Scholars Corner: The Gospel at Colonus

by Matt Roberson

Currently, I am in the final stage of the M.A. program at Hunter College, which requires all students to complete a thesis.  The topic can be of the student's choosing, which is great on one hand, but with much freedom comes great indecision.  I knew I needed to write about something that could keep my interest peeked throughout the process, which for me is asking a lot of any subject.  One certainty was that I wasn't going to be one of the folks who devotes their entire research to one play.  A semester long course on Hamlet had steered me clear of that road.

Then, noted African American theatre scholar Dr. Jim Hatch introduced me The Gospel at Colonus.  Since that time, I have been researching and writing what I hope will be the most thorough survey of the show to date.  Like it or not, because of Gospel, I have become one of those academics.  For those who don't know the show, here is a clip, put together by Minnesota's Ordway Center to promote their recent production of Gospel. (note: this is taken from an outdoor amphitheater.  The giant stones are not part of Gospel's normal set)



In the early 1980s, Lee Breuer and collaborator Bob Telson were touring and developing a 30 minute piece called Sister Suzie Cinema.  In the work, Breuer used an R&B singing group, 14 Karat Soul, to sing the text he had written - sort of a poetic celebration of his affection for movie houses and cinema.  As the play was very short, the two began thinking about creating a companion piece.  Breuer had been thinking a lot about the religious nature of ancient Greek drama, and how it had to have been a much more spiritual experience than most productions of Greek drama he had seen.  Most important to him was the idea of catharsis.  Breuer wanted to create something that brought audiences beyond "pity and fear", and into a more positive, ecstatic state.  His partner, Bob Telson, was playing lots of gospel music for various groups in Harlem and elsewhere.  Telson had also been very moved and impressed by the ability of gospel music to create ecstasy and outpourings of joy in audiences.  From this marriage of Breuer and Telson's personal interest came The Gospel at Colonus.  In 1983, after two gestational years of workshops, Gospel premiered in it's full scale at BAM's Next Wave Festival.  It was the hit of year, and was brought back for two more weeks following the festival's end. 

The work, which I'll get into more in a later post, tells the Sophoclean story of Oedipus' exile through the lens of an African American Christian worship service.  A minister, originally played by Morgan Freeman, enters and with the words, "I take as my text today the Book of Oedipus," the play begins.  While the Preacher does narrate at different moments, and some lines of text are spoken, the story is primarily told via song, all of which are of the gospel genre. For me, Gospel is not only an exciting piece of theatre to watch, but puts me in a state unlike any other show.  In that, it is a truly unique experience, which is why Breuer has been able to take the show across the world, for almost thirty years. 

Coming soon, I'll delve into some juicy bits regarding the play's history, as well as it critical reception. Spoiler alert: Michael Feingold good, Frank Rich bad......

Complicite Up Close

by Joe Heissan

Playgoer readers,

The Playgoer is on vacation, so I’m filling in today. I am working currently on my dissertation, which focuses on Complicite (originally known as Théâtre de Complicité) and devised theatre in Great Britain. Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling have described devising as the way of making a production “in which no script—neither written play-text nor performance score—exists prior to the work’s creation by the company.” Though devising is usually thought of as a group activity, it is possible for an individual to devise a performance.Here in the United States, devising is growing in popularity.In the UK devising was originally associated with alternative or fringe theatre, but increasingly it is being seen as just another way of making a performance.Devised productions have turned up at the National Theatre, in The West End, and at international theatre festivals. Companies in the that devise plays regularly receive support from the Arts Council England. There is no one way to devise. Some scholars and practitioners see devising as synonymous with “collaborative creation,” or “collective creation.” I don’t necessarily feel that these terms as interchangeable, and part of my dissertation research will be to tease out how accurate this might be.

Here in New York we had a chance recently to enjoy Complicite’s award-winning devised production of A Disappearing Number at the Lincoln Center Festival.(The New York Times review can be found here.) If you missed it, the production is traveling to London in October, or it can be viewed on 14 October 2010, at 2 p.m., as part of National Theatre of London Live in HD. This is an initiative to broadcast live performances from London of national theatre plays onto cinema screens around the world. I know, for example, that there will be a screening in at Fairfield University. If at all possible, Complicite productions certainly should be experience live. But if that’s not possible, this might be an acceptable alternative.

Complicite was founded in 1983, when performers Annabel Arden, Fiona Gordon, Marcello Magni, and Simon McBurney got together to devise a play called Put It On Your Head, a flight of fantasy about the English seaside and the social agonies of Englishness on the beach. Arden and McBurney had known each other while studying at Cambridge. Gordon, Magni and McBurney had studied together in Paris with Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier. Gordon moved on after this initial production. Arden and Magni have had active associations with Complicite for much of its existence, having worked with McBurney to create such memorable productions as A Minute Too Late; Please, Please, Please; The Visit; The Winter’s Tale; Anything for a Quiet Life; Out of a House Walked a Man…; Foodstuff; and The Street of Crocodiles, though in recent years both have gone off to work on projects mainly outside of the company. Arden, for example, recently co-directed Heldenplatz in London, and her 2007 production of L’elisir d’amore will be revived at Glyndebourne in 2011. Magni acted with Kathryn Hunter and Jos Houben in Peter Brook’s Fragments which toured through 2009.

McBurney is now Complicite’s artistic director. In addition to directing productions such as Mnemonic (also actor); The Elephant Vanishes; The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (also actor); The Chairs; and Shun-kin for the company, he had appeared in films including The Last King of Scotland; The Manchurian Candidate; and Friends with Money, and on TV as Cecil the Choirmaster in The Vicar of Dibley on the BBC.(Hilarious!)Complicite’s network of collaborators has grown extensively over the years, with some working on only one specific production, while others have been involved in multiple projects.

In New York, we have enjoyed visits of Complicite productions every few years, including The Street of Crocodiles; The Noise of Time; The Chairs; The Elephant Vanishes and Mnemonic. If you are going to be in London in November 2010, Complicite’s production of Shun-kin will be playing at the Barbican Centre, and A Dog’s Heart will be playing at the English National Opera. If you’d like to see some work by Complicite collaborators here in New York, be on the lookout for Rae Smith’s set design for War Horse at Lincoln Center; Paule Constable’s lighting design for Phantom 2:Love Never Dies on Broadway; Kathryn Hunter in the RSC’s productions of King Lear (The Fool) and Antony and Cleopatra (Cleopatra) at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011; and Mark Rylance in La Bête (Valere). If you’re a Doctor Who fan like me, Marcello Magni recently guest-starred in episode #501, “The Eleventh Hour,” which I’m sure will be repeated soon on BBC America. Harry Potter fans should be listening for Simon McBurney, who will provide the voice of Kreacher the house-elf in the upcoming …and the Deathly Hallows movies.

Minstrelsy in the US, now and then

by Kevin Byrne

My final posting, oh how the days do fly by, examines some contemporary productions in New York City that use blackface, mostly in an effort to challenge the racism of society and culture. Their aims are similar to the productions from fifty-years previous mentioned in yesterday's missive.

In addition to the shows mentioned in this post, I could include: The Dance: A History of American Minstrelsy, The Mammy Project, Disposable Men, Southern Promises, and Jump Jim Crow (2008). My list is not exhaustive.

Before delving into this type of production, I would like to detour into the Wooster Group's Emperor Jones, which featured a blackfaced Kate Valk in the title role. (The Wooster Group's tinkering with blackface and minstrel conventions stretches back to their controversial Our Town/Pigmeat Markham mash-up Route 1 & 9 of the early 1980s.) There are a lot of pitfalls in staging O'Neill's 1920 play about an African American dictator of a exotic island whose attempt at escape descends into a Jungian nightmare. The play is mostly a monologue by Jones, written in some incredibly stilted, minstrelized dialect. What I appreciated about the production is that it overemphasized the materiality and falsity of the language through melodic over-accentuation of each individual word (countervailing the supposed "naturalness" O'Neill strove for), just as it overemphasized the blackface of Valk-as-Jones. The production didn't engage in larger social issues, but it did undercut the scripts racialized precepts.

The problems I have with many contemporary shows which employ blackface and minstrelsy is that they do so for the sake of easy theatrical shocks, without acknowledging the complexities of the racisms they condemn nor referencing the elaborate, twisted history of the form. For example, The Lynch Play and Jump Jim Crow (2009) were painfully earnest productions that were ultimately frustrating and limiting. The shows were intended as cultural critiques that exposed the racism of US society; due to an over-reliance on blackface and minstrelsy as spectacle, they rarely advanced a message more sophisticated than Racism is Bad. The Lynch Play even enforced a segregated seating policy—it was a cheap tactic for raising issues of racial boundaries. Jump Jim Crow began with a group of African American actors embodying black stereotypes in a minstrel show-setting, only to have them reject their roles and be replaced by whites (from the audience!). The show relied on the mere use of blackface as a substitute for a social message. By de-historicizing minstrelsy—and even racism—these productions fail to address the complicated mixture of racism and pleasure that the money-making and product-generating minstrel show trafficked in. Through the lazy use of blackface as shock tactic and the simplistic message about racism being evil, the shows, paradoxically, endorsed a political quietude. These productions wanted to capture the rage of the 1960s shows by Baraka and Kennedy, but such fist shaking is not enough. Few of them really understood the history they were critiquing.

The two productions I want to end with are Neighbors and Scottsboro Boys, which were running at the same time this past spring in theatres a few blocks away from each other. Neighbors is about a family of minstrel stereotypes that moves into a suburban enclave next door to a mixed-race family, and the chaos which ensues when they interact. It was, indeed, a messy show, but also a provocative and challenging one, bursting with irresolvable ideas. Before seeing it, I worried about the dangers in humanizing stereotypes and giving them psychological motivations and familial biographies. But the show, in its most brilliant moments, allowed the characters to display the seductive, dangerous, and deeply angry allure of minstrelsy without making them easily pathetic or sympathetic. It recognized the dark history of the form, and let neither itself nor its audience off the hook through empathy or simplistic moralizing.

I'd like to finish with the musical Scottsboro Boys, which is headed to Broadway in a few months. The story is based on a series of actual court cases in the 1930s, in which a group of African Americans were falsely convicted of raping two white women on a train travelling through Alabama. The musical, with a predominantly African American male cast, presents this story through the format of the minstrel show, and it employed all the characteristics of minstrelsy that I discussed earlier: songs, dances, costumes, blackface makeup. I set the show in contrast to Neighbors to emphasize a particular, troubling dualism: whereas Neighbors brought stereotypes closer to real people, Scottsboro Boys flattened a collection of real individuals with awful histories into caricatures.

The production team seemed to pride themselves on their ability to shock their audience with the use of minstrel tropes, and patted themselves on the back for their bold stances. But the implicit message of the show, how it tries to be enjoyable for the audience, is incredibly smug to the point of offensiveness. The distancing of the audience from the action onstage says: isn't to great that they are not us, that we're not in the racist South of the 1930s. The show forces the audience to see the people, and the time, and the problems, as caricatures. I'm sure that it made sense to the creators to tell this story through a minstrel show; it seemed somehow "natural" to do so. But the connections are facile and cheap, and such a presentation does a disservice to these people and the horrific suffering they endured.

In her recent history In Search of the Blues, Marybeth Hamilton touches upon the Scottsboro case. Olen Montgomery, one of the defendants, wrote songs while in prison; the lyrics to his Lonesome Jailhouse Blues were published in a Popular Front newspaper. "If I live, I'm going to be the Blues King," he wrote to his lawyer. None of his individuality, artistry, or loneliness made it into the show.

OK, this scholar will be returning to his corner now.

Minstrelsy in the US, here and there

by Kevin Byrne

Building off of yesterday's posting, what I examine here are the instances of minstrelsy into the twentieth century. An interesting phenomena to examine and explore is the ways the minstrel show became useful to, was in fact foundational for, so many of the technologically mediated entertainment industries of the century. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, minstrelsy (like so many other popular forms, such as vaudeville) became less sustainable as a live form of professional entertainment. The increasingly cheap and ubiquitous media of film, phonograph, and later radio rendered them antiquated. But, of course, these were the same media that appropriated and utilized elements of minstrelsy: blackface caricatures, dialect songs, and so forth. To return to the points I was making in my last post, the minstrel show should be seen as a business: some companies tenaciously hung on, some performers moved to the new media, and most individuals found other lines of work.

These new media were mass produced very quickly and minstrelsy was ubiquitous within them. Because of the tangible, durable, material products from this time period, these are the images and sounds that are most readily called to mind when the word "minstrelsy" is used: a corked-up Al Jolson singing "Mammy" in The Jazz Singer, Andy and Amos scheming at the Open Air Taxi Company, Bert Williams in a chicken suit, Aunt Jemima with a plate of flapjacks. A cataloguing of all instances of black racial caricature in US popular and mass culture is obviously beyond the scope of this blog post, or of any individual work of history. But I can point readers to Marion Riggs's brilliant documentary Ethnic Notions, or in a related but different way, the montage sequence at the conclusion of Spike Lee's Bamboozled. Blackface and minstrelsy were foundational to these media forms; that they were a successful and continuing part of it.

I stress this because I want to move forward in time, to the era where theatre and film artists really began using minstrel show characteristics as a way of lashing out against such racist denigration. Throughout the twentieth century, of course, artists were challenging black stereotype by presenting alternative, dignified, human portraits of African Americans. But it was really during the Black Arts/Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s that the accumulated images and effluvia of minstrelsy were taken from mass culture producers and thrown back at them. In the visual arts, Betye Saar put a machine gun in Aunt Jemima's hands; on Charles Mingus's Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, someone shouts that Aunt Jemima wants freedom!

In the New York theatre world of the 1960s, minstrel tropes were employed by Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Adrienne Kennedy. They were inverted by Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence, in which a town wakes up one morning to discover that all the African Americans have disappeared, and the townsfolk are unable to perform simple daily tasks (the show has a cast of black actors in whiteface). Some of these shows, and others of the time, can rightly be seen as reaffirming an essentializing difference between white and black, even in their defense and celebration of African American culture.

But what must also be kept in mind, when discussing or thinking about these shows and the power and rage they express, is that they weren't railing against ye olde timey minstrel show of T.D. Rice's Jim Crow and Steven Foster's Old Uncle Ned. The images and caricatures were very present in US culture at the time: in TV shows, films, advertisements, and so forth. The tradition of minstrelsy that was angrily critiqued had a complicated history and a very present place in US society.

Though the presence of racist African American imagery has somewhat abated in the twenty-first century, it still finds a way of making itself present: look no further than a box of Obama Waffles.

In my final post, I will look to those New York performances of the past few years which have overtly used blackface and minstrelsy to provoke, parody, or shock. The results have been uneven and sometimes troubling.

Minstrelsy in the US, then and now

by Kevin Byrne

Greetings all Playgoer readers. I am filling in this week for The Playgoer, presenting you with illuminating and edifying information while he vacations on a beach and plays ukulele by moonlight. Different from the postings over the past week by Peter, I will be discussing some threads in the history of US minstrel performance, with an emphasis on black minstrelsy and with an eye toward current productions in New York City. It is an interesting story that has occupied much of my academic career, and certainly there are reverberations that are felt even today.

Minstrelsy is certainly a negative appellative these days, usually meant to castigate some cultural product for indulging in some general kind of racist caricature. (I recently ran across the word minstrelsy in article about Jersey Shore, labeling its self-parodying participants as amped-up Italian stereotypes.) The film Transformers 2—whose director, Michael Bay, frequently uses racial caricatures for comic relief—included a pair of mush-mouthed, slang-spewing robots whose ghettoized vernacular marked them for ridicule. And comedian/puppeteer Jeff Dunham has built his career around African American and Muslim stereotyping; both he (and his audience) can deflect accusations of racism by saying, "Hey, it's not me, something else is doing the talking." Two recent Broadway productions had critics referencing minstrelsy because of their use of African American signifiers: Lend Me a Tenor and A Behanding in Spokane. And a recent article in Theatre Journal, written by colleagues of mine, includes an analysis of the minstrel elements of the Donkey character in Shrek: The Musical.

Against this are those productions that have overtly appropriated the trappings and conventions of the minstrel show to criticize and challenge the racism in US culture. These efforts have had mixed success; I will be addressing them directly later in the week. Many of these productions on both sides of minstrelsy—those that employ stereotype for entertainment and those that utilize minstrelsy to subvert it—are only partially aware of its history. What I am proposing in my postings is a triptych of US minstrelsy: an incomplete portrait that hints at some of the depth and power of the form. Today, I will be touching upon the basic characteristics of the minstrel show; later I will be looking at minstrelsy in the twentieth century; and I will conclude with some words on recent uses of it in live performance.

The main thing to remember about the minstrel show is that it was meant to be an entertainment. The racism of the performances were intended not simply as hateful denigration, but in service of pleasurable comedy. The humor of the shows were delivered through jokes in dialect, songs employing working-class instrumentation, dances of grotesque abandonment, and costumes of either rural dilapidation or urban dandification. And, crucially, the shows, populated initially by white performers, used blackface makeup as metonym for blackness. It is this particular trope that became most important for later theatre and film artists in their efforts at critique.

What also must remain at the forefront of any discussion of minstrelsy is that these shows were intended to make money, were in fact hugely successful for nearly a hundred years (say, the 1830s to 1915). Indeed, the companies were not spreading racism for that end alone; these were entertainers looking to turn a profit. This fact begins to explain why it was that African American performers formed minstrel companies immediately after the Civil War, and flourished in the genre. It also points toward some of the other revenue streams that the companies used to capitalize on their fame: pamphlets and sheet music and joke books and eventually cylinder and phonograph recordings. The cumulative effect of these material byproducts is a subject I'll pursue later.

Finally, to counter the writings by some historians and novelists, I would like to remark that the cultural interactions which inspired the minstrel acts were never an equal exchange between black and white peoples. The social, legal, economic disparity between these groups was incalculably vast. And the minstrel show performed that gap.

American Acting Training III

By Peter Zazzali

In my last post I addressed the professional differences between theatre and on-camera acting by examining the challenges facing those seeking work in the former. While finding employment in film and television is by no means easy, it is nearly impossible for actors to make a living in the American theatre today. This grim situation started when America's regional theatres disbanded their resident companies during the 1970s in favor of hiring talent on a show-by-show basis. This change came at an obvious cost to the actors whose livelihoods were turned upside down, but it also negatively impacted audiences, insofar as they had grown accustomed to the acting company to the point of associating it with the institution’s identity. Furthermore, breaking up an ensemble that is used to working together and replacing it with a group of strangers compromises the potential for creativity. If an actor is unfamiliar with how his colleagues work, he is likely to spend the beginning weeks of rehearsal making safe choices as part of getting to know everyone’s process. This reticent approach to one’s craft is reinforced by the hireling actor’s low status within the professional sphere. For example, if an actor is employed on a show-by-show basis he is probably grateful just to have a job and will dutifully follow direction to ensure the possibility of being hired again. There is little room for negotiating artistic choices, which is oftentimes necessary to rehearsing a play. This practice is comically addressed by the monologist Mike Daisy in his critically acclaimed piece How Theater Failed America, in which he describes “freeze-dried actors being shipped from New York” to begin the formulaic process of staging a production.

If the contemporary regional theatre functions as a largely mechanical industry devoid of artistic risk, there was a time when things were different. The case of Bill Ball and the American Conservatory Theatre exemplifies the U.S. not-for-profit theatre and actor training at its very best. Founded in Pittsburgh in 1965, A.C.T. moved a year later to San Francisco to embark on one of the most intriguing and energetic theatrical enterprises of the twentieth century. A company of more than forty actors produced a repertory of as many as twenty-seven plays a year for an audience that consisted of both local regulars and first-time tourists. When the acting company wasn’t rehearsing or performing, they were busy taking classes to improve their craft. Steeped in the Continental model of Jacques Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier, Ball stressed actor training as the foundation for his organization. He reasoned that stage acting required ongoing training and development and therefore Ball required his company to attend a wide range of classes that extended from the traditional (voice and speech) to the unconventional (African dance and “laughing class”). As company member Kitty Winn shared with me in a recent interview, “Your life was the theatre…There wasn’t time for anything else.” Demanding as this daily grind was for Winn and her colleagues, according to the accounts of numerous critics and theatre practitioners, the work produced by A.C.T. throughout the 1970s was second to none. Productions such as Ball’s Tartuffe and The Taming of the Shrew remain a lasting part of American theatre history, and moreover, are emblematic of what a company of likeminded artists can accomplish.

American Acting Training, Part II

By Peter Zazzali

In his seminal essay entitled, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin argues that film acting will have a much more dominant role in modern society than stage acting. Although he was responding to developments during the 1930s, Benjamin accurately anticipated art’s evolution in the modern world, especially as it pertains to acting. Numerous studies support Benjamin’s theory, most notably William Baumol and William Bowen’s 1966 treatise on the economics of the performing arts in which they make a compelling case for the fiscal challenges facing American actors and the need for them to seek employment in the mediums of film, television, and commercials. Nine years later an NEA report entitled “Understanding the Employment of Actors” echoed Baumol and Bowen’s findings.

Today the profession has become even more competitive as an increasing number of actors are entering an unstable job market. When the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs began in 1972 there were only a handful of university-sponsored acting programs, currently there are nearly 300. At the time, regional theatres contracted actors on a yearly basis thereby providing them with professional stability. As I mentioned in my previous blog, this situation began to change during the middle-1970s when external sources of funding for these theatres decreased. Nevertheless, university acting programs have proliferated ever since. From Alaska and Hawaii to Florida and Maine, BFA and MFA programs have become ubiquitous at America’s colleges over the past twenty years despite the fact that the professional demand is simply not there.

Do our colleges and universities have a responsibility to prepare students for the limited employment opportunities awaiting them upon graduation? Furthermore, most of these programs function under the auspices of a “theatre” department in which the training will consist of a curriculum and pedagogy designed for the stage. Given the extraordinary professional challenges confronting theatre actors, how do these programs justify a steady diet of movement and voice classes in conjunction with departmental productions of the likes of Shakespeare and Chekhov, when in reality they’ll be competing for Crest commercials and a guest spot on Law and Order in several years?

American Acting, Actor Training and the Not-For-Profit Theatre

by Peter Zazzali

Greetings fellow Bloggers. My name is Peter and I’m currently working on a dissertation that examines professional acting and actor training in the U.S. Some key questions I’m asking are: How do American actors prepare for a career? How does formal training serve them in this pursuit? How do the economic realities of professional acting inform their career choices? Finally, what do these decisions mean for the craft of acting itself?

To illustrate my topic I am using the history of the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs, a consortium of B.F.A. and M.F.A acting schools that existed from 1972-1987, as a case study to measure how the curriculum and pedagogy of America’s acting schools have trended in relationship to the profession.

The League came about in response to a need to train actors for the U.S. regional theatre, a movement underwritten by the Ford Foundation to bring professional theatre to America’s cities. Because regional theaters like the Guthrie and Seattle Rep produced a demanding repertory of classical and modern dramas, they needed actors that had the skills to execute a wide range of roles. League schools like Juilliard and Yale trained actors in a psychophysical manner for the purpose of providing what Jennifer Dunning coined “The New American Actor,” someone whose corporeal being was a consummate vessel of expressivity. The training regimen balanced some version of Stanislavsky’s system with a rigorous array of technical courses in subjects such as voice production, speaking with distinction, and a host of movement classes that included fencing and African dance. Contrarily, the strictly psychological approach practiced at New York’s numerous acting studios before the advent of the League (e.g., The Actors Studio, Stella Adler conservatory, the Neighborhood Playhouse) adequately prepared students for film and realistic works, but it did not provide them with the necessary technical skills to execute the classical repertoire. Thus, regional theatres looked to the League Schools for their casting pool.

Although the League disbanded in 1987, it provides unique insight to American actor training and the not-for-profit theatre. It was after all the latter that prompted M.F.A. acting schools to form. As the Ford Foundation significantly decreased its funding throughout the 1970s, regional theatres terminated their resident companies thereby altering the professional landscape for actors. Because they could no longer count on being permanently employed, actors were forced to look to other sectors of the entertainment industry for work. My next posting will discuss what these subfields are, how they have changed the public perception of the actor’s craft, and most crucially, what these developments have meant for American theatre and society.

(Jennifer Dunning's 1983 article, "The New American Actor," is viewable here.)