DOCSLIB.ORG

The Possession of Suzanlori Parks

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Possession of Suzanlori Parks 8/25/2016 American Theatre - Archives October 2000 HOME ABOUT SUPPORT CONTACT LOG IN Search The Possession of Suzan­Lori Parks By listening to "the figures that take up residence inside me," the playwright resurrects a lost and dangerous history­­and dares audiences to venture with her into its depths By Shawn­Marie Garrett Suzan­Lori Parks began writing novels at the age of five. But it wasn't until she first heard voices that she realized she might be cursed and blessed with a case of possession­­in both senses of that word. Parks knew that she possessed something, but she also knew that it possessed her. It was 1983. She was working on a short story called "The Wedding Pig" for a writing class she was taking with James Baldwin at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. Suddenly she had the sense that the people she was writing about were in the room with her, "standing right behind me, talking. Not telling the story, but acting it out­­doing it. It was not me," she says, "not the voice of confidence or the voice of doubt. It was outside of me. And all the stories I wrote for this class were like that." Parks intended from the beginning that her writing should be read aloud. So in Baldwin's workshops she would speak her stories, playing all the characters, recreating her creative process, moving naturally from writing to (or back to) performance. Observing her, Baldwin soon posed the obvious question: "Why don't you try writing plays?" Parks had never done theatre in high school or in college because, well, she thought it was "dumb," and most theatre people turned her off. But this was James Baldwin talking. "Someone I respected was telling me what to do­­in a good way," she says. "It wasn't some Whosey­Whatsit who runs La Fuddy Duddy Playhouse in Whosey­Whatsitville." (Experience has instilled in Parks a healthy contempt for dim­witted dramaturgy, workshops and readings that go nowhere, and the cookie­cutter mentality of conventional "play development.") Baldwin's suggestion inspired her to complete her first play, The Sinners' Place, during her senior year, and a small­college territorial battle ensued. The play earned Parks honors in her English major even as it was rejected for production by the theatre department on the grounds that "You can't put dirt onstage! That's not a play!" Dirt Onstage would turn out to be something of a theme for Parks, who has gone on since her Mount Holyoke days to become one of the most intriguing and challenging young playwrights of the contemporary American stage. Even The Sinners' Place, though "only a first try at writing," she said in a 1996 interview, "had all of the things in it that I'm obsessed with now. Like memory and family and history and the past." And, of course, "a lot of dirt on stage which was being dug at." In her subsequent history plays, Parks's process, as she describes it, was one of digging and listening­­for action, characters and words­­rather than of trying to shape them from the outside according to the more familiar dramaturgical model that "cleanly ARCS," as she wrote in a later essay. But then, a play that "arcs" moves, whether with dread or anticipation, towards an inevitable future. Parks's history plays, by contrast, try to make contact with an unknown past, and so require a different process, a different structure­­and, yes, occasionally, dirt. "I'm obsessed with resurrecting," she said in an interview published around the time of the appearance of perhaps her most provocative play, Venus, "with bringing up the dead...and hearing their stories as they come into my head." The blow of Parks's early rejection at Mount Holyoke was softened somewhat when Mary McHenry of the college's English department slipped Parks a copy of Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. Along with Ntozake Shange, who devised the "choreopoem" as theatre text, the adventurous Kennedy showed Parks that she could do anything she wanted on stage. Parks had already learned from her favorite fiction writers, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, that she could do anything she wanted with language, and that character and feeling needn't be sacrificed at the high altar of formal experimentation. "Surface difficulty, daring, order, inventiveness and passion­­ writing should have all of these," Parks says. But mostly (and characteristically) Parks approved of these great modernist writers' chutzpah: "I'm fascinated with what they were allowed to do, I guess," she told an interviewer in 1995. "What Joyce allowed himself to do, what Beckett allowed himself to do, and Woolf...what they got away with." From the beginning, Parks wanted to dare as much, to offer as much to her audiences as these writers offered to their readers­­and to get away with it. Unlike many young writers, she was also up to the challenge. In his evaluation of her performance in his class, Baldwin described Parks as "an utterly astounding and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time"­­and this was before she'd had a single play staged or an essay published. Given her ambition and her admiration for "difficult" writing, only one question remained: Were American theatres and their audiences ready to dare as much for her? 2. Politics Sometimes courageous, sometimes cowardly, always embattled, the American theatre, at the moment Parks emerged, found itself smack in the middle of the so­called "culture wars" and the battle over the reconfiguraton of the National Endowment for the Arts. Within the theatre, debates raged (and still rage) about how multiculturalism should work, not just in theory but in practice. By 1989, the year Parks had her first professional production, black playwrights and actors and "nontraditional" casting practices were mostly "in"; black directors, designers and administrators were, and still are, mostly "out." Despite the increasing diversification of the American repertoire in the decade since then, there persists in many quarters a mentality, however well­meaning, that ghettoizes African­American drama, and in so doing oversimplifies its formal variety and implies that white and black theatre (and by extension white and black history) have nothing to do with each other: they remain separate but unequal. Separatism has frequently cropped up as both a white and a black utopian dream. Parks, more than any other recent writer­­more than August Wilson or other polemicists "fired," as Wilson has written, in the "kiln" of the '60s­­shows, mostly through her sense of humor, exactly how and why trying to make black history a minor subplot of a white story is laughable. Or laughable and painful, to be more precise: a stinging joke with real­world consequences, like the joke of "scientific" racial classification itself, a perverse fiction made fact in the 19th century by misinterpreters of Darwin, "proved" through phrenology and other invented sciences, written as history, and then denounced in the early part of the century by African­American intellectuals. More recently, though, race, as well as gender and ethnicity, have been reworked into the more individualistic politics of "identity"­­a word to conjure with at the time Parks was building her reputation. https://www.tcg.org/publications/at/2000/parks.cfm 1/5 8/25/2016 American Theatre - Archives October 2000 Parks's appearance on the theatrical scene seemed to jibe perfectly with the American theatre's changing policies in the '90s: its 11th­hour grant proposals emphasizing its dedication to multiculturalism, its suddenly overriding priority to rescue its ever­sinking bottom line by reaching out to "new" audiences. Yet this seemingly perfect timing turned out to be a mixed blessing. Indubitably, Parks's career took off fast. Her second play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, written in 1989 when Parks was 28, received ecstatic reviews when it debuted at the Brooklyn experimental outpost BACA Downtown. It won her an Obie, and Mel Gussow of the New York Times left Brooklyn so impressed he called Parks "the year's most promising playwright." Since then, Parks has benefited from numerous grants and has become an artistic associate of the Yale Repertory Theatre, which has produced three of her plays, including two premieres. She now has an artistic home at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, which has housed three of her plays so far and will produce another, Topdog/Underdog, this season. All richly deserved. Yet the love affair between Parks and the American theatre has, like most love affairs, been complicated. Words like "diversity" and "multiculturalism" sound good in publications, but the truth is, many theatres are still afraid to take what they consider to be financial risks and often assume, a priori, that audiences will bristle at unfamiliar or marginal work. "Marginal": a code word for formally experimental or "culturally specific" plays. According to marketing departments, Parks's are both. The "surface difficulty" and "daring" of Parks's first two history plays, Imperceptible Mutabilities and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, did appeal strongly to a small yet unpredictable assortment of theatre artists, audiences and critics who could see how Parks was inventing new ways of shaping dramatic character and structure, and could hear the originality and feel the physical impact of what she was doing with words. "Her voice has already made a difference on our stage," dramaturg Laurence Maslon of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., told a reporter in 1993. "If we can't hear her, there's nothing wrong with her voice, just something wrong with our ears." "She sits all alone amongst her generation, peerless," Parks's fellow playwright Han Ong maintained the next year, at the time of the premiere of Parks's third history play, The America Play.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Colonizing Force of Hawthorne's the Scarlet Letter
    Laura “A” for Atlantic: Doyle The Colonizing Force of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter In The Scarlet Letter, colonization just happens or, more accurately, has just happened. We might recall, by contrast, how Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Hope Leslie elaborately narrates the sociopolitical process of making an Indian village into a native English spot. Hawthorne eclipses this drama of settlement. Although Haw- thorne, like Sedgwick, sets his plot of sexual crisis in the early colo- nial period of Stuart political crisis and English Civil War, he places these events in the distant backdrop, as remote from his seventeenth- century characters as his nineteenth-century readers. Meanwhile, he recasts Sedgwick’s whimsical heroine, Hope Leslie, as a sober, already arrived, and already fallen woman. In beginning from this already fallen moment, Hawthorne keeps off- stage both the “fall” of colonization and its sexual accompaniment. He thereby obscures his relationship to a long Atlantic literary and politi- cal history. But if we attend to the colonizing processes submerged in The Scarlet Letter, we discover the novel’s place in transatlantic his- tory—a history catalyzed by the English Civil War and imbued with that conflict’s rhetoric of native liberty. We see that Hawthorne’s text partakes of an implictly racialized, Atlantic ur-narrative, in which a people’s quest for freedom entails an ocean crossing and a crisis of bodily ruin. That is, The Scarlet Letter fits a formation reaching from Oroonoko, Moll Flanders, Charlotte Temple, and Olaudah
    [Show full text]
  • Gender, Class, and Identity in Alice Walker's the Color
    European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies Vol.7, No.1, pp.16-27, January 2019 ___Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK (www.eajournals.org) GENDER, CLASS, AND IDENTITY IN ALICE WALKER’S THE COLOR PURPLE AND SUZAN-LORI PARKS’ IN THE BLOOD Manal Abdullah Ahmad Batobara1 and Mohammad Saleem2 1Department of European Languages and Literature, University of Jeddah, Jeddah, KSA 2Department of English, King Abdulaziz University, Rabigh, KSA ABSTRACT: The genesis of suffering of Afro-American women has multilayered factors, i.e., race, class, gender, etc. But the struggle of these women is still underrepresented. The present paper looks at the representation of Afro-American women in the fictions of two Afro-American women writers – Alice Walker and Suzan-Lori Parks – to investigate the gender, class, and race dynamics in their works. Their selected works were analyzed from a comparative perspective with a view to highlight the plight of Afro-American women, and to look for possible convergence in the emancipated portrayal of their juxtaposed characters. The thematic stress and characterization of the protagonists in the selected works suggests that oppression of black women can be challenged only if they realize their own strength, in the bonds of sisterhood, for instance, or in the refusal to submission to oppressive conditions. Superficially, the writers have come up with juxtaposed images of black women – Alice Walker's Celie victimized because of her poverty, race and gender, while Suzan-Lori Parks' Hester allowing herself to be exploited by men, resorting to filicide in the end. But, at a deeper level both the writers chide black woman for their lack of strength to put a bold face against their oppressors.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender-Specific Manifestations of Hysteria, Chlorosis, & Consumption
    Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects Insane in the Brain, Blood, and Lungs: Gender- Specific aM nifestations of Hysteria, Chlorosis, & Consumption in 19th-Century Literature Anna P. Scanlon Marquette University Recommended Citation Scanlon, Anna P., "Insane in the Brain, Blood, and Lungs: Gender-Specific aM nifestations of Hysteria, Chlorosis, & Consumption in 19th-Century Literature" (2019). Dissertations (2009 -). 884. https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/884 INSANE IN THE BRAIN, BLOOD, AND LUNGS: GENDER-SPECIFIC MANIFESTATIONS OF HYSTERIA, CHLOROSIS, & CONSUMPTION IN 19TH-CENTURY LITERATURE By Anna Scanlon A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin June 2019 ABSTRACT INSANE IN THE BRAIN, BLOOD, AND LUNGS: GENDER-SPECIFIC MANIFESTATIONS OF HYSTERIA, CHLOROSIS, & CONSUMPTION IN 19TH-CENTURY LITERATURE ANNA SCANLON MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY, 2019 This dissertation examines literary and medical texts from throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to better understand prevailing attitudes about gender and disease. The project traces the progression of three diseases – consumption, chlorosis, and hysteria – throughout the long nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the stereotypes and prevailing medical notions of each illness. In general, this work examines the influence of lovesickness, female-patient/male-doctor dynamics, and pathology on the endemic or epidemic nature of each disease. In particular, the first three chapters of this project study tuberculosis – or consumption as it was called in the nineteenth century – and the ways in which society presumed this illness manifested either through the female’s beauty or spirituality.
    [Show full text]
  • The Dramatic Writing of Suzan-Lori Parks As Liberatory Critical Pedagogy." (2012)
    University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2012 Theory, praxis and transformation : the dramatic writing of Suzan- Lori Parks as liberatory critical pedagogy. Tamika Keene University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Keene, Tamika, "Theory, praxis and transformation : the dramatic writing of Suzan-Lori Parks as liberatory critical pedagogy." (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 731. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/731 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THEORY, PRAXIS AND TRANSFORMATION: THE DRAMATIC WRITING OF SUZAN-LORI PARKS AS LIBERATORY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY By Tamika Keene B.A., SUNY Albany, 2010 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Department of Pan African Studies University of Louisville Louisville, KY May 2012 THEORY, PRAXIS AND TRANSFORMATION: THE DRAMATIC WRITING OF SUZAN-LORI PARKS AS LIBERATORY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY By Tamika Keene B.A., SUNY Albany, 2010 A Thesis Approved on April 18, 2012 by the following Thesis Committee: Dr. Joy Carew Thesis Director Dr. Lundeana Thomas Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • T O P D O G /U N D E R D
    STUDENT MATINEE GUIDE Marin Theatre Company T 12/13 Student Matinees O P D O G / U N D E R D Bowman Wright (Lincoln) and Biko Eisen-Martin (Booth) in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog O G visit marintheatre.org/dramapedia for more information about our plays Marin Theatre Company Performance Guides are intended to enrich your theatre experience by offering insight to the play and inspiring intellectual discovery through key background information. The guide often offers notes on historical or cultural context as well as interviews with the artists about productions and scripts. We hope the guide JASSON MINADAKIS | ARTISTIC DIRECTOR enhances your enjoyment of the performance. SANDRA WEINGART | INTERIM MANAGING DIRECTOR DAUNIELLE RASMUSSEN | INTERIM DIRECTOR OF www.marintheatre.org | EDUCATION 415.388.5200 x3310 STUDENT MATINEES AT MTC At MTC, we believe that theatre offers our community the chance to share in the act of imaginative storytelling – live, in person, in the moment. For audiences and performers alike, theatre is a creative act, and we believe that sharing in a creative act inspires personal growth and brings people together. MTC's Expanded Programs open up opportunities for people of all ages and all communities to participate in the joyous, challenging, and inspiring process of theatre. The Student Matinee series is a key component of MTC's Expanded Programs and a fantastic opportunity for young people in Marin and the Bay Area. MTC's Student Matinees are special weekday morning performances of plays we're presenting in our regular season – the same plays that are delighting audiences, earning rave reviews, and contributing to the cultural fabric of our community.
    [Show full text]
  • Early American Adaptations
    1 Contemporary Adaptations of Early American Texts/ Authors/Topics Compiled by Zabelle Stodola from Postings to the SEA Discussion List, July-August 2011 A bullet marks each person’s posting(s), sometimes with related additions of my own. When someone provided a particularly detailed response, I have identified that person at the beginning of his/her post. I have kept all the original responses, so if you want me to tell you who posted what, please contact me offlist and I can provide that information. The order is moreorless according to when the responses were posted to the earam list. Since so many responses came in, I have not checked for accuracy and I have not deleted some duplicate suggestions. Thanks to all. Enjoy! • Salem Witchcraft documents; The Scarlet Letter (and the teen film Easy A partly inspired by it as well as Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Fucking A); Hawthorne short stories and various aspects of Puritan history; The Crucible of course; and Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba • (From Steve Thomas) Two additions. First, was Rita Dove’s poem “David Walker” mentioned already? Second, a couple years ago I think I sent to this list-serve a list of contemporary Scarlet Letters (and by contemporary, I vaguely mean stuff published after the 1970s). I can’t seem to find that old e-mail, but I will include the list below and update it. In addition to this list below, Leland Person gave a presentation at a Hawthorne conference a few years back about references to Scarlet Letter in mainstream media.
    [Show full text]
  • ENG 402: Advanced Placement English Literature & Composition Summer Reading
    ENG 402: Advanced Placement English Literature & Composition Summer Reading Dear students, Welcome to Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition! You have chosen a challenging, but rewarding path. This course is for students with intellectual curiosity, a strong work ethic, and a desire to learn. I know all of you have been well prepared for the “Wonderful World of Literature” in which we will delve into a wide selection of fiction, drama, and poetry. In order to prepare for the course, you will complete a Summer Reading Assignment prior to returning to school in the fall. Your summer assignment has been designed with the following goals in mind: to help you build confidence and competence as readers of complex texts; to give you, when you enter class in the fall, an immediate basis for discussion of literature – elements like narrative viewpoint, symbolism, plot structure, point of view, etc.; to set up a basis for comparison with other works we will read this year; to provide you with the beginnings of a repertoire of works you can write about on the AP Literature Exam next spring; and last but not least, to enrich your mind and stimulate your imagination. If you have any questions about the summer reading assignment (or anything else pertaining to next year), please feel free to email me ([email protected]). I hope you will enjoy and learn from your summer reading. I am looking forward to seeing you in class next year! Have a lovely summer! Mrs. Yee Read: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C.
    [Show full text]
  • A Dictionary of Biblical Allusions in the Scarlet Letter
    ,- A Dictionary of Biblical Allusions in The Scarlet Letter An Honors Thesis (HONRS 499) by Kory 1. Watson Dr. Donald Gilman, Advisor Ball State University Muncie, Indiana May 1997 Graduation date: August 1998 ._ I: - TABLE OF CONTENTS i) ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. 2 ii) INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 3 iii) DICTIONARY OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES (in order of textual appearance) ....................................................................................................... 6 iv) INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES (in alphabetical order) .................................................................................................................... 39 v) REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 44 - 1 - I. ABSTRACT Biblical allusions resonate in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. In general, Hawthorne does not simply mention a biblical figure or event, but often reworks it in order to deepen the meaning of the text. This volume is a catalogue which lists the allusions both alphabetically, and in order oftheir appearance in the text. Its purpose is to elucidate some of the multivalent meanings inherent in this novel. - 2 - II. INTRODUCTION Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) is undoubtedly one of American literature's most studied
    [Show full text]
  • Hebrews 10:5-7 a Body Thou Hast Prepared for Me I. Our Text
    Hebrews 10:5-7 A Body Thou Hast Prepared for Me I. Our Text – Hebrews 10:5-7 Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’” II. Intro A. I think most of you all are familiar with Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne bears a child outside of marriage, and it is clear to all that she committed adultery. She is tried, sent to jail for a period of time and then upon her release required to wear a Scarlet A upon her dress which marks her as an adulteress. In the meantime, the Rev Arthur Dimmesdale, the one with whom she committed adultery, is not discovered as the adulterer nor does he reveal it, but rather goes about his pastoral calling and is revered by his congregation. 1. Toward the end of the book Hester hears that the preacher will be walking through the woods one afternoon so she goes out into the woods to meet up with him as he travels home. It had been 7 years since the affair and except for a single meeting one evening on the scaffold where Hester and her daughter were required to stand for a period of time where she was scorned by the town when she was released from jail, Hester and the preacher had not really talked.
    [Show full text]
  • Parks' in the Blood: Book About African American Woman Living in Poverty
    www.ccsenet.org/ells English Language and Literature Studies Vol. 2, No. 2; June 2012 Parks’ In The Blood: An Image of a Black Woman Who Is More Sinned against than Sinning Ashraf A. Hadia Faculty of Arts, Assiut University, Egypt Faculty of Education and Arts, Northern Border University, KSA Tel: 966-599-359-590 E-mail: [email protected] Received: April 13, 2012 Accepted: April 30, 2012 Published: June 1, 2012 doi:10.5539/ells.v2n2p105 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v2n2p105 Abstract This paper seeks to reveal how Parks managed to present an image of a black woman who is brutally victimized by the social system through analyzing her play, In the Blood (1999. In that play, the social ills of hypocrisy, violence, discrimination, and sexual harassment are strongly emphasized. In a satirical style, the author could show how society blames and punishes those who are mainly created by its different own institutions and organizations at the same time. Although she does not give solutions, she calls for a reform of these agencies to let all people, whether poor or rich, receive the same level of societal care. Keywords: Black woman, Hester La Negrita, Slut, Social institutions, Poverty, Hypocrisy 1. Introduction As a Black person writing for theatre, what is theatre good for? What can theatre do for us? We can tell it like it is; tell it as it was; tell it as it could be. In my plays I do all 3; and the writing is rich because we are not an impoverished people, but a wealthy people fallen on hard times.
    [Show full text]
  • Kadir Has University Graduate School of Social Sciences
    KADIR HAS UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES A Journey To The Terrible Enlightenment in Suzan-Lori Parks' In the Blood and The Fucking A American Culture and Literature M.A. Thesis NALAN EMİRSOY May, 2013 A Journey To The Terrible Enlightenment in Suzan-Lori Parks' In the Blood and The Fucking A NALAN EMİRSOY Advisor Assist.Prof.Selhan Savcıgil Endres Submitted to the Graduate School of Social Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of M.A. in Literature in American Culture and Literature KADIR HAS UNIVERSITY May, 2013 “I, Nalan Emirsoy, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.” Nalan Emirsoy iii ABSTRACT This thesis will address a comparative investigation of the portrayal of the sin, guilt, immoral act, fault and the search for salvation in the embodiment of the three different female characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter and Suzan-Lori Parks’ plays In the Blood and The Fucking A. Contemporary playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is associated with what is called “revisionary” artistic style in which she believes that revising the history of literature is a tool for constructing the new literature. For this reason, she has a tendency to use historical figures and refer to famous old writers within the framework of her “revisionary” and “experimental” theatre. This idea is the reason why understanding Nathaniel Hawthorne’s character of Hester Prynne is pertinent when analyzing the characters Hester La Negrita and Hester Smith within the texts In the Blood and The Fucking A.
    [Show full text]
  • Hillbilly Tragedy What’S Not Playing in American Theatres in the 2017–18 Season
    Hillbilly Tragedy What’s Not Playing in American Theatres in the 2017–18 Season Paul David Young n November 2016, the forgotten, un- or underemployed, white, Christian, heterosexual, working class male of Middle America elected Donald Trump, so Igoes the hypothesis. Allegedly, pollsters failed to detect this group and account for its views in presidential prognostication, and the Democrats had “lost” the election because they likewise did not heed its cries of pain. Before announcing the 2017–18 season, American theatres had had the luxury of several post-election months to consider the street protests and counter- demonstrations, the debates about the legitimacy of the election, and the NPR listening tours devoted to the neglected white Christian working-class straight male in the heartland. Had the “mainstream” or “fake” news media (as the right prefers to call everything other than Fox News and Breitbart) been misled by its alleged “liberal bias” into ignoring the anger of this key slice of the American electorate? Had American theatre similarly ignored this demographic group? And if so, would American theatre respond to the election and correct this omission? In theory, theatre should adapt quickly to respond to such events. To find out, I undertook a survey of the 2017–18 season. Before I began my research, I felt confident that there were already many plays circulating about this supposedly forgotten figure in the American political landscape, and that American theatre had surely jumped in to take a closer look after the election. I was completely wrong. Perhaps I had been misled into believing that American theatre was addressing the issues of this group because of a limited number of plays.
    [Show full text]