Dry Land by Ruby Rae Spiegel (performance review)

PAJ: Performance Arts Journal, 2023

This is a review of The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays, edited by leanna Keyes, Lindsey mantoan, and Angela Farr Schiller. London: Methuen Drama, 2021.

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2020

Shakespeare's plays have long been viewed as a space where the boundaries of binary gendered sex, sexuality, and desire become murky. However, the contemporary social justice call for trans/gender-inclusivity has been ambivalently integrated into standing conventions of the Shakespeare theater. This essay close reads reviews and advertising materials to argue that contemporary Shakespeare performance is space in which a public makes meaning of gender nonconformism; as such, it is vital for performance institutions to become self-aware of their role in potential education or misrecognition. Recent productions at the African-American Shakespeare Company, the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and the California Shakespeare Theater offer examples of complex and holistic strategies for engaging transgender themes through staging, casting, and outreach programming.

American Literature, 2012

Scholars and critics have announced the end of innocence of the essential black subject. This ending draws artists, scholars, and cultural workers out of black-white binaries and into a critical politics of race as contingent, historically articulated, and particularly placed. Blackness is crossed and recrossed with categories of sexuality, gender, class, and ethnicity to form "new ethnicities" that engage rather than suppress difference. At this historical moment, performance studies is well-positioned to contribute to such projects. The critical tropes of performance and performativity, that is, performance as that risky site that materializes performativity-how someone's body incorporates the conventions of race-are tools of understanding and critical intervention. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity offers an illuminating and compelling example of a critical politics of performing race. It decisively intervenes in disciplinary dialogues to rethink performance theory through the praxis of blackness, and to rethink black theory through performance. What other scholars have done to examine the performativity of gender, Johnson achieves with regard to blackness and sexuality. He skillfully uses performativity and performance as analytic tools, interdependent and mutually challenging. As a term for non-esssentialized identity, performativity is discursively mediated: blackness is a signifier that is historically situated, malleable, and contingent. One "becomes black" in corporeal and material performances as particular bodies negotiate slippages among biological, cultural, and ideological codes. As a portal for doing race, performance facilitates appropriation, the process of setting boundaries that define "authentic" blackness. Johnson examines the politics of appropriation, devoting four chapters to appropriations by black subjects; and two chapters to cross-cultural appropriations by white and other ethnic subjects. The range of Johnson's texts-film, literature, black gay subculture, stand-up comedy, drag, personal narrative, gospel, classroom experiences-attests to the ubiquity of black performance in social life. As an identity ethnography written from the disciplinary routines of performance studies, Johnson makes explicit his text-making process as a researcher-critic-performer. The first three chapters deconstruct binaries that authenticate blackness: the privileging of folk culture, masculinity, and heterosexuality to exclude middle class, the feminine, and homosexuality as black signifiers. In Chapter 1, on Marlon Riggs' film Black Is … Black Ain't, Johnson simultaneously destabilizes blackness and insists upon the fact of the black body with AIDS in a racist society. Chapter 2, on the "manifest faggotry" of Eldridge Cleaver, Imamu considers how black heterosexual males appropriate signifiers of queerness to demean black gay men, the ambivalence of sexual desire, and the politics of black masculinity. Chapter 3 treats black gay men's appropriation of heteronormative tropes of domesticity in vernacular performances, analyzing filmic (e.g., Paris is Burning) and ethnographic sites. Johnson analyzes how black gay tropes of house and home, mothers and children, subvert the normative nuclear family and the mutual exclusions of heterosexuality and homosexuality. These three chapters deftly accomplish the critical task of reading race and sexuality together to form a compelling argument for queerness as a signifier of blackness. performance: in the discursive constraints of mammy (other studies of black role-playing, white masks, and tactics); in the situation of the interview, Mary's life history, and the community in which she now lives; and in relation to her body as both medium and site of performance. The close attention to performance is enhanced by transcription that features Mary's embodied text and Johnson's interactions. Readers may at first be first puzzled by the choice to present the entire transcription in the middle of the chapter, rather than the conventional method of excerpts or an appendix. This methodological tactic centers Mary's voice and body, directs Johnson's discussion, and foregrounds performance as an event co-constructed with a listener and other audiences. As performance makes the body visible, Johnson makes his text-making and meaning-making seeable, offering the reader not only opportunity to re-search his selections and interpretations but also to formulate her/his own. I was repeatedly struck, for example, by Mary's strategic use of reported speech, direct and indirect, in the narrative performance. This chapter also presents an exemplary performance analysis of narrative, culture, and identity. Johnson bases his arguments about Mary's appropriation of the mammy figure on the relations of narrated events (the "told") and narrative events (the "telling") in the storytelling performance. He argues that Mary's performance in the narrated event constructs her as "making do" while her performance in the narrative event "remakes" her black identity in relation to present audiences. For example, Mary's silence in the narrated event preserves a "good" mammy image at the same time that her signifyin' in the narrative event performs her criticism of the trope. Johnson reads shifts in Mary's body and voice to argue that she assumes authority in the narrated event only to undercut it in the narrative event. Johnson also listens to slippages and gaps over the course of the performance event: when Mary's energetic performance becomes subdued, her greater interest in talking about her neighbors than her past, and stories she does not tell. The resulting analysis attests to the precarious and contradictory performance of the mammy trope that both speaks to the power of personal narrative to re-story identity and to the ways it can individualize and obscure structural inequalities such as racism. Johnson achieves this complexity by attending to the mutually dependent and challenging relations of embodied performance and discursive performativity. The fifth chapter, on an Australian gospel choir, has been published in a briefer form in Text and Performance Quarterly ; however, the more extensive data and analysis in the book are rewarding. Analysis of the appropriation of gospel performance by white Australians creates an ethnographic case that is rich and intriguing, incorporating gospel lyric analysis, fieldwork, interviews with choir members, and transcriptions of media interviews with Johnson as a gospel singer. Especially insightful are discussions of how blackness is authenticated in reciprocal cultural interactions of Johnson performing gospel in Australia, and of Australians performing gospel in African American churches. Johnson explicates how authenticity depends upon universalizing, naturalizing, and romanticizing black experience, black spaces, and black bodies; including a frank, reflexive analysis of his own complicitous performance of "the real thing." After an arresting discussion of the dynamics of appropriation, Johnson's conclusion that the Australian choir "becomes black" while denying white skin privilege and the historical specificity of the black body at home (Aboriginal) and abroad (African American) is somewhat compromised by his move to dialogic performance theory. These dialogics are difficult to distinguish from liberal humanism and seem a retreat from the critical politics of performing race. In a concern to demonstrate the transformative power of dialogic performance, Johnson may underestimate the workings of power. The final chapter, "Performance And/As Pedagogy," participates in the venerated disciplinary work and perennially vital dialogue on teaching in performance studies, and it reveals Johnson's love of teaching-"the best for last," as he writes. Johnson situates his discussion within the politics of representation, which performance, by demarcating who the Other is, renders so crisply visible and discussable. After reading black literary critics both for their productive strategies and problematic essentialisms, Johnson turns to the embodied practices of the performance classroom. The chapter describes Johnson's pedagogical strategies of staging intertextuality, negotiating discussions of white and ethnic students as "black" texts, and the teacher as text, including his own performance of the Other when the Other is the Self. Johnson skillfully brings the theoretical and practical insights developed in the first five chapters to discuss how, as a teacher, he both authorizes and destabilizes blackness. Especially interesting are his discussions of "impersonating the personal," challenges to the transparency of experience, and strategies for de-essentializing the black self. Johnson's arguments for the transformative power of dialogic performance in the classroom are provocative and convincing.

2015

Over the past 20 years, after the American LGBT liberationist movement has managed to make new voices heard and acquired certain social conquests, partly overturning decades of exclusion and segregation, gay American drama has often focused on the stories of white upper-middle class men who lead lives that conform to heteronormative roles. This has been the pattern on the American stage following Tony Kushner's influential Angels in America. However, the LGBT collective debates between stances of assimilation to mainstream society and the intention of preserving identity paradigms that differ from hegemonic norms. The intersections between sexuality and ethnic identity offer an alternative model of characterization in drama, one that highlights differences and addresses issues that are frequently overlooked by the mainstream. The crosses between race and sexual orientation focus on the preservation of differences as a response to conformity to social mores. This analysis studies three queer plays belonging to Asian-American, Chicano and African-American playwrights who aim at transgressing hegemonic standards of normality and reject the idea of accommodating to society expectations. By doing so, these authors challenge American drama from the point of view of subject matter, characterization and dramatic structure, highlighting difference at the center of their plays. In the conclusions, I reveal that the new American queer theater may be that which rekindles the spark of belligerence that may have been lost when gay ceased to be a synonym for marginal and became another mainstream construct. To my parents, who disapproved of my academic choices a million times and yet supported my drive. Their million apologies for "being so wrong" have been unnecessary: They have always wanted what was best for me. That is enough to owe them my whole life. To Ed, my life-companion of over eight years, who shall always remain my one try at assimilationism. I hope his "next one" is not so much work as I was! To author E. Patrick Johnson: Needless to say, I would not have been able to write this without the play that he so generously provided. To Cristina Martini, not because she has directed this study, but because she has always been a source of inspiration, since I was 11 years old and she was my first English teacher. Her loving patience at that time pales in comparison to what she has done for me here. To Josefina Coisson, my colleague and friend, for the immense forbearance and relentless support. I have kept my word: This one is done. Now it is your turn! To "Pampita" Arán and Silvia Barei, two juggernauts who pushed, pushed, pushed. By comparison, I feel like the little engine that could. To my friends, old and new, who were not only provocative and stimulating in late-night debates on sexualities over alcohol and cigarettes, but also of occasional envy for their focus, time and patience.

Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies, 2018

Josh ua B a st i a n C ol e C or n e l l Un i v e r si t y "To some, I will never be a 'real man' no matter how skilled my portrayal. Maybe, then, I will always be just an actor."-Scott Turner Schofield, "Are We There Yet?" "What makes us so confident that we know what's real?"-Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man Acting Cis Traditional actor training espouses "bodily unity," or unobstructed access to all parts of the physiological (and expectedly able) body; anything else would be what Jerzy Grotowski calls "biological chaos." 1 A focus on bodily unity in actor training implies that an alternate, dysphoric, or otherwise non-normative embodied experience is "chaotic"-an obstacle to overcome, unhealthy and unwhole-and that embodied disconnections signify failure or lack. This attitude toward disjointedness, when applied to transgender embodiment, infers that trans people are nothing more than broken cisgender people. 2 But the trans "whole" body offers an alternative conception of "wholeness," one with empty spaces creating a fragmented human form. For trans men, that fragmentation localizes around the chest and pelvis, but the empty spaces that emerge there create healthier and more peaceful versions of embodiment for many trans people.

Theatre Journal, 2021

While LGBTQ+ narratives have become an established part of national storytelling in contemporary theatre in the United States, considerably more often than not such plays and productions focus on urban queer experiences rather than the rural. Many queer theorists, including Jack Halberstam, have argued that such a lack of representation is grounded in the false notion of a “metronormativity” suggesting that queers must migrate to the city in order to survive. Through critical readings of two recent revival productions of canonical American works, Christopher Alden’s Peter Pan (2017) and Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (2018), I demonstrate how queer rurality was presented conceptually and dramaturgically, reconfiguring ideologies of nationalism that would see the urban/rural as a polarized binary. Drawing on my own personal experience, I extend Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational theory of the closet (in/out) through my original concept of, “closet ajar,” critically unpacking the imagined constructs of these productions where rural queers are alternatively presented as a part of the community at large. I argue that these productions open possibilities for future representations of queer intersectional rurality in American performance (and beyond) and scholarship across disciplines

Theatre Topics, 2020

It is 2018, and I am sitting in the Neptune Theatre, Halifax, Canada. I’m watching the Canadian premiere of The Color Purple directed by Kimberley Rampersad (the first time the show has been directed by a black woman). It is the first ever positive representation of my own sexuality that I have seen in the form which I have spent almost two decades studying, researching and writing about. As I see the character of Shrug Avery (Karen Burthwright) delight in the fluidity of her own sexual desire, a desire above and beyond gender, it feels like a space has been made. I’m crying but it’s complicated. Joy? Sadness? Recognition?

Race/Gender/Class/Media 4.0: Considering Diversity Across Audiences, Content, and Producers, 2019