Stages of Whiteness: Marking Power and Privilege in U.S. and German Popular Performance © 2019 By Christopher Martin M.F.A, University of Arkansas, 2007 B.A., Oral Roberts University, 2004 Submitted to the graduate degree program in the Department of Theatre and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ! Chair: Nicole Hodges Persley ! Jane Barnette ! Henry Bial ! David Roediger ! Rebecca Rovit Date defended: June 18, 2019 !ii The dissertation committee for Christopher Martin certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Stages of Whiteness: Marking Power and Privilege in U.S. and German Popular Performance ! Chair: Nicole Hodges Persley Date approved: August 14, 2019 !iii Abstract Stages of Whiteness: Marking Power and Privilege in U.S. and German Popular Performance examines white, male playwrights, television evangelists, and game show hosts and producers on what I am defining as three “performance stages” found within 21st century American and German popular theatre and entertainment. These performances have remained unmarked as white to white people; they remain opaque to them and have persisted into this century as spaces not affected by constructions of race. They remain “just performances.” The dissertation explains how everyday people— audiences— learn to see, hear, and protect whiteness as a universal subject position, as represented through the patterns of storytelling, narrative structure, and binaries of winning and losing. Each “performance stage” has specific audiences that encapsulate lower, middle and upper-class white consumers. These stages, I contend, are used to distribute narratives that warn new audiences against the changing racial, economic, and socio-cultural conditions that have challenged white male patriarchy. This project is a result of four trips to Germany to visit theatre spaces in Berlin, multiple visits to New York archives and theatre spaces, a visit to Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church in Houston, Texas, and a visit to Los Angeles to attend tapings of game shows, including The Price is Right, on which I was a contestant. Methodologically, as I engage with archives and live performance, I lean upon auto-ethnography where I use my own subject position as a white, Queer man from Southeastern, Pennsylvania to see these places anew and to describe how whiteness, once invisible to me in work as a theater artist, emerging scholar and consumer, became racialized to me as “white.” I am marking my position as a white, Queer male to !iv unsettle impulses towards objectivity and universality associated with white male playwrights and their stories which dominate American and German theater landscapes . In addition to my own subject position, I analyze these performances through theories of race and performance and dramatic analysis. The dissertation identifies comparable sites in theater, religious television programming, and game shows in the U.S. and Germany that source their values in tropes from the Germanic Enlightenment. I track how totalizing Enlightenment binaries of good and bad, inside and outside, God and the Devil, and ultimately winning and losing migrate across national borders and have become reproduced and preserved in new spaces. !v Acknowledgements First and most importantly, I want to thank my family for their ongoing support and encouragement. To my Mom, your words, “Oh don’t worry, I know you’ll finish your writing,” just as I was preparing to leave for Germany in the summer of 2018, remained with me over the past year and sustained me when I felt stuck and uncertain. To my Grammom, who is no longer with us, thank you for your words and belief that I “will find my way.” To my Grandmother, whose Grandfather only spoke German, thank you for your enthusiasm in our shared interest of our family that came before us. To my Dad, thank you for your thoughtful contributions when I needed it most. To my two sisters, thank you for being readily available to discuss all of the “wins and loses” I’ve faced over the past handful of years. Conceptually, I am deeply grateful to my dissertation chair. Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley, Thank you for seeing the best in my work and academic interests. There have always remained opportunities for critique, but you have always been generous, kind, and saw my project long before I did. To the rest of my committee, Dr. Jane Barnette, Dr. Henry Bial, Dr. David Roediger, and Dr. Rebecca Rovit, thank you for your support from my time in your classrooms to this final project. Thank you to friends, peers, and mentors who have gone through this process before me. Thank you Dr. Rachel Blackburn, Dr. Jeffrey Coleman, Dr. Amanda Dawson, Dr. Sonia Desai, Dr. Rana Esfandiary, Dr. Agena Farmer, Dr. Gary Garrison, Dr. Bryce Lease, Dr. Steve Peterson, Dr. Gina Sandi Diaz, Dr. Will Shüler, Dr. Greg Stone, and Dr. Andrea Walker. For their financial support, I want to thank the Department of Theatre at the University of Kansas, Kathy Pryor, KU Theatre Business Manager, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), The KU School of the Arts Travel Fund, and The Price is Right, for !vi whose random, lucky, and very timely financial intervention allowed me to spend six months living and researching in Germany. Finally, I would like to thank all of you who have opened your homes in the States and abroad to me this past year as I have been traveling and finishing this project. Thank you to Ron Asraf, Andrea Bos, Daniel Carolan, Doris and Michael Göbel, Jessica and John Haworth, Mandel Ilagan and Phil Berman, Rui Leonardo, Lindsay and Steve McKee, Jacqui Moore, Mohi Moradi, Lisa Rabe, Katharina and Jeremy Redcay, Andrew Smock, and Jeanne Wheatley Wilson. (SFX: Grand orchestral music sendoff) !vii Table of Contents Introduction .....................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 – “All of the Lights”: Enlightenment Ails and White Loss on US and German Theatre Stages .......................................................................................................................................xxxiii Chapter 2 — Weißer Jesus/White Jesus? Deconstructing the Stages of U.S. and German Christian Evangelical Evangelists ...........................................................................................lxxxvi Chapter 3 – Show Me the Money: Staging Winners on US and German Game Shows ........cxxviii Conclusion – Winners and Losers: An Imagined Future ..........................................................clxxv Endnotes ................................................................................................................................clxxxiii Bibliography ................................................................................................................................207 !1 Introduction Like many white, Western Europeans who arrived to North America, they needed a way to stabilize their way of life and consolidate, or re-consolidate, their power. Ta-Nehisi Coates contends, in Between the World and Me, that these people who believe they are white are a modern invention. He writes, “they were white— Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish — and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again.”1 The impulse towards individualism and work ethic was not merely constructed out of nothing after having arrived in this new world; Coates explains that these individual pursuits were only made possible when these white people wed themselves to criminal power. This includes the genocide of indigenous peoples as Europeans began to colonize the United States — to the enslavement of African men and women as forced migrants via the transatlantic slave trade — as land owners who were desperate to thrive in this new world. Although these people, white people, remember the very act of fleeing Switzerland and Germany, in the instance of my ancestors, as an act that justifies the idea that from nothing to everything is possible, this common story amongst many white European immigrants is only possible at the expense of those people of color who were murdered and robbed of their historical mattering as their human value was reassigned as inferior in relationship to whiteness. The histories of how these expenses were calculated are often unmarked or understood in the context of individual stories of survival. My goal in this dissertation, by reconnecting unmarked white stories to contemporary performances, requires that I identify how the residual “truths” found in an ideology of whiteness developed and continue to provide a structure for white masculinity to maintain power and privilege in contemporary performance practices. !ii By including the story of the people of southeastern Pennsylvania I do not intend to establish that this study is explicitly about them but that their collective story represents the kind of story shared by many Americans historically understood as white as well as those belonging to populations and communities who have more recently “[become] white.”2 This default story – in many ways coterminous with whiteness as a socially constructed and understood identity – has produced, replicated, codified, and reified ideas central to existence and identity, not for people ostensibly like those of southeastern Pennsylvania, but also for individuals not marked by commonality, whiteness, and