The Hook. 1948 Built himself the small Connecticut studio in which he wrote Death of a Salesman. Trip to Europe with Vinny Longhi where got sense of the Italian background he would use for the Carbones and their relatives, also met some Jewish death camp survivors held captive in a post-war tangle of bureaucracy. 1949 Death of a Salesman premiers and receives the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award, among others. New York Times publishes “Tragedy and the Common Man” (essay). Attends the pro-Soviet Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to chair an arts panel with Odets and Dmitri Shostakovich. 1950 Adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People premiers. The Hook fails to reach production due to pressure from HUAC. 1951 Meets Marilyn Monroe for the first time. 1952 Visits the Historical Society “Witch Museum” in Salem to research for The Crucible. 1953 The Crucible premiers and receives the Antoinette Perry Award and the Donaldson Award.

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1954 Asked to attend the Belgian premier of The Crucible, but unable to attend as denied passport by the US. 1955 The one-act A View from the Bridge premiers in a joint bill with A Memory of Two Mondays. HUAC pressured city officials to withdraw permission for Miller to make a film he’d been planning about New York juvenile delinquency. 1956 Lives in Nevada for six weeks in order to divorce Mary Slattery and gets the material for The Misfits. Marries Marilyn Monroe. Subpoenaed to appear before HUAC. Receives honorary Doctor of Human Letters (L.H.D.) from the University of Michigan. Goes to England with Monroe and meets Laurence Olivier. Revises A View from the Bridge into two acts for Peter Brook to produce in London, England. 1957 Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays published. Convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. 1958 United States Court of Appeals overturns his contempt conviction. Elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. 1959 Receives the Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. 1961 Divorces Marilyn Monroe. Sidney Lumet directs a movie version of A View from the Bridge. Mother, Augusta Miller, dies. 1962 Marries Inge Morath. Marilyn Monroe dies. Son, Daniel, born. 1963 Daughter, Rebecca, is born. 1964 After visiting the Mauthausen death camp with Inge, covered the Nazi trials in Frankfurt, Germany for the New York Herald Tribune. After the Fall and Incident at Vichy premier. 1965 Elected president of International P.E.N., the international literary organization, and went to Yugoslavian conference. Ulu Grosbard’s Off- Broadway production of A View from the Bridge. 1966 First sound recording of A View from the Bridge. Father, Isidore Miller dies.

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1969 In Russia published (reportage with photographs by Inge Morath). Visited Czechoslovakia to show support for writers there and briefly met Václav Havel. Retired as President of P.E.N. 1970 Miller’s works are banned in the Soviet Union as a result of his work to free dissident writers. 1972 The Creation of the World and Other Business premiers. Attends the Democratic National Convention in Miami as a delegate. 1977 Miller petitions the Czech government to halt arrests of dissident writers. The Archbishop’s Ceiling premiers in Washington, D.C. 1978 The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, edited by Robert A. Martin, published. Belgian National Theatre does 25th anniversary production of The Crucible, and this time Miller can attend. 1979 Chinese Encounters published (reportage with Inge Morath). 1981 The second volume of Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays published. 1983 Directs Death of a Salesman at the People’s Art Theater in Beijing, the People’s Republic of China. 1984 Salesman in Beijing is published. Miller receives Kennedy Center Honors for his lifetime achievement. 1985 Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman airs on CBS to an audience of 25 million. Miller goes to Turkey with Harold Pinter for International P.E.N. Serves as a delegate at a meeting of Soviet and American writers in Vilnius, Lithuania, where tries to persuade the Soviets to stop persecuting writers. 1986 One of fifteen writers and scientists invited to the Soviet Union to conference with Mikhail Gorbachov to discuss Soviet policies. 1987 Publishes Timebends: A Life (autobiography), which appeared as a Book- of the-Month Club popular selection. 1991 Receives Mellon Bank Award for lifetime achievement in the humanities. Television production of Clara and interview on A&E. South Bank Show television special on Miller.

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1995 Receives William Inge Festival Award for distinguished achievement in American theater. Tributes to the playwright on the occasion of his eightieth birthday are held in England and America. 1996 Receives the Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award. Revised and expanded book of Theater Essays, edited by Steven R. Centola, is published. 1998 Major revival of A View from the Bridge wins two Tony Awards. Is named as the Distinguished Inaugural Senior Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. 1999 Death of a Salesman revived on Broadway for the play’s 50th anniversary and wins Tony for Best Revival of a Play. 2000 There are major 85th birthday celebrations for Miller held at University of Michigan and at the Arthur Miller Center at UEA, England. Echoes Down the Corridor is published (collected essays from 1944-2000). 2001 Untitled, a previously unpublished one act written for Václav Havel, appears in New York. Miller is awarded a NEH Fellowship and the John H. Finley Award for Exemplary Service to New York City. On Politics and the Art of Acting is published (essay). 2002 Inge Morath dies. Awarded the International Spanish Award: Premio PrÌncipe de Asturias de las Letras. 2003 Awarded the Jerusalem Prize. Brother, Kermit Miller, dies on October 17th. 2005 Miller dies of heart failure in his Connecticut home on 10th February. Memorial Services held in Roxbury and NY.

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Appendix B (From Eddie’s Casebook)

Excerpt from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” By Walt Whitman

VI

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meager? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil, I too knitted the old knot of contrariety. Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me. The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting, Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest, Was called by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing, Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat, Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, Yet never told them a word, Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping, Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

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Appendix C (Cast Handout) Sicilian Peasant Culture

• “Between 1901 and 1911 more than 80 percent of all Italians entering New York were from the semi-feudal region of southern Italy. One study estimated that three-fourths of the males in this group were of peasant origin.”

—From Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront by Howard Kimeldorf

Home and Family • “The head of the family is an autocrat: his will is law, and it is carried out on the spot, without comment, unless the housewife sometimes grumbles a little to herself…and when the husband does not say anything when factual evidence shows he is wrong, he won’t admit he is wrong because he does not intend to lessen his authority in any way.”

• “The housewife, too, has her portion of absolute domain; the domestic affairs are hers, and her husband does not interfere with them, not does anyone else of the family.”

• “The man goes to seek his daily labor, and goes to pick up his pay on Sunday. He keeps for himself what is needed for his farming tools, when he must take them to the smith, and the remainder he scrupulously hands over to his wife. She diligently, first of all, prepares the bread he needs to take on working days; the rest she uses for the family and other needs.”

• “A love that comes first from profit, then becomes an intense heartfelt love, is that which the peasants have for orphans. In cases of an absolute lack of offspring…this love is lavished instead upon one of those unfortunate beings whose blameworthy or cruel parents cast away, and charity takes it in, feeds, cloths, and rears it.…I shall say even that they treat the orphan with more loving vigilance, perhaps because they feel compassions for it.”

• “‘My little home! My little hearth! My home, mother mine! My home, my home, you are both kingdom and abbey!’ With these three sayings the countryman as a son expresses the worship of his own hearth. He exalts the inestimable treasure of domestic peace and joy. His foremost and greatest ambition is to own a home; and no peasant gets married without first preparing a nest of his own.”

Women • “The housewife is no less prompt than her cristiano (husband) in getting up from bed. It is not yet dawn and she is already tidying up the house, sweeping, dressing the children…and all this not silently, but chatting and joking loudly

96 with her neighbors likewise engaged, or humming in half tone some traditional tune or some little religious song.”

• “Very well known and proverbial is the jealousy of the Sicilians for their own women…Their honor, they demand to be spotless in all meanings of the word…Woe betide anyone who stains the honor of a peasant, of his wife, of his daughter, his sister, his mother! Vendetta descends….To avenge offended honor is a duty; it is commanded by nature and God Himself. Let a man do his own avenging; a stain on his honor is not washed with a judiciary reparation, but only with blood.”

• “The peasant women, generally, are very modest, scrupulously faithful to their husbands and resist firmly any solicitations, flattery, or offers, ardent as they are by nature and however much their condition forces them to prolonged abstinence both of food and love.”

Other Issues • “Fear, a love of quiet living, and repugnance to getting mixed up in any way with Justice and its agents (of which they have a holy terror) counsel and determine the peasant to excessive prudence, to resolute reserve…against which is blunted and broken the…tenacious ability of an investigating magistrate.”

• “Although he does not feel love in his heart for them…the peasant always acts full of polite regard, obedient, and obsequious, to those in high places, whether for their power and wealth or for their personal dignity and merit.”

• “Why does the peasant steal? ‘We steal’ (he says) ‘because we are needy, and when there is need. The Lord himself is the one who has told us: Help yourselves as I help you. Theft for an impelling need is not theft; it is not punishable as such, provided that it does not exceed the needed quantity….Besides, whom do we rob? The king, the rich man, the man we serve. Now, to rob the king, our master—that is not theft, it is vindication, our right….The earth belongs to us who work it, not the rich man who owns it because he was quicker to run and take possession of it.’”

• “An active and diligent worker the whole year, temperate in eating, free from city vices, patient, resigned, respectful, honest, and religious in his own special manner, the peasant aspires only to live with less discomfort and possibly greater ease, but without leaving the class he was born in.”

—From Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants edited and translated by Rosalie N. Norris

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Appendix D (Photograph)

“Light and Shadow Down Under the Manhattan Bridge”

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Appendix E (Photograph)

Set Model by Justin Townsend

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Selected Bibliography

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The Arthur Miller Society. A Brief Chronology of Arthur Miller’s Life and Works. http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/life.html.

Barbalet, J.M. Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Batstone, David, and Eduardo Mendieta, eds. The Good Citizen. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Battaglia, Letizia. Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom: Photographs of Sicily. New York: Aperture, 1999.

Berkeley, Anne. “Myths and Metaphors from the Mall: Critical Teaching and Everyday Life in Undergraduate Theatre Studies.” Theatre Topics 11, no. 1 (March 2001): 19-29.

Berkeley, Anne. “Phronesis or Techne? Theatre Studies as Moral Agency.” Research in Drama Education 10, no. 2 (June 2005): 213-227.

Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre: Ninth Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003.

Brooklyn Public Library. http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org.

Brooklyn Public Library. Worklore.net. http://www.worklore.net.

Campbell, Nancy D. “Credible Performances: The Performativity of Science Studies.” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 3 (June 2004): 433-442.

102 Character Counts! Coalition. The Six Pillars of Character. Josephson Institute. http://www.charactercounts.org/defsix.htm.

ComAttack. Online Musik Magazin. http://www.omm.de/veranstaltungen/musiktheater20022003/bilder/HA-a-view- from-the-bridge1.jpg.

Crary, Ryland Wesley ed. Education for Democratic Citizenship. Washington: National Council for the Social Studies, 1952.

Cristaldi Communications. Sicilian Culture. http://www.sicilianculture.com/index.htm.

Davis, Howard. GreatBuildings.com. Kevin Matthews and Artifice, Inc. http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi- bin/gbi.cgi/Brooklyn_Bridge.html/cid_2161150.gbi.

Della Femina, Jerry, and Charles Sopkin. An Italian Grows in Brooklyn. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1978.

Dogançay, Burhan. Bridge of Dreams: the Rebirth of the Brooklyn Bridge. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999.

Dolan, Jill. “Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and Civic Engagement in Theatre and Performance Studies.” Theatre Topics 11, no. 1 (March 2001): 1-17.

Ellis, Anne. “The Art of Community Conversation.” Theatre Topics 10, no. 2 (2000): 91- 100.

Evans, Walker. Many Are Called. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Feuerstein, Gary. Brooklyn Bridge Gallery. http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/bbridge/bbgallery/bbgallery.htm.

Frommer, Myrna Katz and Harvey. It Happened in Brooklyn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993.

Gabaccia, Donna. Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

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106 Photos from Heidi Nelson’s Northeastern Production follow--