Contemporary Theatre Notes

• Questions of political and economic interpretations of scripts.
• Successful writing happens through revision.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Edward Albee

• Hamsters – SNL (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
• Where’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Who’s afraid of living life without false pretenses?
  • Circular verbal abuse/insults used again – Martha and George being horrible to each other.
  • Alcohol
  • All of this is going on at about 2AM
  • Honey’s portrayal and “hysterical pregnancy”
  • “Innocent” guests vs. husband/wife performing
  • Martha emasculates George
  • Martha – blousy/aggressive
  • “Dead” Son
  • Trials of infertility
  • In vino – Veritas
  • The end: An act of destruction or love? – Killing the fictional son, to help or to hurt?
• Canonical Today – In 1962 it was very controversial and difficult to put on, it wasn’t widely understood/accepted.
• Why are we drawn in by this behavior in fiction?
• From where does our discomfort come?
• Why is it funny and relatable?
• Why does it go on and on?
• Historical context – Early 1960s, discomfort and unhappiness in upper-middle class couples not talked about often. Social taboo. Emotionally draining.
• Edward Albee
  • Adopted, born 1948, did not get along with his birth family
  • Saw the upper-middle class (Wasp) as pretentious and disliked wealth 
  • Lived in Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan
    • Big Queer scene Stonewall uprisings
    • Artist/bohemian/low income area
  • Influences:
    • Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
    • Absurdism
    • Aftermath of WW2
    • Existence of Nuclear Bomb – humankind has the power to decimate itself 
    • “Meaning of life in the face of the abyss”
  • Albee writing about his family to parallel George’s book about his parents
  • “Truth isn’t truth” – Surrealism defamiliarizes the audience with expectations and doesn’t follow “well-made play” “happy ending” structures.
  • “Who’s Afraid of the big bad wolf” – Disney, Three Little Pigs
  • There are no mistakes in art
  • “Books belong to their readers” – John Green
  • Middle class hypocrisy, fury at being trapped etc.
  • Why Virginia Woolf? – First waves of feminist writers – Martha has the “power” in the relationship
    • Who’s Afraid of Powerful Women? Is Martha the Big Bad wolf?
  • Both are intelligent people
  • Big gender roles of the book 
  • Natalism – “A Room of One’s Own” – Virginia Woolf
    • Is a woman only fulfilled if she has children? Martha is shattered when she loses the fiction of their fake son. Honey had a “hysterical pregnancy”
  • George and Martha – 1st President and First Lady, never had children
    • Play is set in New England
    • Talks of George vs Nick talking over the college from Martha’s father
    • Father of our country – couldn’t be a father, George in the play is a failed man in the patriarchy
  • Who’s/what’s the revolution? 
  • Virginia Woolf’s name – Virginia is the birthplace of the country, where Washington was from.
• Nick and Honey – represent the mainstream expectation of this time. Young, happily married. Honey is a ditz and housewife, Nick is intelligent. Socially conforming in comparison to George and Martha.
• Movie: Technicolor / Pleasantville
• Nick and Honey – relationship was expected, and they never thought to go against that, “hysterical pregnancy” and Honey’s family had money.
• Nick represents a eugenic impulse
• Honey is shown as intellectually inferior – cannot hold her liquor, lacks impulse control
• Nick is willing to play their games to get what he wants / ambition personified
• Set in New Carthage – idea of a diminished empire, small liberal arts college
  • Represents new ideals/free thought
  • Extremely cliquey / politics of people
  • Microcosm for middle class hypocrisy, heavily gendered expectations
• How do we make meaning, when we are born astride the grave? Through relations with other people – not always a positive thing.
• What are the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day?
• Influences
  • Albee’s own privileged upbringing
  • The myth of the American dream/American exceptionality/city on a hill
  • Absurdism – how we make meaning in the face of the void through stories and lies
  • The family drama (in plays and pop culture)
  • Camp (queer culture/oppression)
  • The life-lie (Ibsen, O’Neill)
• Did George kill his father? What does it mean that he “killed” his son?
• Camp – genre for film/pop culture
  • “Always Sunny in Philadelphia”
  • Drag Queen “What a dump”
  • Elizabeth Taylor / Betty Davis
  • Movie Martha starts the play mentioning the movie: Beyond the Forest
  • Over the top and exaggeration
• Albee was a gay writer, how does that impact his critique of gender roles
• Can Martha only be a strong woman if her husband is emasculated? Is Nick only so hyper-masculine because Honey is so stereotypically submissive/feminine?
• Nagging wife – Husband “yes dear” Stereotype
• Why did they invent the story of the son? Why did they kill him?
• Killing the son – mercy or cruelty? Is Martha being punished or liberated?
• Hypocrisy of 1960s standards and expectations, and how the incongruity of what was expected and what was going on with many people was coming to light. Marriage and children – importance and the societal expectation of bearing children. Natalism.
• Truth that isn’t spoken of.
• Albee’s separation from his privileged upbringing – the pretense of privilege. Left for a counter-culture environment.
• In vino – veritas.
• What don’t we talk about? Why?
• For what is game playing a metaphor in this play? What are the different games in this play? What do they signify?
• Transition from Saturday to Sunday – metaphor for rebirth/resurrection in Christianity.
• Walpurgisnacht – German saint celebration of fighting off witches at night.
• The line between truth and illusion
• Games (in no order):
  • They’re not real games – just given the name.
  • Game gives value to something without as such intrinsic value.
  • Not wanting to admit the stakes at hand.
  • Competition (between couples).
  • Childishness
  • Addicting
  • Rules
  • Defense mechanism / coping mechanism
  • Literalizing these patterns of behaviors – cattiness etc.
  • Naming behaviors common to this world that aren’t generally addressed
  • Hump the hostess
    • “The way to a man’s heart is through his wife’s belly”
    • Nick doesn’t care for Honey
    • Martha has done this before / cheated on George
    • Nick’s careerism
    • A lot of her past conquests haven’t measured up
• Deep down Martha loves George, doesn’t want anyone else. Lack of a child and the way society judges them poisoned their relationship. Sabotages herself.
• Pg. 189
• George doesn’t kiss up to her or treat her as insignificant for being a woman – he fights her, challenges her, doesn’t bind her to gender roles
• Self-destructive behavior – thinks George deserves better than her
• Life of imagination exists in George that Nick cannot measure up to (Historian vs Scientist – Stem vs Humanities – Liberal Arts College Setting, the push to technological advancement, out with the old in with the new, changing standards – what’s the most useful for the college, who will take over for Martha’s father, potential vs loyalty)
• Bringing up baby
  • Fake invented child
  • Comfort in the fiction that they have failed to make reality
  • The child as a way to pit against each other
  • Started as a joke and devolves into a psychosis
  • Did George kill his parents? Why did George kill their son?
  • The son as a metaphor for their relationship.
    • A way to love each other through growing bitterness
  • George recites the Latin Christian exorcism
    • Martha’s litany – every memory tender and loving, no tears no hardships – too idealized
  • Honey’s changing mind on wanting a child or not
  • Martha’s fiction eases George’s guilt and grief
  • Why kill the son now?
    • Martha mentioned the son to the guests
    • As people start asking questions, the illusion shatters
    • Two can keep a secret
    • “You broke the rule baby” pg.251 – Martha crossed a line
    • Embarrassment to be caught in the lie
    • George does so out of worry – that Martha is starting to believe in the illusions, it is consuming her – Martha w/ undiagnosed mental health issues
    • The life lie – Henrik Ibsen – the lies we tell ourselves to function normally
    • It’s only a game – it cannot become so real
  • Remember is 2am-5/5am and they’ve had a lot to drink – not necessarily mentally ill, it becomes too easy to pathologize them
    • Can’t face the truth – the death of a child:
• Stay together for the kid
• Humiliate the host
• Get the guests
• Snap! Went the dragon
• Peel the label
• Is this play feminist or misogynistic? Is it a satire/critique or a villainization of nonconforming gender roles?
  • Some critics see the end as harsh – a punishment for Martha’s brashness
  • Other see it necessary, an act of love, to rebuild a realness to their relationship, to rescue Martha from the lie she’s trapped herself in.
• At the end of the play – Martha is concerned about it just being her and George, without the common ground of their son between them.
  • George and Martha express true emotion – care and worry over each other rather than going at each other’s throats.
  • Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Martha is, afraid of not being excepted, afraid of being who she is, afraid of not having a child as her safety net in womanhood.
  • They sound tired, passive
  • Martha is in shock
• Sequel: 
  • Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf
• The Iceman Cometh – is a cruelty or kindness to shatter the life-lie?
• The tragedy cycle and the wheels and machinations of it – once it starts it will reach its ends – Antigone
• In what do you see this play’s continued relevance? Why do you think it continues to fascinate up, even though it has become more customary and canonical?
• How does the play handle disability and views of eugenics?

Funnyhouse of a Negro

• What bridges the plays of Funnyhouse of a Negro and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Adrienne Kennedy – specific abstract/ethereal tone of voice, metaphorical language
  • Unrequited love or infatuation with Albee
  • “It was a madness that wasn’t entirely due to him” – Like a phantom for a dream
• Tearing back the veneer – exposing the darker underbelly that is very real but not oft talked about or looked at
  • How to blow up two heads at once (ladies) (2006)
• Ties of colonialism 
• Globalism
• Unthinking standoff
• Scramble for Africa (2003)
• Edith Sitwell: how might her poetry help us read Kennedy?
  • Sarah Negro wants to write poetry like her
  • Sitwell vaguely resembles Queen Victoria
  • 1940 – Still Falls the Rain
  • Unthinkingly embracing whiteness
  • Repetition – (relentless dread)
• It’s been said before, but you weren’t listening
• The story keeps changing each time its said
• Violent imagery
• Themes of searching for forgiveness
• Sarah is an unreliable narrator
• Her mother is in an asylum – I think Sarah might be as well
  • Its Sarah’s “funnyhouse” another term for an insane asylum – literally tearing her hair out, delusions of having murdered her father
  • Sarah is described in tandem with her mother – the face, the skin, the hair falling out, the fear of the “black beast”
  • Vicious cycle – becoming her mother 
    • Learned and internalized racism
• Sarah relationship with her father – is he dead, how, why is he so estranged from her
• Mental illness?
• Bring everyone into the nightmare – makes it harder to dismiss as “not my problem” – everyone is complicit in the nightmare
• Funnyhouse vs Raisin in the Sun
• Parody on blackfacing – black actors with white masks/powder
• Caricatures
• Sarah strive for whiteness destroyed her, not her father (a doctor living the life she wanted)
• Sarah’s internalized racism – The tragic mulatto / the octoroon
• Vilifying her own father to protect herself
• The statue of Victoria Sarah has is referenced as ugly – a terrible aspiration towards colonization, to choose one side of oneself over yourself, as it watches and judges
  • Raymond calls it ugly because he is Jewish, and knows the terrible power that idealizing whiteness can create – Aryan race and the Nazis
  • Sarah doesn’t see this hesitance of idealizing whiteness because society that sees her as black or mixed will judge her and be cruel to her
• The ending – irrevocable damage – you did this, so live with it, do better, don’t let it get this bad again
• The facts don’t matter, the consequences do
• “This is America” music video/grammy performance

Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill

• Beat: Moment in the scene where you have one train of thought
  • The beat is the switch
• Cloud Nine has odd beats that are hard to follow / chaos
• Very few stage directions / the directions are a bit jarring and vague
  • “People come and go so quickly here”
• The directions refer to the world not the stage
  • A big mélange
• Distant choreography
• Harder to infer the intention
• Clunky dialogue, especially in terms of sex
• “There is not a space for things to be out in the open”
• Anachronistic
• Colonialism – domination
  • Leaching into the home
• Why did Joshua want to shoot Clive when he was so loyal?
  • Why didn’t he kill Clive?
• Cross gender and cross racial casting
  • Black character played by a white actor to show his aspiration to be white
  • Betty is played by a man because she is harmed by gender roles though she plays into them heavily
  • Edward is played by a woman because he’s gay
  • Cathy is played by a man – because Lin is lesbian?
  • No black actors in the company at the time Joshua was written white
  • Other races and sexualities are okay if it isn’t in our faces / if they assimilate / de-sexualize
• Edward – bi /trans?
• Victoria played by a doll – children meant to be seen not heard
• Identities:
  • Male vs female
  • Black vs white
  • Adult vs child
  • Heterosexual vs queer
  • Colonial vs native
  • Married vs unmarried
  • Human vs nonhuman
• Issues of feminism is highly politicized
  • Cultural feminism
  • Liberal feminism
    • The Heidi Chronicles
  • White / hetero feminism
  • Intersectionality
  • Materialist approach
    • Material conditions of culture
• Can women succeed in a man’s world vs burn the structure down
• Politics of form
  • Kennedy vs Churchill
  • 20 years apart / time periods they wrote in
  • Cloud Nine doesn’t achieve its goal of being as subversive as Funnyhouse does
    • Cloud Nine still sticks to the white male/heterosexual gaze
• Goes more for the shock / sexual misconduct
• The jokes aren’t too funny
• How has the humor aged? 
  • Seems a little homophobic / exaggerated
• Having all instances of homosexual sex be pedophilia/rape/incest seems homophobic, even if it is sort of a satire, the audience would simply have their notions of homosexuality as impure redoubled/validated
• Is she trying to show – this is what you think homosexuals are like isn’t it ridiculous? Or is she trying to show how homosexuality is distorted by being forced to be hidden away. Does she see being homosexual is okay? Only if its off the stage? Normalized by the end of the play. 
• Harry sleeping with Edward makes it seem like boys can be “made” gay
• Heightens the difference between homosexual and heterosexual sex – homosexual sex looks coded as heterosexual by the cross-gender casting
• Not ready to be satirized at the time
• Anachronism
• British vs American humor difference
• Funnyhouse doesn’t pull its punches
• BRECHT – “make it strange”, don’t suspend disbelief
• Drag vs playing straight in cross-gender casting
• Hyper Awareness of sex
• What is Churchill trying to show about femininity and masculinity
• Stereotypes
  • Women
    • Can’t catch / has the ball taken away from them
    • Outside dictates the inside
    • Pure / adore men
    • Weak
    • Eve / sin
    • Woman’s sphere is the domestic
    • To be used for sex but not sexual
  • Men
    • Boys don’t play with dolls
    • Outside dictates the inside – inference of preferences etc.
    • Men don’t cry
    • Men don’t take care of the kids
    • Men’s sphere is the world
    • Entitled to sexual appetites
• Act 1 and 2
  • Can you talk the talk but how much has really changed?
  • Martin – mansplaining
    • Way more concerned about Victoria about sleeping with Lin than with Ellen
  • Women policing other woman
  • Betty telling Ellen just to lie back and get married/sleep with harry
  • The acts seem disconnected
  • Parallels of Gerry and Harry
  • Edward wants to BE Victoria
• Effects of Anachronism
• Does Cloud Nine reinforce homophobic notions that are no longer tolerated today? Is it still okay to perform?
• Context of a work – compared to contemporaries not to modern day standards.
  • What is the work doing?
  • History – what do we need to underscore?
  • Merchant of Venice – Anti Semitic but less anti-Semitic than contemporaries like Marlowe.
• Is harmful rhetoric being used for constructive political discourse or for its own sake?
  • Is the harmful language being used by sympathetic or antagonist characters?
• Can harmful rhetoric be deconstructed?
• What do words do?
  • What do we risk?
    • Do we risk seeming to affirm – regardless of intent?
    • Do we risk censorship? Losing history?
• Symptom vs cause of an issue
• Dramaturgy
• Choices made in a performance:
  • Discussion of context
  • Changing of harmful language or imagery
  • Ignore it entirely
  • Don’t perform a work at all
• Failed subversivness
• Homosexuality is portrayed as heterosexuality by the casting choices
  • Intentional fallacy
• Harding examines neoliberalism
  • Doesn’t focus on power structures and disadvantages
• What is the play trying to do vs what is it actually doing?
• Act 1 and Act 2 don’t really mesh together – stagnation of character development
• What’s one thing you think the second act is trying to do?
  • Show what has changed in the last 100 years – and how much thing really have and have not changed.
  • Progress is two steps forward but one step back.
    • Ex. Martin cares about Victoria’s pleasure but can’t quite get there / still makes it about him and his inadequacies
  • Reconfigured family
  • Edward wishes he was a woman
    • Reaffirms homosexual as effeminate / promiscuous
  • Being aware of the problems without knowing how to deal with them
  • Betty as a symbol of the older generation coming to terms with changing times and ideas
• Major issue
  • It feels like a lot of character progress happened between acts rather than in act 2 and is never fully explained.
    • Edward comes to terms with himself (is now played by a man)
    • Betty accepts herself as a female and her role (now played by a woman)
    • Betty decides to divorce Clive (is never explained, he doesn’t appear)
  • They don’t connect to act 2
    • Harry and Edward’s relationship is unexplained in its harmful effects
    • Incest?
    • Joshua shooting Clive isn’t addressed
• Tommy
  • As a reversal of act 1 – where Victoria (the girl) was a dummy
  • Cathy has such a forceful personality tommy doesn’t even need to speak – woman’s times to shine over men
  • Tommy as a symbol of Victoria being trapped in the marriage with Martin
    • Never on screen – almost imaginary
    • A figurative symbol of her tie to Martin, why she can’t leave him for Lin
    • Stay together for the kid – her desires should come second
      • Tie to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• The Threesome
  • Edward, Lin and Victoria
    • Incest
    • The need for a man in the house
    • Victoria needed a push to leave Martin
    • Edward as trans/bisexual
    • Edward wants to BE Victoria
    • Shock value
    • Don’t accept the default – question sexuality
    • Incest undermines the validity of lesbianism
      • Slippery slope argument – if homosexuality is accepted, things like incest with quickly become okay
• Lin’s Brother
  • Anti-war sentiments
  • Northern Ireland and British soldiers
  • Fallout of colonialism – the shrinking empire, a cling to the past destroying them/killing yourself to keep to the past
  • The banality of war
  • Man can be oppressed by patriarchal attitudes/expectation
    • Men should go to war for their country

Fences by August Wilson

• 10 play cycle of life on the hill
• One of the most prominent African-American playwrights
  • Other plays: Raisin in the Sun / For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide
• Fences is his most famous
• Symbolism – White picket fence American dream – always close at hand but hard to build/reach
  • Carving out his corner of the world
• Fences – “What we build to keep things or people out or in”
• Fence – isolating himself from his family / emotional distance
  • The cost of making your place / getting what you want 
• (be becomes a driver and starts to hate it – feels like he’s betraying his roots) 
• Wilson differentiated between African-American who wanted to be white and those who stuck to their roots
• (what you give up of the past to move on)
  • How does pride affect the ability to move on towards opportunities
• Fences can be paradoxical / arbitrary / contradictory
• Changing times – can people change with them
• Rose wants the fence to keep people in / Troy wants to keep others out
  • Protection 
  • Keeping death out
• Rose wants to keep everyone in
  • Wants Gabe to live with them
  • Wants Cory to live his dream and not be disappointed
  • Wants Troy not to step out on her
• Baseball – “Swing out on the fences”
  • Troy – too old to play in an integrated league / arrived too soon
    • American Dream / America’s Sport
    • A dream deferred
• Troy’s Stories
  • Wrestled with death
    • White robe – KKK allusion
      • Join his army – if he tries too hard to be like the white men is he comes to become as bad as them, turn against his own
  • Deal with the devil for furniture/home (metaphor – sold his brother out for his money from the war)
  • How he met Rose
  • Mr. Rand and the Watermelon
    • Trope – thieving
  • The dog – Blue
  • Leaving home at 14 / his father wanted “the girl for himself” / his mother leaving
  • Promotion / becoming a driver
  • How he met Bono
• Troy’s stories are a coping mechanism
• This neighborhood
  • Economic exploitation (their store costs 5 cents more)
  • Gabriel returns from the war to segregation
• Religious Imagery
  • Gabe believes he is the archangel Gabriel
  • Wrestled with death – 3 days and 3 nights
• Vicious cycles –
  • Troy’s father and Troy
  • At the funeral – Cory is a lot like Troy
  • “Take the crookeds with the straights”
  • Troy’s Father – Sharecropping / Zero sum game
  • Sense of responsibility 
    • Wasn’t the best but felt a responsibility to stay for his kids
    • Wasn’t good but did his best in many ways
  • Lyons grew up without Troy and he is separated from Troy’s ideals / Lyons is following his dreams
    • Not just surviving but living
  • “Sins of the father”
  • Paying your dues / doing what needs to be done
• Neither extreme – all practicality or all dreams
• Troy never tells his kids he loves them
• Troy has a lot of disconnect between what he says and what he actually does. 
  • He wants a better life than his for Cory but tries to sabotage Cory’s chances with football when Troy himself wanted to play baseball. 
  • He loves Rose but cheated on her, even though he wanted to be nothing like his father. He has an ideal built up in his head that he can’t seem to actually follow through on, he’s self-destructive.
• Troy’s speak to Cory
  • “I don’t have to like you”
  • Comes from a place of protection / tough love
  • Doesn’t want Cory getting hurt like him
    • But he’s doing the same thing to Cory that he’s afraid of
  • Doesn’t want Cory to become like him
  • Generational differences
  • Desperation – doesn’t want Cory stuck in the cycle
  • Things don’t work out the way you want always
  • Progress is two steps forward one step back
  • Troy doesn’t start in an unreasonable position, but desperation makes it more and more unreasonable
  • Pride vs jealousy
• Why does Troy cheat on Rose?
  • Tropes of black masculinity
  • Societal expectation – marriage / kids
  • Suppression of emotion
• How does Gabe save/protect Troy?
• Vernacular
• Why does vernacular matter?
• Standard English vs slang/cultural/regional accents
• Vernacular preserves history and context
• “Standard English” is whitewashed
• African-American culture and sticking to roots
• Keeping true to life on The Hill
• Shows education levels / disparity
• Reclaiming historical space / claiming the stage
• Arias – character’s emotional soliloquy in opera
• Wilson’s women
  • Rose’s speech to Troy
  • Rose is her own complex character – not just a wife
  • Black women have also suffered
  • Alberta – not on stage / not one of the family
• She doesn’t belong in their yard
• Denial of the consequences stepping out with Alberta is going to have with Rose
• Consequences – Troy built up fences and cannot handle the fallout, Bono bought the fridge for his wife – facing the consequences vs denying them
• Raynell is a living example of what has happened – The consequence of your actions
• Alberta died in childbirth
• Is Troy a Tragic figure?
• Ending
  • Rose’s speech to Cory 
    • “You healthy and grown”
• Despite everything, Cory headed up exactly where Troy wanted him to. His live isn’t ruined.
• “Take the crookeds with the straights” the bad with the good
• Best and worst parts of his father
  • He meant more good than harm
• Life wasn’t perfect, but it was her life and she loved Troy
• The song about Blue with Raynell
  • Troy isn’t all bad
  • The song represents the good of Cory’s relationship with his father and how his death affects Cory
• Religious symbolism
  • “Blue went to where the good dog’s go”
  • Gabe blowing the horn “tell St. Petersburg to open the gates”
  • Did the horn really work? Did he exorcise Troy from their lives, let him move on and thus let them move on?
• Is this play still contemporary?
  • Father-Son relationship – parental legacy
  • Oppressed communities – The younger generation blames the older generation
  • Your best isn’t always good enough, but you cannot discount the effect
  • The more things change, the more they stay the same.

M. Butterfly – 1986 by David Henry Hwang

• First Asian-American man to have a play on Broadway
• Summer 2018 first play on Broadway by an Asian-American woman
• Why is this play framed the way it is?
• Why is Madame Butterfly a crateful motif?
• What are the aspects of the “oriental” Hwang is critiquing?
• The place of woman?
• Why would this be revised? (2017)
• Is stereotyping okay when it’s to make a point about the stereotype?
  • Where are they doing the critical work and where are they problematic?
• Do gender binaries stay in place?
• Is the end homophobic/heteronormative/racist?
• Pinkerton/Butterfly dynamic is switched?
• Song takes over narrating for Gallimard
  • The use of meta-theater
  • Extraordinary power shift
    • But Gallimard takes the story back
• The framed story is Gallimard talking to himself in prison – unreliable narrator
  • What is his level of sanity?
  • He’s still believing “his butterfly” is real, is female and he wants to be with her.
    • Break with reality not psychosis – trauma, repression
    • Suicide
• When did Gallimard discover Song was a man? How long has this been repressed? Maybe he is gay and is repressed/closeted etc.?
  • Cannot get “excited” about the pinups and magazines
  • Doesn’t enjoy losing his virginity to a girl
    • Did Marc sending that girl to him count as rape?
• Freeze response (fight, flight or freeze)
• Knew Song was a man and loved him more than his wife but continued to believe he is a woman because he is closeted/in denial.
  • Gallimard might be gay and in denial
• Gallimard is in love with the idea of Song, with feeling masculine.
  • Knows he’s gay (in denial) which society can make feel emasculating.
  • Helga asks him to get his sperm checked because they cannot conceive a child.
• He wants to be desired
• Male and female stereotypes
  • Madonna vs whore stereotype
• Edward Sied – “Orientalism”
  • Intersectionality of race and gender oppression
• The power of self-delusion
• This mythology and stereotype still endures
  • The harmfulness stereotype – his illusions and his stereotypes lead him down the path of destruction, death
  • Stereotypes harm those who stereotype as much as those being stereotyped
  • Stereotypes make you miss reality in favor of your illusion
• The audience at the time – 1980’s
  • Typically, rich, typically white
  • Probably knows of Madame Butterfly
• War and sexual language

Angels in America

• The Ascent of Angels in America: The World Only Spins Forward
  • Isaac Butler and Dan Kois
• About Angels in America
  • Aids epidemic
  • Reagan / Reaganomics
  • Extremes
  • Religion: Jewish vs Mormon
  • Homophobia
  • The old vs the new
  • First published in 1992
  • Dancing as fast as I can – Harper’s valium addiction
• Silence = Death (Pink triangle)
• June 1981 first reported cases of HIV/AIDS
• 1992 AIDS is the leading case of men between 22-45 years old
• Infection rate: 50,000 new infections a year
• Death rate has fallen
• Roy Cohn – Joe McCarthy’s assistant prosecutor
  • Witch-Hunt of communist/anyone seen as a threat
    • Targeted government/artists/reporters/Hollywood
• Ethel Rosenberg – Wife of Julius Rosenberg who worked on the Manhattan Project, convicted of passing information to the communists.
• Why is this play called Angels in America?
  • The physical angel
  • Martyrs / symbolism
  • Death of the queer community
  • Hope
  • Paying for sins
  • Angels bring good news
  • Spectacle
  • coping
• References
  • Stella for Star – A Streetcar named Desire
  • Cat named Sheba – Come Back Little Sheba
  • I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can – Harper’s Addiction
• The Names Project Quilt
• Still Life/ Viral Morning Robert Share
• The Lazarus Effect – AZT
• Ryan White
• GrenAids
• What is the significance of the rabbi’s speech in the beginning?
  • The context of America for some of the characters (This melting pot where nothing melted)
  • The world has changed – its smaller, easier in many ways
    • You no longer journey across the ocean, but you carry the legacy
  • What journey are each of these characters on?
  • New York is its own character – Ellis Island/Immigrants
  • What must we understand of our legacy?
  • Jewish – Louis, another marginalized group
  • History of America- fleeing oppression, migration is heartbreak and seeking a better life
  • Mormons went west to escape persecution
    • Flee from New York to Utah
  • Roy Cohn was Trump’s mentor
    • Toxic masculinity
    • Government’s refusal to acknowledge – Cohn calls it “liver cancer”
    • The angel is a symbol of: hope, the angel is a spectacle, rampant death, angels come to prophetic they herald great change, the angel Moroni (golden tablets to Joseph Smith in Mormon faith).
• Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
  • Millennium Approaches – end of the world as we know it, Y2K, mark of a new turning over, a massive change. Will everything spiral apart or be reborn.
  • The angel – images of a promise of rebirth/salvation after death
  • Roy Cohn – the current system works for him, Trump’s mentor
  • Perestroika – documents that exposed Russian communism, new world order, thaw/fall, rebirth/rebuilding
  • Queer-kinship
  • You have to change to make things better
  • Joe and Harper / Louis and Prior
    • Parallel journeys
    • Louis leaves Prior – cannot handle the tragedy of watching Prior die / fear of change
• Most gay men then stayed with and cared for their partners – Louis is not the common experience but an accurate one
• Louis is not fully comfortable with his sexuality / isn’t out to his family
• Louis’s failing is the failing of America – individual care / selfishness
• Belize is Prior’s ex and still cares for him
• Joe and Harper
  • Cohn tells Joe “save yourself” p.61
  • Denial of sexuality
• Cohn says he is straight but sleeps with men, not homosexual
• Joe refuses to admit attraction to men
• Harper should have been written as sane
  • Sexism / delusional but it’s a real falsehood
  • Woman are given a limited role
  • Harper is a representative of larger cultural anxieties
  • Addiction – the other community that is prone to AIDS
    • Addiction is how people escape reality of life
  • Loving someone who wanted you to change / who used your love as a shield
  • If Joe had been honest – could they have been friends?
    • Will and Grace scenario
• Prior and Harper’s dream/hallucination
• Self-loathing – religion leading people to be ashamed of themselves
• Internalized homophobia
• Belize
  • The only character of color (also double-cast as Mr. Lies)
  • Moral center of the play
  • Racism – the white males being cared for by POC
  • Thrasher – “magical negro” stereotype
  • Feels like a token character
  • Conversion w/ Louis – still comforts him despite racism
  • The only hyper-feminized stereotypical gay man
    • The emotional and physical labor
    • The more feminine gay man
  • Character vs caricature
  • We don’t see much about his past/family etc.
• Taking responsibility for actions/words/love
• Trying to do too much
• Don’t erase minority history
• What’s the Great Work that Prior is being called to?
  • Suffering to do the work of god/prophet
  • Spearhead a movement of hope
  • Preparation of change

Hir – premiered in 2015

• Paradigm shift
• Premise – New futures of gender, multiple identities, etc.
• Taylor Mac – genderqueer author, pronoun: Judy
• Patriarchal roles which have oppressed woman and queer people
• Messing with form and content at the same time
• Show: Transparent
• Casting choices: It’s important that the actor playing Max be someone who was a biological female and now identifies as transgender or genderqueer.
  • The politics of casting
• Living room drama / family focused
• Compare to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: implosion of the family
• Arnold – demasculinization, destruction of the patriarchy in “tearing down” Arnold’s manliness 
• The house – a starter home that never got started – falling apart around them
  • Cheap plywood, everyone is poor, capitalism etc. 
  • The class divide widening – people have been left behind
• Why Isaac joined the military
• The house bears witness to what Max and Paige had to bear/physical damage after Isaac left by Arnold’s fists.
• “Screw the middle class”
• Blow up the past to make the future
  • Max wants to study Hirstory – Queer figures of the past
• Built on a garbage dump – think Love Canal
• Paige – progressive about gender/sexuality but racist (“darkies”, “spics”, emphasis on the “chinese-american plumber” as if the “chinese” part was shocking/unnatural)
• Rage of the privileged that things are changing
• Paige is a terrible ally:
  • Not to mention, Paige literally threatens to throw out Max’s testosterone when ze disagrees with her and tries to defend hir brother. Paige also tries to intentionally make coming to terms with Max’s gender identity difficult for Isaac. Isaac is clearly trying – not fully succeeding as evidenced by phrases such as “I thought you weren’t a sissy” etc. but he does begin to use ze and hir to refer to Max – clearly Isaac does not love his sibling any less. Paige constantly throws any unexpected change or slip up in Isaac’s face and even as he tries to get it right, goads him into anger. It is her actions that cause him to throw up when Max first enters the room and when ze plays the banjo, but Max takes it as hir brother being unable to accept hir. She isolates Max from other people – with the homeschooling and not wanting hir to get close to Isaac. She wants Max to be there for her and under her thumb.
• Does Paige go too far?
  • Using Max as a figurehead rather than a child
  • Trying to control ze’s transition
    • Suppression of femininity and masculinity – Max can’t ever be right in her eyes
  • Hyperbolic
  • Cycle of abuse – she’s the abuser/controller of her family now
    • Almost sadistic – humiliation of Arnold, triggering Isaac purposefully, making fun of his PTSD
    • Revengeful
  • Paige tries to determine Max’s story for hir instead of letting Max talk for hirself
  • She’s the one hurting her family now, making them fear her actions/ire
  • Defensive of her position as an ally
  • Lost compassion in her new found power
• Genre: Absurd realism
  • Realistic to the point that it isn’t clear that Paige is in the wrong
  • Undermines Isaac’s efforts to accept his sibling and his contrast to Paige by making him a drug addict and violent (son of his father). Makes it hard to support either of them.
  • Isaac is meant to represent old ways of thinking that are toxic but he is legitimately trying to accept Max to the best of his ability but if constantly undermined and goaded by Paige into being the worst version of himself – living up to the worst expectations
  • Hard to support either Paige’s crusade for the future or Isaac’s cling to the past wholly – the play doesn’t give you a full middle ground in moving forward with acceptance of trans identities, without excusing the past or destroying it entirely
  • Isaac’s acceptance undermined by drug addiction and violence
    • Remember it’s been a few hours for Isaac
  • Paige’s progress is undermined by her insensitivity to Isaac’s PTSD and abuse/neglect
  • Someone should have called DCF for Max
  • What does it mean to coexist with our past
  • Unfair to Max to put the burdens of reconciling differences on hir
    • Stereotype of building progress solely on the backs and efforts of minorities – allies have to learn to listen 
  • What does it mean to humiliate a disabled characters (Arnold and his stroke) – intersectionality except for disability (PTSD and stroke the butt of many jokes and the basis of the humor of the play)
    • Too much mocking of disability
    • Is the humor failed?
    • Initially a funny mental image – but the implications of the visual humor are not funny/they are harmful
    • Disability as a metaphor/punishment rather than its own identity
  • Over-the-topness undermines the plays message of acceptance 

Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth

Jerusalem hymn by William Blake

• What are we evoking about Britain?
  • Why does Phaedra sing the hymn?
  • Why is she cut off at “dark satanic” cuts off before mills ( not just about industrialism) i if it’s not the mills about is it
  • England – “city on a hill” religious grandiosity, land of god
  • Bringing jerusalem to England – imperialism, the crusades
  • Second half – bringing back Jerusalem, not sung because the play is about what England has lost, not in rebuilding
  • Degradation of England and culture (ie. the floats are mainly pop culture like Men in Black etc., “most of these kids are safer here than at home”, social and economic barriers, everyone looking for blood – wants to see him bleed/fight, manipulation of law, class divide and middle class hypocrisy, ignorance of mental health problems/addiction, child abuse, underage drinking, capitalism, soul death, depression, escapism, middle class morality, sense of insularity/isolation, consumerism, developments, corporatized, loss of local identity, what happens when something is branded, gentrification, east-west divide)
  • From the mythic to the mundane
  • Mourning for britishness
  • What would it take to build jerusalem?
  • The irish blessing – farewell song
  • Werewolf by barry dransfield
  • April 23rd – St. George’s day, William Shakespeare’s birth and death day
  • Rooster and Falstaff parallel
  • St. George mythic representations – slay the dragon, save the princess
  • Shakespeare wrote for the people/the masses – not court theatre
  • Johnny is a non-traditional hero, but he does give these kids a safe place until they grow out of it
    • Saves Phaedra (St. George parallel, save the princess)
  • Henry IV Part 1 – Falstaff
    • Parallel to Johnny
    • The prince: Man of the people, loaded, westral prince, one day he will become a great king
    • Falstaff – loud, hungry, drunk, greedy, given command of troops, wastes money, forces the poor to go to war for england
    • Falstaff is what happens if Prince Hal fails to throw off this crude dimenor when he needed to
    • Dionysion quality – needed as an outlet, but do we live there
  • Forest of Arden / Birmingwood
    • Where change has happened
    • Loss and gain
    • Into the woods – escape civilization, discover yourself
  • Lee’s escape to Australia
  • The forest is being encroached upon
  • No more forests in england – no more places for the young of england to find themselves
  • Johnny becomes the forest
  • Johnny is a folktale name – English folktale Johnny Cake – you can outrun everything except the last thing, running is well and good until someone tricks you/don’t get caught up in bragging about what you’ve done
  • Importance of blood (allusion to birthright) – rare blood type
  • Belonging in a country that doesn’t care about him
  • Ley Lines and giants – myths he connects to
  • John Bryon – poet Lord Bryon
  • Romantic poets
  • Johnny B / John Bull
    • British “Uncle Sam”
  • Setting – stereotype of a trailer, smashed TV, old american fridge, various junk, waterloo sign, hoarding the old – clinging to the past
    • Waterloo sign on the door – Napoleon’s defeat by the duke of wellington
    • British triumph
    • His fall, one of the last of the old guard, Johnny’s waterloo
  • Folktales: Johnny-Cake and Johnny-Gloke
  • St. Crispin’s day speech – lee’s sendoff
  • Mysticism of britain and how it has diminished through industrialization
• Commercialization
• Werewolf by Barry Dransfield
  • Sung by Phaedra at the start of Act II
  • Johnny is the werewolf
    • Can’t help his nature
    • Have sympathy for those who you think are “evil”
    • Not breaking the branches – not being remembered
    • Villainized for doing the things everyone wants to but never dares to do
    • The wolf is always the scapegoat (Remus Lupin)
  • England is the werewolf
    • Imperialism
    • Nothing left to show for it
    • But villainized for it
  • Troy is the werewolf
    • In lust/abusing his stepdaughter
  • Born with a bullet in his teeth – Richard the 3rd reference
  • Immaculate conception – left by his followers – branded with a cross – Johnny is a Christ Figure
  • White nationalism – St. George’s flag
    • Mostly/all white cast
• What’s the role of humor in this play? Your favorite moment? 
• Why is Johnny made a christ figure in act 2?
  • Symbolism of christianity
  • Persecuted Jesus for being not what they imagined / telling the truth
  • Shelter for the kids
  • Associated with the “other”
  • P.102
    • The plagues
    • The burning rainbow (god’s promise tainted)
  • Protecting Troy (upper-class) but Johnny gets blamed
    • Sexual abuse scandal in the christian church
  • Scapegoat for all problems
  • Gog and Magog
  • Immaculate conception – left by his followers – branded with a cross – Johnny is a Christ Figure
• What is the purpose of Marky’s presence?
• What do you make of the play’s descent into violence? Too much?
• What do you make of the ending? What do you think it means?
  • Johnny’s speech to Marky / his monologue?
  • The curse (the curse of Queen Margaret – Richard the 3rd)
    • Blood and soil (nationalism)
    • Romany history
    • The drumming?
  • They need Johnny as a counterpoint to themselves, to bolster themselves
  • Christ figure
    • Unclear death
• Self-immolation
• Pied piper
• Last stand – a hill to die on
• If i can’t be here no one can
• “Over my dead body”
• Captain goes down with his ship
• Sacrifice of blood / important blood
• They need him for his blood – if his blood is spilled its their grave they are digging without him there to save them from themselves/to be their villain
• Misunderstanding – he didn’t abuse Phaedra
  • Martyr for someone else’s sins
  • Takes on the blame for everyone else’s darkness
• Nationalism
• A defiance at the end
• “Do not go gentle”
• Take the satisfaction of killing him/driving him out away from everyone
  • Dying on his own terms
  • Cursing them – making them feel the guilt for what they have done to him

Posh by Laura Wade (2010)

• Movie: The Riot Club (2014)
• Why show the anxieties of the upper class?
• Male/sexual entitlement
• Old boys club – connections, money, power, prestige
• Different perception of class society in Britain than US
  • Not just about money, but old money
• “Taking their country back”
  • Things are changing, a want to return to the glory days
    • But what are the glory days? Different to different classes
• Based on: Bullingdon’s Club
  • Similar: Kate Kennedy’s Club
• Training for entitlement
  • The club is initiation, its for life
• Power dynamics
• What goes on behind closed doors?
• Who gets listened to, who gets off?
• The club is disappearing 
  • Hurts more than helps in the business world
  • Connections change
  • Entitlement doesn’t disappear, just the seemingly naive sense of entitlement to the public
  • Learn to play the game
  • Adapt
• Here is the truth – what do you do with it
• The attitudes of the rich towards the poor
  • Derogatory to the poor
    • But need them to be served dinner
    • You cannot demand a service while demeaning those who provide ot
    • Turning the poor against the poor – the existence of other poor people is not the reason you are poor
• Analogy: Gossip Girl
  • The Proper vs lesser Ivies
  • You go to our school but you aren’t one of us
  • Old money vs new money
• Not enough condemnation of the behavior within the play
• Performance of toxic masculinity

Disgraced

• Amir wanting to “pass”
• Is he a stereotype?
• Does he make a valuble point about microaggressions / fighting hard to separate yourself from the way you were raised?
• Juan de Pareja – Velazquez’s Moor
• A lot of critiques / Muslim audiences disliked the play
• The progression of the play felt natural
• Is it too obvious?
  • Universality – good? Erasing?
  • Violence – an attack
• Is it realistic?
  • Shame?
  • Violence and inevitability
• Hard to escape how you’re raised
  • You can’t
• Typical muslim? Vs “eye-opener” – social pressure
• White middle class audience
  • Can see it as reinforcing the stereotype
  • Or
  • See Amir’s frustration and how people become what is expected of him
    • People rise to the expectations set for them
• Is Amir more sinned against than sinning?
• Anti Semitism
• Pitting minorities against each other (Jews, African-American, Muslim)
  • Othello
  • The white spouses are only wrong because they cheated / ignorant of the struggles their spouses face
    • Don’t race the problems of race / aren’t at fault – other minorities are
• Emily
  • White savior trope
  • “Color blindness” – angry over microaggressions / doesn’t want to think about larger aggressions or problems faced by racism
  • Good intentions
  • White people telling minorities how to face/understand their oppression
  • Slightly fetishist of islam
  • Appropriation of Islam
    • Painting at the Whitney
• Minorities against each other
  • He’s the new “n-word” / minority 
    • Jory gets the promotion
  • White spouses unfaithful to their spouses of color
• “Order over justice”
• Jory’s playing the game, Amir got found out for playing it, Emily playing the game (sleeping w/ Isaac)
• Disagree with your past, useless to leave it behind:
  • Interpretation of the Quran – “beat” vs “leave” your wife
  • Pride at watching the twin towers fall
  • The nephew returns to Islam at the end
• Amir is trying to escape Islam, belittles Abe for changing his name/Americanizing, also belittles him for wanting to return to Pakistan
• His speech about the twin towers – hard to escape his upbringing
  • Pride of his culture even as he is ashamed of that pride
  • Beating his wife is the breaking point – he stopped trying to separate himself from the problematic aspects of Islam
  • Focus on the problems of islam 
  • Conveys that it is impossible to escape the way your raised / give up on “rooting that shit out” – plays into the stereotypes of muslims
• His speech opens a dialogue, the beating of his wife is the breaking point where it becomes a harmful stereotypes of muslims
• He has rightful anger against white people for erasing his culture, forces him to give up on it
• Representation that this is the way people are raised is also a harmful stereotype
  • Gives the impression that this is inevitable / all muslim people are raised to be “terrorists” 
  • Most cultures have harmful ideas and beliefs children must work against in adulthood
• His hitting his wife could just be shorthand for showing anger / cheap
• Emily seems to be able to escape what happens
• White woman victimhood

Bootycandy

• Humor
• Excess
• Two metanarratives
• Scenes we can’t figure out
• Creating visibility and variety 
• Influence of 
  • August Wilson
  • George C Wolfe’s The Colored museum
• What is it making visible?
  • Taboo topics – frankness about sexuality
  • Resistance to change
  • Shame
    • Dreaming in Church
    • Bootycandy
    • Drinks and Desire
    • Happy Meal
• I didn’t even see it as funny initially because that kind of victim blaming happens all the time
• Last Gay Play
• How do you tell your story?

The Humans

• Family Thriller
• He set out to write a thriller/horror
• Therapy Scene
  • Generational differences
    • Marriage
• What does marriage allow you to survive?
• Fidelity
• Religion
  • Equates to antidepressants
• Mental health
• Class differential between Bridget’s family vs Rich
• Peppermint Pig Scene
  • Funnier seeing it than reading it
• Where does the horror come from?
• Erik
  • PTSD
  • 9/11
  • Faceless woman
• Fear that something is going to happen
• What do they fear?
  • Losing the families love
  • Loss of relationship
  • What is Aimee going to do with her life
  • Post 9/11 
  • The apartment is near the flood zones and twin towers
• What is and isn’t survivable? Who gets to survive it?
• The Ending
  • The door closing on its own? Seeing the neighbor? 
  • Where does Erik go? Does he leave his family? Does he die?

• Momo – “you can never come back” – things won’t be the same
• Erik’s panic attack
• The door can no longer be propped open 
• Seeing the neighbor

The Christians

• Starting the process of questioning, not shattering a ceiling of belief
• Faith comes down to a question of translation/interpretation
  • Gehena – garbage or hell?
• How far are you willing to go for your convictions?
  • Parallel structure to Antigone
• Non denominational
• Mega church
• The idea, can you know God’s mind cuts both ways.
• Everything that should be in private in performed for the congregation

Indecent by Paula Vogel

• When you talk about a community, what do you show? Do you air the dirty laundry, or take the stones outside the tent?
• Reclamation of art, identity
• What is indecent?
• Maintaining the structure of community theater on broadway
• “Sell god for a price” – remember where you come from
• “You must remember this” feeling
• Censorship – what is censored and why
• From the ashes they rise
  • Most of the cast died in the holocaust
  • Phoenix imagery
  • Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
• Relate to: Cabaret / Our Town / six characters in search of an author
• Lemml narrates the story for us
• Asch begins as the student who wants to blow up expectations, ends as the mentor who just doesn’t want to burn the theater down
• The God of Vengeance
  • Religious / moral hypocrisy
  • Sexism / patriarchy
  • Class dynamics
  • Lesbian desire
  • Obsession with virginity
• Indecent
  • What is indecent?
    • Censorship
    • Anti-religion
    • Same sex relations
    • Abandoning who supported you
    • Moral hypocrisy
    • Genocide
    • Giving into pressure
    • anti Semitism
  • The actor who plays Peretz plays Asch at the end as an older gentleman
• The ending
  • Asch’s survivor’s guilt
    • He gets to return from Europe, he wrote the play
    • The ghosts are always there – 6 million have left the theater / Holocaust
    • Lemml’s ghost and the last dance – the play must survive
• Brings censorship into the present – this is not localized
• Immigration and oppression
• What is a public ready to hear?
• Last scene in yiddish
  • Transcendence of reality / intermingling and tangling
• Impossibly long line – ellis island / the gas chambers
• I never remember the ending / please don’t let this be the ending
  • Of art
  • Of god of vengeance
  • Of the Jewish people
  • Endurance of art – manke and rifkele escaping 
• Pg.74 Oklahoma
  • Love story / westward expansion
  • Its presence is irony and bitterness
    • The tension underneath
  • Who’s been pushed out
    • Of theater
    • Of America
• Father Comes Home from the Wars
• How do you face oppression?
  • Head on or
  • Run away?
• Invocation of The Odyssey 
  • The only heroes are not just Greek heroes
• Civil war – distancing mechanism
  • Root of modern struggle
• Freedom
  • What does it take
  • What is the price
• Hero’s freedom means fighting against the freedom of other slaves
• Hero betrayed Homer
  • Flawed hero
  • He’s a person not a symbol
  • Oppressed people sometimes have to aid in the oppression of their people for their own lives/wellbeing
• How far can you go before you are irredeemable/can’t come home again
• What’s is Parks doing with humor?
• Hero’s relationship to whiteness and the Boos-Master?
• New configuration of family? Penny? Odd-see?
•  

Father Comes Home from The Wars Part 2 and 3

• The Odyssey – A great epic out of our own history
• Why the civil war? Neo-Confederacy
• The lie of freedom
• Passing down the story/history
• 82-83 – “i love him, thank god I’m not him”
• Mental gymnastics – basically Orwellian doublethink
• Stage directions
• Hollow promises
• The feather
  • Yankee doodle
  • Peacock feathers – death
• What does Parks leave us with the ending?
  • Penny leaves with Homer
  • Ulysses buries the master
  • Psychological toll – effects of slavery don’t dissipate with freedom
  • Think about American history
    • Rewriting of history / the odyssey

Mary Jane

• Cheerful attitude
  • Societal expectations
• Not wanting to be seen as unfit
• Women are socialized not to ask for help
• Fear of pity
• Trying to convince herself that she’s doing everything she can
• Does this happen for a reason?
• Mary Jane also has a chronic illness
  • Migraines
• The network of factors of disability distanced from the body