Hunchback the Musical

 I didn't post yesterday. It was a long day, and I spent the evening watching a community theatre production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the stage version of the Disney musical). My best friend played Quasimodo.

In my experience, stage versions of animated hits are a mixed bag. Certainly Julie Taymor's vision lifted Lion King from its animated roots and made it into a theatrical event. (I've not seen it, but its influence is unimpeachable.) Having loved the animated versions of  The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, I was unimpressed with the stage versions. Both seemed bloated with extra songs better left on the cutting room floor.

Frozen onstage--well, at least the soundtrack--enriches the original. I like the extra songs generally (well, the one about "Hygge" I could do without). 

None of these, though, alters the original to the extent that Hunchback does. The movie's Alan Menken (music) and Stephen Schwartz (lyrics) join with playwright Peter Parnell to move the material closer to Victor Hugo's original.

Quasimodo is much less articulate--except when alone alongside the gargoyles and saints (who serve here more as chorus than as fully realized characters). The book clarifies that, as in the novel, Quasi is mostly deaf due to his proximity to the bells. The musical's writers also lean into the narration of the story, expanding the narrator from Clopin's singular song to a leitmotif for the ensemble to fill in details and move the plot along. 

For instance, everyone starts off in white, singing a medievalish Christian chant. Then the cast sings the exposition tune "The Bells of Notre Dame," playing out the back-story of Frollo and Quasimodo's origins. The actor playing Quasi dresses similarly to everyone else and is re-costumed--a prosthetic hump added--as part of that introduction. He becomes Quasimodo before everyone's eyes.

The script and lyrics unfortunately keep the term gypsy for Roma people. It's a confusing choice given how easy it would have been at least to nod to the distinction between the epithet that labels them versus the term they use for themselves. (I wonder if the choice makes sidesteps contemporary issues of Roma standing and integration--relevant given how often the show has played in Europe. Relevant--but not an excuse.)

The biggest change, of course, is the ending. As in Hugo's novel, everyone dies. Quasi swoops down to rescue Esmeralda from the executioner's fire, does his iconic "Sanctuary!" cry (this won applause when I saw it), and carries her to his tower abode--only to have her die in his arms. He then throws Frollo off the tower and into the fire (rather than, as in the cartoon, Notre Dame itself seems to kill him). The wounded Phoebus stumbles in, collapses on Esmeralda's body, weeping. He tries to lift her, fails, cries. Quasimodo lurches out of his own grief to approach him, lay a hand on his head, and lift up his loved one for Phoebus.

The saints and gargoyles of the ensemble surround him and reprise the song "Someday" (an afterthought in the movie, central here), hoping for a better world. Esmeralda, in the white light that is musical convention for "afterlife" walks slowly off stage.

The actor playing Quasi completes the song. He stands tall, turns to regard Esmeralda, doffs his outer costume and prosthetic hump,and rejoins the chorus. 

In the production I saw, the audience is then told (as in Hugo's novel) that in Notre Dame's crypts, people found two skeletons embracing. One was that of a woman, wearing a brightly colored band. The other was a man with a bent spine. When they tried to separate them, the man's skeleton crumbled to dust.

The narration concludes:

 And we wish we could leave you a moral
Like a trinket you hold in your palm

But there's none beyond the "what makes a monster and what makes a man" question.

And that's it! Ballsy. 

The musical never made it to Broadway. It's not the most tightly constructed piece, dramaturgically. The music is fine, the extra songs intriguing (Phoebus is given a bit more PTSD from the Crusades). "God Help the Outcasts" remains the standout song.

I will admit that the melodramatic themes of how to treat immigrants and outsiders rang loudly in a year where many Christian leaders are saying that the greatest sin is empathy. The ending--replacing a miraculous and happy conclusion for a yearning that "someday" things might improve:

Someday, life will be kinder

Love will be blinder

Some new afternoon

Godspeed this bright millennium

Hope lives on

Wish upon the moon

Let it come

One day

Someday

Soon

Amen too, Hunchback of Notre Dame. Amen.

My First Kiss

 I was 19 when I kissed for the first time. It was on stage during a rehearsal for a seventeenth-century farce. I played the comic servant, who predictably falls (at least in lust) for the comic female servant. Since it's a classical comedy, the script ended with many happy pairings, including ours.

"Now kiss!" my director said. 

I went for it with the good-natured actress (a senior to my freshman self). 

Mercifully, the kiss got cut. I imagine it looked like the first kiss for me.

I didn't actually kiss someone--a guy--til a year later. It was in a car. It was very hot and very clumsy. 

I was pretty bad at kissing for a long time. I think I got better gradually. 

I don't do a lot of kissing now--not that deep, urgent, lust-filled kissing. It's just not the phase of life I'm in.

All this is to say I just read a thesis about intimacy choreography in actor training programs. The author notes that intimacy coaching has become pretty regular in the bigger studio film and television productions. Stage productions have been slower to adopt such practices. 

Theatre (and likely every artistic craft) suffers from a "back in my day" stodginess. To certain theatre teachers, the whole "let's communicate carefully and precisely about what's going to happen here" process just seems like so much political correctness (or DEI wokeness). 

Back in my day, you just went at it. 

Yeah, but just speaking for myself, that didn't work so well. I mean, I think everyone involved was as sensitive and open as the era expected anyone to be. Intimacy choreography wasn't on the radar. Had I been a more experienced actor, a more experienced kisser, or--well--straight, I likely could have made a kiss work. (Indeed, by the time I was a senior, I kissed just fine through shows like Private Lives and whatnot.) And I was fine. The freshman show kiss in that rehearsal was awkward, and I was embarrassed that that was my only kiss experience. But I wasn't traumatized. (I was lucky; there are plenty of stories where things go way bad.)

Nevertheless, I definitely would have appreciated having back then what we try to make possible for actors now--someone there to give everyone permission to be honest about boundaries and comfort zones, someone who had a toolkit to balance the requirements of the production with where I was as an actor and as a person.  

I imagine when fight and combat choreography became an accepted practice, there were folk who scoffed. Back in my day, you'd just learn how to fake a slap or a hit or a wrestling match. You worked it out! Yet we all recognize the value of having someone trained in how to make interpersonal violence on stage compelling for audiences, effective for the scene, and safe for the actors. 

A worrisome quote from one anonymous acting teacher the thesis-writer quoted argued that this intimacy craze was a fad. It would fade, and we could just get back to making art. 

I fear the current political climate in the US supports that sense of Oh, thank goodness. We white straight cishet men can get back to doing the real work around here without worrying about all those others. 

I hope that's not the case. I hope other young folk get to kiss or not as they would want, even in the pretend-land of theatre. 

Problematic Musicals

 For my Monday seminar, I assigned two beloved-yet-problematic musicals: West Side Story and The King and I. "Watch whichever one you haven't seen before," I advised.

I hadn't seen the Rodgers and Hammerstein, so I watched that. 

Yikes. 

The good: 

• The songs are charming.
• Yul Brenner is indeed a handsome, charismatic guy. (Those calves! That chest!)
• Anna's dress in the "Shall We Dance" number is wonderful. I love a dress that accentuates a spin.

Everything else? Well, it's like a lot of Rodgers and Hammerstein: the mid-century liberal good intentions and excellent song/lyric-craft can't compensate for the stifling Orientalism of the script and story.

Especially from a 2025 perspective, the yellowface is unignorable and inexcusable. Rita Moreno and Yul Brenner are amazing; it's not OK that they were made up to pass as "Asian." The dialogue is the prototypical "ching chong" (the derogatory name for stereotyped "Asian" dialects). The styles and customs have nothing to do with nineteenth-century Siam (Thailand). The "Small House of Uncle Thomas" dance number is a visually striking model of concentrated, aestheticized pseudo-Asianness. The trope of "benevolent, culturally mature English white person civilizes ignorant simpletons" overrides everything else. 

I don't see a way to redeem this one, frankly. That it got an acclaimed revival in 2015 surprises me.

Yet I have no doubt that more revivals will appear in the future. Broadway seems addicted to problematic R&H musicals. Recent revisions of Oklahoma! (Oregon Shakespeare's queerly cast production, Daniel Fish's 2019 "gritty" immersive version) attest to this. We're always sure we can fix the major problems in these musicals (the Orientalism of King and I, the exoticization of indigenous folk in South Pacific, the invisibility of indigenous people in Oklahoma!). I remain unconvinced. When is a work so problematic that we allow it to rest?

West Side Story revivals have arguably fared better. At least they've attempted more and more creative changes. Whether such changes work (see varied reactions to the 2019 Spielberg/Kushner revival) remains up for debate. 

I like the music of West Side Story better. I find the Robert Wise movie and the Spielberg one more interesting pieces of film. I respect what Spielberg and Kushner were trying to do, though I question whether they were the right dramatists to tap (there's no shortage of Latine, and specifically Puerto Rican, playwrights and directors). 

Brian Herrera cites a 2022 podcast episode of On The Nose called "Whose West Side Story?" that usefully adds another dimension to the debate. Namely, they discuss how, alongside ongoing criticisms and debates from Latine critics about the show, the work remains an important cultural marker for many Jewish critics. I've not heard the podcast yet. The debate sounds complicated and important and definitely one that doesn't really require my personal input as a non-Latine, non-Jewish person. 

Herrera has also talked about the ways that that musical has inspired other work, creating something of an extended universe of stories and productions based around its themes, music, and legacy. Does this legacy rescue that musical in a way less possible with King and I? How do responses to problematic musicals (e.g., David Henry Hwang and Jenine Tresori's Soft Power) affect such musicals' legacies?

I'll have to see what my students think on Monday.

 

The Ghost Light Goes Out

I just got back from watching a production of Xanadu at our local community theatre. After this production closes, the theatre itself shutters permanently. It's been around for 79 years. The news came suddenly, a shock to everyone.

I'm not privy to all the tea about what went wrong. A combination of post-COVID malaise, internecine disputes, and money troubles all contributed. They had a new artistic director, now gone. They had a full season planned, now cancelled. Two more weekends of Xanadu, and the stages go dark forever.

It reminds me of the lines from that NPR story I wrote about earlier:

I don't know what comes next. Things fell apart so quickly, but also slowly; as the years passed, cracks started opening up, eventually turning into a chasm. In the end, we didn't make it.

I've seen so many productions at this theatre. I've been in a show there. You can find me in a picture from that production. It hangs on the walls alongside photos from years--decades--past. I saw people I acted with in the audience. I saw people I taught, people I teach with, people from my church, and people from other productions with a rare night off.

The show, based on the featherweight 80s movie, leans into its campy lightheartedness. Clio (they pronounced it kleye-oh), Muse of History, descends to earth to help a young artist realize his dream of a roller disco that also has theatre and dance and sports and magic, etc. 

Much of the plot revolves around revitalizing an old abandoned theatre space. The owner had himself been visited by Clio nearly forty years prior, initially inspired but then backing away from his dream. Many lines concerned what they could do to save this precious space where art happens.

And then they'd shift into one of many lesser-known 80s hits, usually with a self-aware metatheaticality. 

But beneath the silliness and the energetic cast, the lines about abandoned theatres and jokes about artistic inspiration disappearing from earth after 1980 landed differently. 

This theatre had its share of excellent performances as well as many "good try, ya'll!" productions. But its value was never as a source of Great Art. Instead, it really did what the best community theatres do--putting people in touch with Some Art in ways that feel more entertaining than obligatory. Seats fill up for musicals, and standing ovations are the norm. Everyone on stage seems excited to be there. Everyone in the audience seems eager to see and laugh and clap. 

It's a living theatre space. 

I don't know what comes next. So much love and sweat and energy and spirit haunt that place. It feels wrong for a lifetime's worth of of theatre to end so abruptly.

The cast looked like they were having the time of their lives, soaking up the well-earned guffaws at their jokes and the giggles at technical malfunctions (e.g., the projection system crashing) with equal good faith. I laughed, too. 

And I may yet shed a tear. RIP, TBR. Thanks for all the art you produced.

Pretty and Disgusting

 

Inevitably in script analysis classes, I have to dissuade students from explaining away some odd or confusing choice by a playwright in a script by blaming it on expediency (Maybe she knew it'd be too difficult to do X on stage) or propriety (She avoids doing X because it would have been too much for the audience). Neither recourse works. Or, rather, both undercut the playwright's artistic agency--and underestimate theatre's potential.

As Elinor Fuchs says, in the world of the play "there are no accidents." We approach a script, in other words, assuming that the playwright knew what she was doing. What's in there is what she wants in there. What's not in there is what she chooses not to put in there. The actual truth, of course, might lie somewhere else. But we adopt the attitude that the script is as the script is meant to be.

Beyond that, though, I try to disabuse students of the misconception that it's the playwright's job to keep audiences feeling safe and comfortable. Some plays do that, and good for them. But no law exists requiring playwrights to protect audiences from feelings. 

You say Marsha Norman keeps Jesse's suicide off-stage (behind the closed door) because showing it would have been "too much for the audience"? I'll see your presumption of theatrical decorum and raise you Sarah Kane's Blasted. 

Nakedness, violence, sex, rape, cannibalism, sucking out eyes and swallowing them--this play has it all, really. (I don't think it has a single gunshot, though--just one big explosion in the middle.) "This Disgusting Feast of Filth," trumpeted one of the first reviews.

That headline is not not accurate, exactly. If you can imagine a place to go, Blasted goes there. It's pretty disgusting. See these two production photos:

The character with his head sticking out of the floor, Ian, has been a rapey creep in the first part of the play only to find his realistic Leeds hotel room invaded by a Soldier who proceeds to menace, rape, and mutilate him before blowing off his own head. The nice hotel room gets blown apart by some explosion. The girl Ian had been with (unwilling on her part), Cate, escapes for a bit before returning--first with an infant she had been handed. The infant dies, Cate buries it and leaves, and Ian later digs it up to eat it.

After a montage of Ian struggling to survive for days after Cate leaves (including the baby-eating scene), a despondent, blinded, starving Ian buries himself in the infant's grave-hole in the ruined hotel floor. His head sticks out. "He dies with relief," the stage directions read. It begins to rain, and water drops down from the ceiling--right onto Ian. He wakes up, curses.

Cate returns, scarred and bloody from whatever war-torn hellscape Leeds has become (Kane keeps the nature of the conflict vague). She's procured gin, bread, and sausage. She eats it, then crawls over to Ian--and feeds him. "Thank you," Ian says. The play ends.

Having thoroughly debunked any notion that she writes to protect audiences from discomfort, Kane ends this "feast of filth" with one of the most elemental human acts--sharing food.

"In performance," playwright and director Ken Urban observes (PAJ, no. 69, 2001), "it is a gesture of unimaginable generosity" (46). Writing soon after Kane's death by suicide, Urban notes how European critics recognized in Blasted a greatness that initial British reviews missed. Urban in fact sees Kane as searching for ethics in a space of catastrophe.

Since its premiere, the play and Kane's other works have established themselves as hallmarks. Her other plays don't quite match Blasted's level of graphic brutality. (Cleansed has lots of violence, but it's refracted through more theatricality.) But most have that mix of inhumanity and transcendence. Pretty disgusting and pretty and disgusting. 

That doesn't mean I'm assigning it to my script analysis classes anytime soon. But as catastrophe of some sort looms (just constitutional? Civil war?), I appreciate both the frank portrayal of utter breakdown and the hope of human kindness even in blasted ruination.

Class Prep: Mushbrain--but a plan!

 OK. I think I have a possible plan for the grad class. It's gonna be a combination reading/discussion group with a pedagogical focus. 

It meets twice a week--Mondays and Wednesdays. Most Mondays, I'll have them read a play paired with a critical piece (usually an article focusing on teaching that play and/or contextualizing/problematizing it). I have many, many more such pairings that could work than I have room for. I gotta cut down.

Most Wednesdays, there will be two presentations by students. Students will sign up for two of these presentations at the start of the semester. One will be a "keystone" presentation where they teach us a lesson on some especially influential or significant play, artist, movement, and/or event. Ideally, this will be one we've all heard of, perhaps from prior to 2000 (or at least prior to 2010). I'll have a suggested list, but they're welcome to do something different if they'd like. The other presentation for each Wednesday will be something else--a "hidden treasure" (I'll think of something else to call it). Here is where they can either suggest and have us all read a relatively recent play (last 20 years or so) that they think will become important--or argue for the recovery/recuperation of some artist/group/event that we (and most canon/class formations) overlook.

Additionally, each week, students will post a "sitrep" (Situation Report) on a blog they'll create just reflecting on their thoughts from the prior week.

The two big projects at midterm and finals will be some kind of annotated syllabus that they'll create--perhaps one for a general ed "contemporary dramatic lit" class and one for a special topics course of their own devising that generally deals with theatre/performance of the last seventy-five years.

The hard--hard hard hard--thing right now is, as always, what do I leave out? I have so much extra that i'm thinking of cutting down student reports in favor of just having more that I provide. I'm trying to take Jill Dolan's advice: assign less. I want the class to be rewarding, not a slog.

Perhaps I should do only one or the other rather than both on the Wednesdays?

Aaaand there's also the undergrad script analysis to get ready before Monday. But not right now. My brain=mush.

G'night!

Class Prep: Lots of Article Reading

 All day long has been me downloading scholarly articles onto my hard drive and into my brain in preparation for deciding what goes into my contemporary theatre seminar.

I've taught this seminar several times before, and I've never been exactly satisfied with it. It's technically a history seminar, but there's just no way to do justice to the last seventy-five years of global theatre history in fifteen weeks (fourteen, really, with holidays and whatnot). I looked over all my past attempts today. They stretch back to the aughts. I see I started with a doggedly chronological march through key eras. Then I shifted to a thematic focus. I shunted the march-through-history back to a "crash course" that took up the first few weeks. Students would absorb all that the standard theatre history texts had to say about the eras we studied. I'd give them a week or two to do that and then threaten them with some kind of test. The real test, of course, was me looking at their notes, seeing if they'd taken care to learn what they needed to.

I dislike that activity. It always felt necessary--Well, I can't have a history class without them knowing the basic history, right? You have to have a starting point to trouble, don't you?--but it caused such stress and tension for students. It's like their comp exams in miniature, even as it was supposed to help them prepare for said exams.

I'm trying to do away with that exercise this semester.

As I've mentioned previously, we're formally stepping back from the expectation of an encyclopedic knowledge of theatre history. This seminar--like all our era-based history seminars--is transitioning to a more modular, special-topics course. I've been approaching this course's planning as if it simply were one of those special topics courses. "What if you get a job at a college/university," I pitched, "and got assigned a course along the lines of 'modern drama' or 'contemporary theatre' or 'today's plays'? What do you teach?"

My aim was to attract students beyond just our PhD program. Currently there aren't enough PhD Theatre students in coursework to make a course work. (There's a general lull in applications to PhD programs in Theatre, but that's another topic.) I wanted to appeal to folk in English, Comp Lit, Womens/Gender/Queer studies and the like. As it happens, my class is half theatre grads (PhDs and--unexpected--MFAs) with a few outsiders thrown in. There's even an especially precocious undergrad there.

So: having promised a special topics course, how shall I deliver? I think I have a sufficient number of articles and plays to choose from. How do I arrange the course? What will their main assignments be? What do I want them to take from this course?

In my mind, I'm thinking that the main big deliverables from students in the semester will be teaching materials: perhaps an annotated syllabi--two or three, I haven't decided on; perhaps a portfolio of syllabus, teaching philosophy, and sample lesson; or perhaps a conference-length presentation/manifesto. I'll also try to do a lot of low-stakes writing throughout, perhaps via a weekly blog. The course is two days a week. I'd ideally like to do one day of case study--a play or playwright (or perhaps an event or topic) paired with an article (preferably about teaching said playwright/play/event/topic). The other day, after the first week or two, would involve students signing up to share (1) a keystone play/playwright/event--a play/playwright/event that influenced other work/artists; or (2) a hidden treasure item--an event/site/play/artist that they think could or should become a keystone. Maybe I should include an option of a hands-on lesson?

The other assignment will be weekly status reports (blogs) where they reflect on the topics given.

Different students are taking this class at different levels; some are pass/fail while others are fully enrolled. I'll have tiered expectations for each level.

Now: how do I structure the weeks? I have two days to decide!

Class Prep: Looking for Scripts that Ring Bells

The week before school starts every semester involves heavy research. I read as many plays as I can, as many articles as I can find. It's like I'm cramming for a test, as I tell my students not to do. I like to use new and little-known plays for class, mostly because the chances of my students finding online summaries or essays on them is so low. I've discovered quite a few ones I adore thanks to New Play Exchange. Sometimes you have to go through several before finding one that works. 

"Works" means I feel an inner resonance, like a bell rung, at the end. It means I love the play. Admittedly it's easier to feel that when reading published and produced plays. Such works have generally already gone through several layers of workshopping and refinement. I remember feeling it the first time I read Gidion's Knot by Johnna Addams, Skeleton Crew and Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis, Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, and most recently Primary Trust by Eboni Booth. (What a lovely gem of a play Primary Trust is!)

But I feel especially proud when I find a ringer script in NPX. Often it's a play that's long, so long I wonder if I want to read it at all. But then it turns into Marianas Trench by Scott Sickles or Even Flowers Bloom in Hell, Sometimes by Franky D. Gonzales or Crying on Television by R. Eric Thomas or House of Joy by Madhuri Shekar. These become some of my favorite plays, at least for a time. And I put them into my course and see how they fly.

For any number of reasons, some scripts that I really enjoy just fall flat with students. I continue loving them but take them out of rotation for use with undergrads. I love The Nether by Jennifer Haley, for example, but her Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom--which I also love--just poses fewer mental roadblocks for students. Others prove pretty durable. Students never tire of Diana Son's Stop Kiss, and 'night,Mother by Marsha Norman--for all its iffy representation of epilepsy--keeps their attention. 

Some scripts I have to take out of rotation because students (or at least a few students) like them so much they propose them for our season. This happened with Jen Silverman's The Moors as well as Gullem Clua's Marburg--and now with Haley's Neighborhood 3. I hate to lose these (at least for a four- or five-year stretch), but I'm also pleased that they sparked someone's interest.

And then there are plays I keep in rotation even if they aren't the students' favorite. I use Eugene Scribe's The Glass of Water every semester (I took this cue from Shelly Orr) because (1) I like it, and (2) it so neatly encapsulates the well-made play format so many of the other scripts I choose alter or reject. Few students enjoy that one, exactly, but many come at least to appreciate it. Susan Glaspell's Trifles is ubiquitous and dated but rock-solid as a starter script for the semester (I put that alongside Alice Gersternberg's Overtones and Alice Childress's one-act Florence). Jackie Sibblies Drury's Really doesn't enjoy the popularity of her better-known (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) works, and it confounds students. But the way she plays with time and ambiguity is so rewarding.

Some plays I put in precisely because they'll confound students, usually by refusing to resolve ambiguities or explain themselves. Caryl Churchill's Far Away is a favorite of mine (just about any Churchill would work). A little-known play called D Deb Debbie Deborah by Jerry Lieblich is so, so delightfully complicated. 

Not every script I use is one that resonates with me immediately. My perspective as a white cis US guy (a minority with outsized power) is limited, my bell (like everyone's) is tuned better to certain frequencies than to others. I try to remember that most plays aren't made for me, in other words. I wasn't immediately bell-rung with Jaja's African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh, for example, but I appreciated Bioh's craft and noted how the script checked several of my preferred boxes at once (interesting structure, centers African diasporic voices, centers women, recently popular). I put it in last semester. And as students engaged it, it grew on me. It'll likely be in my rotation for a while. 

I write this having just read another one tonight that rang a bell: Juan Ramirez, Jr.'s Calling Puerto Rico. An agoraphobic man uses ham radio to reach out to both a friend on the International Space Station and his estranged grandfather on Puerto Rico just as Hurricane Maria hits. I'll need to give it a night or two to reality check myself, making sure I'm not just reacting out of personal resonance. My father was a ham radio operator, learning that hobby while serving in the air force on a base in Puerto Rico. I've been through a number of bad hurricanes here in the South myself. I'll need to do some thinking to see if this script is just one I liked or one I liked that would also be useful in class.

More tomorrow.

Class Prep: Canon Questions, Continued

 An anthology I'm most of the way through now that's helping me envision my seminar on contemporary dramatic canonicity is Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US, edited by Lindsay Mantoan, Matthew Moore, and Angela Schiller (Routledge, 2022). I think this book might form the backbone of my course. The contributors are diverse, thoughtful folk. Their contributions are intentionally conversational, mainly edited exchanges and interviews (with some bibliographic tags). 

It's the kind of book ripe for use in a seminar; instructors can pick and choose which essays most resonate with their course. Everything is pretty self-contained, like a streaming series that consists of bottle episodes. As with many such series, some themes and academic tropes recur. Several entries revisit the etymology of canon (from the Greek term for a measuring reed or stick). Multiple authors  nod to the term's Christian-Biblical connotations, and a few (such as Kuftinec and Rauch) even indulge in some dad-joke punning with the military homophone. (I adore dad jokes.)

Audre Lorde crops up many chapters. Well, what crops up is a piece of one quote from one essay by Lorde, that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (from the essay titled by that clause). Usually the quote gets used as a way to dismiss works within a traditional (i.e, white, male, cis-het, Euro/US-centric, non-disabled, well-off) canon--or canons altogether. That's not exactly what Lorde is talking about in that essay, but it's not not what she's talking about, either. 

Most of the contributors seem to be writing in the wake of the "We See You, White American Theatre" manifesto/statement of 2020, which calls out professional and university theatres (and theatre-makers) for their failure to walk the walk of antiracist (and anti/decolonial) talk in terms of their seasons, audience outreach, and production practices. Says Bill Rauch (white cis artistic director of first Cornerstone, then Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and now the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center): "I took every single sentence of that letter personally. As I should have. That is the point."

For several contributors, the weariness with playing nice with/kowtowing to mainstream (white) expectations manifests as well-earned fed-up-ness with the canon(s) handed down to them. "The American Musical Theatre Canon," argues Brandon Webster in a chapter about the canon of musicals, "fails every non-white student who comes in contact with it, in spite of the fact that it's used as the primary took for training and education, both as musical history and pedagogy." Other authors dispute the need for the idea of a canon at all, pointing out that canons are by nature exclusionary, that their intended function is to distinguish the worthy/sainted from those who aren't. As such, they are necessarily operations of power. Not everyone can be canonized. Canons ensure most folk are left out.

Some contributors take a nuanced approach, asking (as Webster does) what a new canon might look like. A few scholars (like Carrie Sandahl) cop to liking parts of the canon they were taught in undergrad and grad school even as they now recognize its exclusionary functions. Finn Lefevre, writing about queer canons, echoes this sentiment, rejecting the notion of simply eradicating 

And some selectivity is necessary given constraints of time/energy/resources. Lefevre references Umberto Eco's notion that we have to have some way to "make infinity comprehensible." It really isn't possible to include everything in a season (or a semester). We produce and teach some things rather than everything. Nor can we simply pretend that we can simply swap some other, non-white identity as the core of a new or better canon. Replacing a white canon with, say, a Black trans disabled canon might provide a valuable respite (especially but not exclusively for Black trans disabled folk), but the master's tools keep their potency. Adopting such tools, as Lorde says, "may allow us temporarily to beat [the master] at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." 

Sukanya Chakrabarti moves deftly through such considerations, arriving at an idea drawn from Robert Dale Parker, who argues that any selection system (like a canon) should "not only represent what it systemizes but also advertise the limits of its own systematicity." "Any stable canonizing projects for queer theatre," writes Lefevre, "necessarily mark themselves in one specific moment of queerness. What was transgressive at that moment will someday, and possibly even through canonization itself, become naturalized. A queer canon today will be queer theatre history tomorrow, and a new canon--or several--will emerge." 

We might have to earn to hold canons loosely, as we are learning to do with so many other linguistic and conceptual tools that help to make infinity (and ourselves) comprehensible.

I think I'm going to assign the whole anthology. It's a winner.

Class Prep: Big Questions

 The other class I'm prepping for aside from two sections of script analysis is a grad seminar in contemporary theatre history and lit. I've taught the course several times before. It's one of several classes scheduled to be reformatted in a revision of the PhD curriculum currently in process. Lord willing, this is the last time this course will be taught.

There's nothing wrong with studying theatre history and lit from a particular era. Our current curriculum requires many such classes. PhD students have to travel through about six semesters' worth of history from ancient times (Egypt, India, Greece, etc.) to the present. That's the model we instructors were all trained in. But we've decided to move away from "encyclopedic survey of theatre/performance history." That goal was based in a prior vision of what a PhD in Theatre was for--a generalized expert who knew a bit of everything even if they specialized in one particular thing. All of us trained in this model felt prepared to teach seminars and classes on any era of theatre or performance.

Yet years of actually trying to fulfill that Renaissance person role taught us the gaps between expectation and reality. The version of "theatre history" we were taught--the history we supposedly became experts in--turns out to be pretty limited, restricted mainly to Europe and North America. To be sure, there's plenty of theatre and performance in those locations. But they're hardly the whole world. 

You can see the field of theatre history slowly rousing itself from a Euro/American (specifically Euro/USA-nian) stupor over the last three decades. Successive editions of theatre history texts and drama lit anthologies have grown larger and longer, the authors discovering whole new continents and hemispheres equally full of performance practices and traditions. Every year, those of us trained in theatre and performance have become more and more aware of and uncomfortable with the holes in our picture of "world theatre history." Each semester we tried to fit more and more material into the same already overcrowded syllabi and semesters. The classic syllabus question--What do I leave out?--takes on a new poignancy when you recognize how much has always been left out of our traditional historical narratives.

Thus, our program--like many of our peer programs--decided to relinquish the notion of encyclopedic knowledge, a core of facts or canon of texts that every graduate of a PhD Theatre program should know. We're shifting away from a seminar-by-seminar march through theatre history; there's no realistic way to do justice to such a history. Instead we're adopting an openly piecemeal approach, a curriculum composed of modular special-topics courses from different eras and focused on different themes. 

Assigned a seminar whose catalog title is "Theatre from World War II to the Millennium," then, I'm trying already to wrest the class away from its place in the old order. I'm instead shaping the seminar around the question of what a dramatic literature class can or should do. I've advertised the course especially to folk in sibling disciplines like English, Comparative Lit, and History. "Suppose you're assigned the 'Modern Drama' class," I wrote in the blurb I passed around to other grad programs in my university. "What do you teach?"

Underpinning this question are a host of others. What is theatre for? Why study dramatic literature? What plays or playwrights should we study? Do we include practices that aren't so text-centric? Are those practices even literature? What criteria might guide us as we design classes and reading lists? What role if any should the canon play? Is that idea even useful anymore? Do we lose anything by jettisoning the values canons purported to champion--universality, quality, timelessness--or are those concepts irredeemably contaminated with hegemonic and oppressive systems? On the other hand, given human limits on time and attention, is there any way not to have some kind of functional canon, a focus on some plays and not others? What then might an ethical practice of canonicity look like?

Hopefully I can harness the energy of such big questions to create a coherent, interesting, and rewarding seminar.

Hopelessness in Lote Bravo

Sometimes, while hacking away at the endless and ever-renewing pile of papers to grade, I run into a student analysis that makes me re-think a play I thought I knew. I'm going to ramble through some thoughts here.

The play in question is The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis. Set in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the play tells the story of a mother, Juanda, searching desperately for her lost daughter, the 15-year old Raquel, whom she calls "el toro bravo," the brave bull. Actually, as the play starts, the audience sees Raquel dying in the deserts outside of CD, her body beaten, her hands bound. She's met there not by her mother but by La Santa Muerte, the Holy Lady of Death in Mexican Catholic culture, patron diety of sinners and desperate people. Raquel asks for release; Santa Muerte offers only presence and some comfort, telling Raquel the story of Juanda searching for her.

The play unfolds from there in nested flashbacks. We see Juanda, a malquiladora (American-owned factory) worker, appealing in vain to Pedro and Roberto, corrupt police detectives, to help find Raquel. She spills her frustration and desperation to Camille, a co-worker at the malquiladora. Camille insists that Juanda pray to La Santa Muerte, giving her an icon of Lady Death. Scandalized at first--Juanda insists she is a good Catholic--she nevertheless takes the figure.

At home, as her young sons sleep, Juanda prays to La Santa Muerte, who enters in a supernatural flash. She scorns Juanda's ignorance (the proper prayer to her involves offerings of tequila), demanding payment in exchange for Juanda's request for knowledge. Juanda promises anything. La Santa Muerte presses her:

La Santa Muerte: Are you a virgin?
Juanda: I have four children.
La Santa Muerte: Were you married before you let a man fuck you?
Juanda: I don't like you accusations or your language. It's disgusting.
La Santa Muerte: You can't even answer me honestly.
Juanda: I was...I've prayed for forgiveness. I've confessed.
La Santa Muerte: Confessed what?
Juanda: Eduardo and I did the honorable thing. We married before I was showing . . . Raquel was born in wedlock
La Santa Muerte: You're a very good Catholic woman.
Juanda: I try . . .
La Santa Muerte: I've never liked her. Your holy virgin. I've never understood why anyone prays to her. A virgin knows nothing about the sins a woman must endure for survival. Get her out of my sight.

Raquel, La Santa Muerte informs her, has prayed to the Lady Death since she was five. It's Raquel's prayers, not Juanda's that lead her here. La Santa Muerte demands the Mary statue Juanda has. She gives it. La Santa Muerte takes her into Raquel's past. We (along with Juanda) see Raquel meet a young wannabe tough, El Reloj ("the clock"), who promises her a job at the bar where he works. Both he and Raquel, Santa Muerte says before departing, pray to her.

From there, the play consists of scenes where Juanda purchases--and then steals--ever more expensive alcohol--and finally her own blood--for her ritual entreaties. Each time, La Santa Muerte shows here a bit more of Raquel's past--her growing relationship with El Reloj, her work selling her body for money, their plans to escape Ciudad Juarez, El Reloj's fear of his gang's boss. Ultimately, after an unsuccessful duel (a bullfight) with Reloj's boss (the Man in the Black Hat), Raquel is beaten. Reloj, struggling to get her away, is stopped by Pedro, the police officer who we learn is both his own father and in the service of the gangs. to spare the rest of his family from reprisal, Pedro says, El Reloj must end Raquel's life, and Pedro must end his. This happens. Pedro and Roberto then dump the bodies in the desert.

Thus we rejoin La Santa Muerte comforting the dead Raquel as Juanda enters. Cradling her daughter, she narrates a tale of her and her sons' escape over the Rio Grande into the USA.

The student's paper suggested that the action pattern for the script is pillaging the light, stealing away hope and replacing it with hard, dark, pragmatic survival. At first I objected. Action patterns in plays generally do not describe merely the starting conditions of the script; they must account for the arc of the play. The play starts in hopelessness, I said, with light already pillaged. What's left for the play to do? The student, however, argued effectively that the play takes us through that loss of hope, the replacement of idealized fantasies (the Virgin Mary) with crimes of survival and, finally, with blood. The play ends just as it began, in the desert, with a woman crooning a tale to a corpse.

It is a grim play, a play where a religion that preaches hope gets supplanted by a religion of gritty reality. "I was a naive child once," the Man in the Black Hat says as he begins to duel Raquel, "filled with dreams of escape." Juanda's ending vision, which I originally read as prophecy, now seems like a kindhearted dream, a final comfort to a daughter who died for nothing.

The real antagonist, Bettis suggests, is the world itself, a NAFTA-created world of exploitative factory work and violence-ridden gang life, all for the benefit of invisible Americans. (The factory Juanda and Camille work in makes USA flags. At one point Camille catches her finger in the sewing machine and without missing a beat wraps her bloody finger in a flag so that she can keep working.)

In an interview, Bettis says she wanted to write a play that would make white Americans, upon watching it, start rooting for Mexicans to cross the border illegally--do anything to escape that world. In this, I think, she succeeds.

But I'm caught by the odd sort of hopeless hope represented by La Santa Muerte, the one everyone in the play--antagonist and protagonist alike--prays to.

At one point, a desperate Juanda steals a bottle of añejo to summon La Santa Muerte.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Shit. This añejo, this bottle…So many mouths that have tasted this have called my name. Desperation. Loneliness. And yet a lingering taste of hope. Subtle. If you didn’t know what hope tasted like you’d miss it completely.

JUANDA: La Santa Muerte…Forgive me. I…I’ve never stolen anything in my life.

LA SANTA MUERTE: That guilt just eats away at your insides, doesn’t it. You should know by now that I don’t forgive. I listen.

JUANDA: What good does that do…

LA SANTA MUERTE: Whose sin is worse. The one who sins to pay or the one who pays to sin?

JUANDA: I don’t…I don’t know anymore.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Good.

"If you didn't know what hope tasted like you'd miss it completely." 

I'll have to think more on this.

 

Wild Ideas and Staged Readings

So, a wild thought occurred to me as I was reading The National Review's take on Will Arbery's just-closed play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, about which I've written before. I've been wanting someone to talk to about this play for a while, but almost no one in my immediate world is familiar enough with the script or with the issues involved. And everyone in my world is pretty busy with their own things that they'd love to talk to me about if only I were more familiar with them.

But, among the many ideas the play pitches into the air for characters to bat back and forth is conservative Rod Dreher's Benedict Option. Arbery apparently sent Dreher a draft of the script. Dreher notes, however, that Arbery has not responded to Dreher's emailed questions. Likely, Dreher surmises, Arbery is reticent (as he is in national news interviews) about sharing his own stance. As a playwright, he presents an honest selection of characters who represent a cross-section of conservative Catholic thought in 2017. For Arbery to register whether he supports one or more of the characters would be to upset the balanced, complicated picture his dramaturgy produces. (This seems similar to Lucas Hnath's keeping mum about his beliefs in reference to his excellent play The Christians.)

But Rod Dreher lives here. I live here. It is in my power to create a staged reading/discussion event and invite Dreher to participate.

This is a wild thought because, although I find Dreher's writing often compelling, the two of us stand on opposite sides of a worldview gap. We may concur about President Trump's many shortcomings, but on issues like abortion and sexuality, we would be opponents.

It's a strange kind of opposition in this strange time.

One of Dreher's posts today celebrates Democrat John Bel Edwards's gubernatorial win over Republican Eddie Rispone yesterday, a victory widely seen as a rebuke of Trump. I celebrate along with him.

Trump had campaigned strongly in Louisiana and elsewhere for Rispone, even coming personally to Louisiana on three occasions for pro-Rispone rallies. Such rallies, predictably, turned in to pro-Trump rallies. Dreher points out that Rispone had no discernible platform beyond "Trump likes me; I like Trump." If anything, Edwards's victory signals that pro-Trump rhetoric alone isn't enough to swing a state like Louisiana.*

Edwards, by contrast, has held on to his position as one of the very few Deep South Democratic governors largely thanks to his stalwart pro-life credentials. He signed into law incredibly restrictive anti-abortion legislation during his last term.

I am, as I have mentioned, heartily against most abortion restrictions. I approach reproductive matters from an entirely different place, holding entirely different warrants, than Dreher does.

I support Edwards despite rather than because of his anti-choice stances. There are a number of reasons; his expansion of medicare, his stabilizing the state's finances, his openness with his electorate (he hosts a call-in radio show weekly), his support for teachers, his general alignment with Democratic rather than Trumpist values. In my ideal world, I'd have someone like Edwards but who also works to protect the right not to be forced into continued pregnancy or childbirth, who doesn't treat pregnancy as a functional punishment inflicted on people (disproportionately on women) who have sex. I'll take Edwards, though, because his anti-choice stance makes him a viable candidate. It's the kind of pragmatic calculation Deep South progressives regularly have to make when voting (and the kind of calculation conservatives in other parts of the country have to make about their candidates).

There are other big worldview differences between Dreher and me. Unlike Dreher, I simply fail to see any dire cultural threat from the spectacle of a few drag queens in 30 or so cities reading books to children in public libraries. I'm baffled at the shibboleth status that Drag Queen Story Hour has acquired among a particular bandwidth of cultural conservative. I don't know, but I imagine there's a number of ways that my faith expression (liberal gay United Methodist) would be obnoxious from his Orthodox perspective.

Nevertheless, I'm intrigued at the thought of having a good, long conversation with him about this play. He'd be an ideal conversation partner here. (In the unlikely event you're reading this Mr. Dreher, please do contact me!)

And beyond the wouldn't-this-be-cool factor, a productive conversation with Dreher might restore a bit of faith in the possibility of a pluralist civic ethos. Two people who disagree strongly and are unlikely to convert each other have a deep conversation about faith and politics. What a spectacle. Someone should write a play about it.

We'll see.

*Dreher cites another possible factor in Edwards's victory, one I find depressing yet difficult to discount: LSU won last weekend against its long-time arch-rival Alabama (a rare feat). Spirits in Louisiana--pride and contentment about Louisiana--were high this last week. Had LSU lost, a note of dissatisfaction may have tipped things more in Rispone's favor...

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Yesterday I read Will Arbery's new play (currently at Playwrights Horizons in NYC), Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Rod Dreher at The American Conservative blogged about it a few times, giving it high praise for its empathetic portrayal of white Catholic conservatives.

Empathetic is a loaded descriptor here, for reasons I'll get to in a moment.

The play, set in 2017 Wyoming (just before the total solar eclipse, just after Charlottesville), features the troubled, mostly twenty-something alumni of Transfiguration College (a real place where the playwright's parents work and where he lives). We see a few hours from the ending of a party celebrating the inauguration of the College's new president, beloved president Gina, who doesn't appear until the final scenes.

The other characters represent representative cross-sections of white conservatism. Teresa, aptly described by Dreher as an "Ann Coulter type," is in many ways the standout, Gina's former star pupil now blogging merrily as an intellectual powerhouse of the Right. She adores Steve Bannon, argues that Trump represents the next, necessary face for conservatives. Kevin is lost soul, desperately lonely, desperately horny, pathetically self-aware of how pathetic he is. He's a bit of an incel, though he never uses that term. Emily, Gina's daughter, is a deep-feeling soul questioning some of the harsher sides of modern-day conservatism. Justin is the oldest of the alumi at 38; he entered college after a stint in the Marines. His perspective aligns with Dreher's own Benedict Option (which gets name-checked here, as do a range of other theological and political works). A war is coming, he's convinced. The best Christians can do is batten down the hatches until it passes.

Most characters are convinced that some kind of conflict is happening. Teresa is eager for it. She wants warriors and castigates Kevin as a "soy boy," too weak-willed to stand for anything. Emily recoils at the thought of making war. So too does Gina, once she comes. She and Teresa have at it, former star pupil versus former favored professor.

Arbery gives every character some grand monologues. As Dreher notes, Teresa in particular sings well the tune of Sohrab Ahmari (from the recent Ahmari-French debates). Reacting to Gina's castigating Trump and his ilk as no true conservatives, Teresa lashes back:

Not being measured. Not being polite. I don’t want to be polite anymore. We can’t lie to ourselves. We’re past that. We’re in Crisis. They’re coming for our tabernacle. They want to burn it down. They want to destroy the legacy of heroes like you. So I propose leveling up. I propose looking at the truth in the face. Knowing what it looks like. Knowing what we look like to them. It’s not going anywhere. I propose not taking any shit. Not ignoring all the hypocritical bullshit. Going blow for blow. And being ready for the war, if it happens. When it happens. You call us racist, we’ll call you racist. You call us white, we’ll call you black. You call us Nazis, we’ll call you abortionists and eugenicists. You call us ignorant Christians, we’ll call you spineless hedonistic soulless bloviating bloodbags. But you stop doing that, and give this thing space and time to work itself out, we’ll stop too. You focus your efforts on making this a better nation, an American nation, a republic of ideas, we will too.

Challenged by Emily about the Christian precepts of love and empathy, Teresa slaps her down:

Oh don’t with the empathy. Liberals are empathy addicts. Empathy empathy empathy. Empathy is empty. Hannah Arendt says we don’t need to feel what someone else is feeling – first of all that’s impossible, second of all it’s self-righteous and breeds complacency, third of all it’s politically irresponsible. Empathize with someone and suddenly you’re erasing the boundaries of your own conscience, suddenly you’re living under the tyranny of their desires. We need to know how to think how they’re thinking. From a distance.

Gina's response is devastating, at least in my own star-pupil-who-loves-getting-accolades-from-professors eyes. She essentially declares that the school's great works curriculum has failed with Teresa, who's twisted it into a Machiavellian warfare strategy. Teresa's character spouts a viewpoint I find dangerous and repulsive, but the moment where Gina practically disowns her just stings.

I'm fascinated how and why this play has caught the fancy of New Yorkers. I tend to distrust it when NYC seizes upon a play as a "real" or "respectful" portrayal of a non-left/progressive demographic. Generally, when I scratch the surface of such accolades I find the same old "aren't they awful/fascinating/scary" stereotyping and "aren't we so much better" back-patting. I imagine the play would be very different, and very differently received, were it about white evangelicals. (Of course, I must admit that the characters' conversations would probably be a bit less erudite; Catholic higher ed institutions score better at intellectual rigor and cultural literacy on average.)

Part of the interest, however, seems to be that reaction against empathy. The dramaturg's intro to the printed edition of the play (and kudos to Playwrights Horizons for making such editions available immediately) cites a recent Invisibilia episode, "The End of Empathy," which I listened to while running today.

Both it and the play require me to chew on them a bit more.

Three Big Life Changes Part I: Drama

Wow, I'm tired. I started this blog in the summer partially as a way to get me writing every day. I had forgotten how, during the school year, I do write every day...leaving surprisingly little brain-juice for blogging.

Anyway, back to my first Big Life/Faith Crisis, part umpteenth:

When I entered the ninth grade (1990-ish), I was for the very first time in my life a non-PK. The double whammy of the economic recession and the Southern Baptist Convention's lurch to the right had left my pastor father without a ministerial appointment. Instead, he found work as custodian in the University-affiliated Baptist Church in the town we lived in. The pastor and staff joked that the church's standards were so high that even the custodian had a Master of Divinity.

Such were the thin jokes of our family's hard time.

My mother fell back on her pre-seminary teaching degrees, getting hired as an overworked English/Speech teacher in a tiny, rural school which my sister and I attended for that year. The next year, Mama switched to an even tinier school even further away, and my sister and I transferred to the large school system of the town we lived in.

Again--hard times all around. We went bankrupt. We switched rental homes several times, once because the land lord (we discovered) had been charged with some illegal something-or-other. I didn't mind that time; that house was infested with fleas. You walked across the living room and felt them biting your feet. You sat on the furniture and felt them biting your arm. You went to school or church and--ugh--found one biting you. I still have the occasional nightmare about fleas...

I also developed an intolerance of roast beef sandwiches from Arby's. At the time they advertised 5 sandwiches for $5, which was just the right price for our cash-strapped family. I think I just overloaded. I can barely stand the thought of them now.

Of course, I shouldn't overdramatize. Lots of families were much worse off than we were. We ate cheaply, but never in my memory did we have to go without food. Nor were we ever without a home, without a car, or without clothing. And--corny as it sounds--we had each other, drawing closer together as a family.

Three big factors changed my life in a big way during that time.

The first involved my going to a very large high school. I had grown up in a series of small towns and had attended a series of small schools. This high school had approximately 1200 students. Though that's still small by many standards, that number was larger than the population of the previous town we had lived in. It was immense to me, overwhelming. The first day (10th grade), I wandered from class to class, hoping I had the right schedule.

I had wanted to take Honors Biology; at the time, I had an interest in ichthyology--long story. I realized, however, that the Biology class I was in wasn't quite at the Honors level. What tipped me off: we were assigned to draw a food chain--any food chain--that included humans. One student asked, "Do we eat eagles?" Intellectual snob that I am, I asked the teacher (discretely) if this was Honors Biology. She said no, I went to the office to get added into that class and my whole course schedule changed.

I got into Honors Biology (Teri Savage as a teacher--what a hoot she was!), yes, but I also got put into a Debate class (largely because it was the only available elective for my new schedule). Debate class involved participation in the high school's speech and theatre club as well as trips to weekend speech/theatre competitions. I joined the club, went to the competitions... and began getting involved in theatre. I got cast in Oklahoma! (my first play) that year. I played cranky old farmer Andrew Carnes, who opens the second act with "The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" (I went blank and just mouthed the words during one performance). I got to say "Hell" on stage. I made friends (!!). What a blast.

More: I discovered, at those weekend competitions, that I was terrible at debate. Just terrible. I liked writing arguments, seeing two sides of the same issue, encountering philosophy and persuasive skills--but I did not like live confrontation. I still don't. So I never did well in debate, which happened on Friday nights. I stayed at those competitions, however, through Saturday, which is when the drama competitions happened (events with names like "Dramatic Duet" or "Humorous Interpretation").

I saw two high-schoolers from another school perform a ten-minute cutting from On Golden Pond and thought: This, truly, is Art. Also: I think I can do this.

The next year my (my 11th grade) sister joined that school (as a 10th grader), and we began competing in Humorous Duet (a ten-minute cutting of How to Eat Like a Child And Other Lessons in Not Being A Grown-up by Delia Ephron). We won.

I continued to act, I got cast in shows, I had a circle of friends, I won some medals--it was like I had discovered some kind of varsity sport I was good at.

From then on, theatre was a part of my life. That was the first change.

More tomorrow,

JF