Theatre Symposium, Vol. 22 : Broadway and Beyond: Commercial Theatre Considered [1 ed.] 9780817387860, 9780817370091

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editors Editor David S. Thompson Agnes Scott College Associate Editor Jane Barnette University of Kansas

editorial board Noreen C. Barnes Virginia Commonwealth University Becky Becker Columbus State University J. K. Curry Wake Forest University James Fisher University of North Carolina, Greensboro John Frick University of Virginia

Philip G. Hill Furman University Susan Kattwinkel College of Charleston Felicia Londré University of Missouri, Kansas City Stanley V. Longman University of Georgia Scott Phillips Auburn University E. Bert Wallace Campbell University

Copyright © 2014 The University of Alabama Press Cover Illustration: Statue of George M. Cohan in Father Duffy Square, New York City. Photo by Randy Lawson, Copyright 2013, All Rights Reserved, Used by permission. Graphic design by Leah Owenby, Used by permission. THEATRE SYMPOSIUM (ISSN 1065-­­­­­­4917) is published annually by The University of Alabama Press, Box 870380, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-­­­­­­0380. Subscription rates for 2014 are $25.00 for individuals, $30.00 for institutions, and $38.00 for foreign. Back issues are $25.00. Paperback ISBN 978-­­­­­­0-­­­­­­8173-­­­­­­7009-­­­­1 eBook ISBN: 978-­­­­0-­­­­8173-­­­­8786-­­­0

T H E A T R E

S Y M P O S I U M

A PUBLICATION OF THE SOUTHEASTERN THEATRE CONFERENCE

Broadway and Beyond: Commercial Theatre Considered Volume 22

Published by the Southeastern Theatre Conference and The University of Alabama Press

THEATRE SYMPOSIUM is published annually by the Southeastern Theatre Conference, Inc. (SETC), and by The University of Alabama Press. SETC nonstudent members receive the journal as a part of their membership under rules determined by SETC. For information on membership write to SETC, 1175 Revolution Mill Drive, Studio 14, Greensboro, NC 27405. All other inquiries regarding subscriptions, circulation, purchase of individual copies, and requests to reprint materials should be addressed to The University of Alabama Press, Box 870380, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-­­­­­­0380. THEATRE SYMPOSIUM publishes works of scholarship resulting from a single-­­­­­­topic meeting held on a southeastern university campus each spring. A call for papers to be presented at that meeting is widely publicized each autumn for the following spring. Authors are encouraged to send unsolicited manuscripts directly to the editor. Information about the next symposium is available from the incoming editor, Becky Becker, Center for International Education, Columbus State University, 4225 University Avenue, Columbus, GA 31907; becker_becky@ columbusstate.edu.

T H E A T R E

S Y M P O SRecto      I U3 M

A PUBLICATION OF THE SOUTHEASTERN THEATRE CONFERENCE

Volume 22

Contents

2014

Introduction 5 “Totally Original”: Daly, Boucicault, and Commercial Art in Late Nineteenth Century Drama

9

George Pate

Luggage, Lodgings, and Landladies: The Practicalities for Actresses on the British Provincial Circuits in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

22

Christine Woodworth

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”: Constructing Margo Jones in Rehearsal

33

Boone J. Hopkins

Puttin’ the Profit in Nonprofit Broadway Theatre Companies

48

Dean Adams

Commercial Necessities: Reviving Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company at the Turn of the Millennium 62 Jeff Turner

Power in Weakness: Musicals in Poland under Communism 77 Jacek Mikolajczyk

The Recent Trend in Licensed Broadway Musicals in South Korea: Hybrid Cultural Products of K-­Drama and K-­Pop Jae Kyoung Kim

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Stages of Experience: Theatrical Connections between the Seven Stages of Experience and His­tori­cal Museums 99 Erin Scheibe

Grover’s Corners Gets Sexy: The Appealing Dissonance of David Cromer’s Our Town 110 Tony Gunn

“There’s Too Many of Them!”: Off-­Off-­Broadway’s Performance of Geek Culture

121

John Patrick Bray

Contributors 135

Introduction David S. Thompson “There’s no business like show business.” —Irving Berlin “You can make a killing in the theatre, but not a living.” —Robert Anderson

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or several years, I have maintained a list containing bits of advice and pearls of wisdom gleaned from friends and colleagues pertaining to careers in theatre. Along with my personal counsel, I share the list with students who find themselves at a crossroads and come to me seeking guidance about possible directions and appropriate steps. At the top of the list I include a prefatory warning that some perfectly good ideas contradict other sound notions. Thus, the first item on the list comes from a colleague who described acting as either the worst profession in the world or the best, and maybe both. Naturally, the same sentiment could apply to theatre more broadly. Depending upon what is happening on any given workday, it might also apply to a great many professions. The prefatory quotations, above, framing these remarks similarly serve as reminders of the divergent views of theatre. Regardless of our connection to theatre, whether as creators or consumers, we need not look far to encounter a dreamlike world, or someone in pursuit of a dream. The dream collides with reality when we turn to the commercial side of the venture, whether our concerns involve ticket prices, salaries, management, or, as Robert Anderson suggests, making a living. Even Anderson’s famous quotation, referring in part to the overwhelming triumph of Tea and Sympathy and the varied success that followed, has its own duality. The image of making a killing at the box office or achieving fame and fortune retains its own dreamy quality whether applied to renowned impresarios of yesteryear or the suspect title characters of The Producers. To be fair, Irving Berlin’s celebrated paean to performance also has a dark side; “Even with a turkey that you know will fold, you may be stranded

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out in the cold” is included as a lyric. (“Still you wouldn’t trade it for a sack of gold.”) Despite many fine studies dealing with the business of theatre, a survey of publisher’s catalogs will yield far more anthologies, biographies, histories, and technique manuals. Yet those seeking to apply the lessons in such volumes cannot ignore the fact that theatre is a business. For several years beginning in 2000, I had the opportunity to see compassion for art tempered with recognition of practicalities. I was fortunate enough to immerse myself in an annual theatregoing marathon of Broadway productions in conjunction with coverage of the Tony Awards in the popu­ lar press. Between performances I attempted to meet as many industry professionals as possible, hoping to broaden my perspective. In nearly every meeting, whether I approached the conversation as a scholar or a fan, I was reminded of the commercial structure supporting the endeavor. I met the musical director who talked with me while walking to union headquarters to vote on a new contract, the actor who could not possibly accept a speaking engagement and risk losing a paycheck, the company administrator who worried about shifting audience demographics, the assistant artistic director who had to balance new play development with theatre rental costs, and vari­ous critics and press representatives who confronted a changing landscape for publication and journalism; all impressed upon me the fascinating story that of­ten went untold. When I returned to the classroom, I discovered that my students frequently expressed as much fascination for the commerce of Broadway, and the commerce of theatre more generally, as they displayed for lessons in dramatic structure or performance methods. Perhaps they had already anticipated some of the advice that they would receive when asking me about careers. One may well argue that theatre has always borne the challenge of balancing dreams and practicalities, art and commerce. Using Broadway as a term in the title of this volume provides a convenient understudy for the concepts balancing on either side of the fulcrum. Consistent with the practice of this journal, the published articles herein began as presentations at a symposium, an event, in keeping with the more traditional sense of the term, held on the campus of Agnes Scott College near Atlanta, April 5–7, 2013. The scholars who presented papers at our symposium were fortunate to witness keynote addresses by two distinguished members of the theatre community. Stacy Wolf, professor of theatre and director of the Princeton Atelier at Princeton University, offered the multi-­media presentation “Single Girls Sell!: Women in 1960s Broadway Musicals.” In some ways the material served as a behind-­the-­scenes version of the analyses appearing in many publications, most notably her books A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexu-

Introduction     

7

ality in the Ameri­can Musical (2002) and Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011). While making a compelling case for the theoretical and analytical possibilities of the field, Wolf also displayed her affection for the material, demonstrating that one can serve the functions of critic and devotee simultaneously. Freddie Ashley, artistic director of Actor’s Express Theatre Company in Atlanta, combined his own experiences and observations with those of other leaders in the Ameri­can t­ heatre in “Keep on Keeping On, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nonprofit Theatre Model.” His presentation merged an intimate portrait of the inner workings of a successful t­ heatre company with a challenge to innovate and to embrace difficult times. ­Simultaneously, Ashley reinforced the fundamentals of patron service, suggesting that audiences should receive superior treatment—­meaning better than that of ordinary customers—a lesson that can benefit theatrical companies of all types. In fact, although working independently, Ashley’s presentation contained uncanny parallels with the seven stages of experience described in a paper presented by Erin Scheibe as well as her article appearing in this volume. By approaching the concept of commercial theatre from multiple perspectives in exploration of numerous possibilities, our keynote speakers reminded us of some of the realities imbedded within the dreamy images, ideally pointing toward a balanced consideration. The authors whose research appears in this volume were able to draw upon such inspiration in revising their work. Both the origi­nal papers presented in April 2013 and the revised articles herein display the broadest possible interpretation of the concept of commercial theatre and how best to examine it. The resulting articles explore vari­ous points on the commercial continuum. Organized generally in chronological order, Volume 22 of Theatre Symposium opens with connections to commercial theatre viewed his­tori­cally. George Pate analyzes the high-­stakes implications of a melodramatic legal battle; Christine Woodworth recounts the difficulties encountered by British actresses near the turn of the twentieth century; and Boone J. Hopkins considers newly found images of Margo Jones along with the commercial appeal they represent. The volume continues with articles that follow developments with ties to commercial theatre. Dean Adams examines the interplay between Broadway companies and regional theatres, commercial enterprises and not-­for-­profits; Jeffrey Turner explores the musical Company as a case history of Broadway and beyond; Jacek Mikolajczyk provides a series of examples, of­ten surprising, of musical productions in communist Poland; and Jae Kyoung Kim surveys Korean popu­lar culture, its influence on theatre, and the unique production arrangements that have resulted. This edition concludes with alternative

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concepts related to commercial themes. Erin Scheibe outlines the inherent theatricality in an approach to audience interaction, in turn suggesting applications beyond the theatre; Tony Gunn investigates the commercial success associated with an innovative approach to an old favorite, Our Town; and John Patrick Bray introduces us to the burgeoning world of Geek Theatre. Creating a symposium—whether an event, a journal, or in this case a combination of both—resembles a theatrical production in that the effort requires a team of collaborators. We are indebted to keynote speakers Stacy Wolf and Freddie Ashley for enlivening our event by providing valuable insights and suggestions to the scholars who presented papers along with a particularly uplifting conference response to conclude the weekend. Although it is not possible for this volume to include every paper presented during the symposium event, each presenter and member of the audience made valuable contributions and all deserve gratitude for their efforts. I thank my colleagues at Agnes Scott College for their support in hosting the event; the college’s administration, led by Elizabeth Kiss, president of Agnes Scott College, for continued encouragement; Gail Meis, registrar, and the staff of the office of the registrar, T ­ anzania Revels and Cheryl Green, for securing space; Demetrice Williams, director of special events and community relations, for logistical consideration; Pete Miller, director of dining services, and his remarkable staff for personifying hospitality; the student members of the Blackfriars of Agnes Scott College for their assistance and participation; and the indefatigable Leah Owenby of faculty services for friendship and camaraderie. Thanks, in order of our introduction, to Dan Waterman, Crissie Johnson, and Vanessa Rusch of the University of Ala­bama Press for welcome patience and invaluable guidance. Jane Barnette, associate editor of this volume and the next, has redefined friend and colleague for the better. My deepest appreciation goes to my wife, Sara Shockley Thompson, and my sons, Robert and Daniel, yet again, for their understanding, not to mention the many little things too numerous to list. Finally, I offer my best wishes and continuing gratitude to the Southeast­ern Theatre Conference—­its executive committee, board of directors, advisory councils, central office staff, and over four thousand members—for their unwavering support of the study and practice of theatre.

“Totally Original” Daly, Boucicault, and Commercial Art in Late Nineteenth Century Drama George Pate

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helpless young woman lies bound and gagged on the train tracks. A train barrels toward her, smoke spewing, horn blaring, brakes screeching in futility. The mustachioed villain cackles to one side. But then our hero rides in on his white horse, saves the girl, and defeats the bad guy. The day has been won in the name of masculinity, chivalry, morality, and hackney. Iterations of this scenario appear through­ out popu­lar culture in the West. It has become the archetypal image of good guys versus bad guys with the damsel in distress at stake. The origin of this story, however, rests in ethically murkier waters, with a complex tangle of vertices pulling toward intellectual property protection, artistic merit, and commercial success standing in place of a dichotomy of Good and Evil. Augustin Daly’s melodrama Under the Gaslight is widely considered to be the first instance of the tied-­to-­t he-­t racks trope, although the familiar roles are switched, with the damsel in distress being played by a Civil War veteran and the hero being the strong female protagonist. The instant popu­larity of the plot device quickly spawned an imitation. That imitation in turn led to a key case in the development of intellectual property law pertaining to theatre and performance. The case of Daly v. Palmer, in which Daly successfully sued to get royalties from the New York production of Dion Boucicault’s After Dark, reflects the complex relationship between commercialism and artistic integrity at the end of the nineteenth century. The arguments supporting Daly’s ownership of the railroad scene suggest that commercialism and artistry in this moment of theatre history are synonymous and that both primarily consist of an author’s ability to create a specific series of emotional excitements for an audience. Daly’s conflict with Boucicault ultimately sug-

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gests that the cultural and legal conventions under which such sequences of emotional excitement count as both art and property reflect an understanding of ownership rooted in social, moral, and aesthetic—rather than monetary—value. Some of the cases and arguments discussed in this essay—de facto patents on plot devices and copyright protection denied on the grounds of immorality—may seem bizarre to anyone even loosely acquainted with contemporary intellectual property law. The intellectual property regime under which Daly’s work was protected differs from our current intellectual property regime in a number of ways, and understanding those differences is key to understanding the assumptions motivating Daly’s arguments and the relationship between artistry, ownership, and commerce that those arguments reflect. Oren Bracha explains that, for most of nineteenth century, the intellectual property regime in the United States understood copyright as a limited right to the specific economic activity of printing particular texts.1 In other words, copyright literally functioned as just what its name suggests, a right to copy. This meant that the owner of a copyright did not have the right to control or receive compensation from any uses of the text other than copying. Unprotected uses of the text included everything from translations to performances. Oliver Gerland points out that “until [1856], a copyright owner who had printed and sold copies of a play could not prevent others from staging it. . . . By contrast, plays that had been performed but not printed and sold . . . were fully protected under common law.”2 Copying a performance of an unprinted play from memory, then, would be impermissible under common law.3 Performing a play from a printed manuscript, though, was considered a perfectly acceptable use of that manuscript. Any owner of a copy of a playscript could claim the right to such use without consulting or compensating the author. The publication of a play effectively transformed it from a performance object to a text object, and it could not legally be both at the same time. Copyright law for most of the nineteenth century, then, maintained a deep ontological distinction between the written text and the performed play, a distinction that would become fuzzier as the popu­lar conception of copyright law moved away from a right to print and toward the market value-­based force of ownership and control of today. One of the major moments in copyright’s change from a protected, exclusive right-­to-­print to a model of general control and ownership was the introduction of a doctrine of fair use in the late nineteenth century. As Bracha argues, the popu­lar understanding of fair use as a possible emancipatory force against total ownership and control obscures fair use’s nature as an expansion of ownership and control: “Ironically, the fair use doctrine is commonly celebrated today as one of the

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major safeguards against overexpansion of copyright protection. At the time it was introduced . . . , however, it was a vehicle for a radical enlargement of the scope of copyright. . . . Formerly, infringement was limited to near-­verbatim reproduction and all other subsequent uses were considered legitimate. In the new fair use environment, all subsequent uses became presumptively infringing unless found to be fair use.”4 In other words, almost all non-­printing use was fair use before the introduction of a doctrine that specifically designated which transformative uses were protected. Finally, protectability was not yet, at this point, based solely on market value, but also depended to some extent on a work’s adherence to dominant conventions and social norms.5 Each of the above aspects of the mid-­to-­late nineteenth-­century Ameri­can intellectual property regime comes into play in the cases discussed over the course of this essay. Under the Gaslight was a huge moment for Daly, serving as the catalyst for his becoming one of the premier playwrights and managers of his day. First produced in 1867, Gaslight followed on the success of Daly’s Griffith Gaunt staged the year before. It had long runs in cities through­ out the country, and the profits from its success allowed Daly to open his own theatre on Fifth Avenue in 1869.6 In his defensive and laudatory biography of the playwright, Augustin’s brother Joseph Francis Daly describes Gaslight as the epitome of success in melodrama, offering its broader cultural impact as evidence of its more than just financial success: “Not only was ‘Under the Gaslight’ played in every city, but for many months the vaudevillists, ‘sketch artists,’ variety performers, and minstrel troupes were inventing burlesque ‘acts’ of the railroad scene. These travesties were so many evidences of the wide and strong impression that the new play had made. From the day of its production in 1867 to the present time it . . . has been played perhaps of­tener than any other melodrama in the English language.”7 Joseph points to the early proliferation of iterations of and references to the famous train scene as evidence of the play’s deep cultural impact. The train effect was not just lucrative; according to Joseph, it deeply tapped into something in the culture, something beyond spectacle. The play—and eventually the playwright—became synonymous with its sensational train effect.8 Augustin Daly, then, had great personal interest in the image of the train bearing down on the hero. It was his effect, perhaps even the seed, for Under the Gaslight.9 When Dion Boucicault copied the effect in After Dark, the stakes for Daly were high and complex.10 After Dark, which uses a train effect very similar to that of Under the Gaslight, first appeared in Lon­don in August 1868. Due to the weakness of international copyright protection at the time, the Lon­don production was outside Daly’s

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reach. When producers Jarrett and Palmer attempted to put the show up in New York three months later, having purchased the rights from Boucicault, Daly sought an injunction against the production.11 Boucicault initially defended his version, not by claiming that his was origi­nal but by claiming that both were equally derivative, saying that “the railway effect is not derived from Mr. Daly’s ‘Under the Gaslight,’ but is a Lon­don stage machinists’ invention of as early a date as 1843.”12 This defense, though ultimately unsuccessful, raises some important questions about the stakes of the case. For one, it suggests that Boucicault saw the case concerning the appropriation of stagecraft, but Daly saw it as an appropriation of plot. Also, where Daly argues for total ownership of his theatrical device, Boucicault suggests that they both make use of a preexisting trope to which neither of them can claim ownership. Daly’s arguments require a more author-­centric view of theatrical production, in which the most important distinguishing feature of a theatrical piece is not its actual production and performance, in which the details and nuances of several artists coalesce. Instead, the defining element of theatre, in Daly’s argument, is the origi­nality of the author’s invention. In fact, the full title of Daly’s play in one edition is Under the Gaslight: A Totally Original and Picturesque Drama of Life and Love in These Times.13 The fact that this edition adds the phrase “totally origi­nal” to the subtitle in 1895, well after Daly’s injunction had been won, suggests a kind of retroactive assertiveness about Daly’s suit. Daly’s play was totally origi­nal; Boucicault’s was not. Judge Blatchford, who presided over the case of Daly v. Palmer, ultimately agreed with Daly. In his decision, which I quote here at length, he states:



Boucicault has, indeed, adapted the plaintiff’s series of events to the story of his play, and in doing so has evinced skill and art; but the same use is made in both plays of the same series of events, to excite by representation the same emotions in the same sequence. There is no new use, in the sense of the law, in B’s play of what is found in the plaintiff’s play attractive as a representation on the stage. . . . The origi­nal subject of invention, that which required genius to construct it and set it in order, remains the same in adaptation. A mere mechanic in dramatic composition can make such adaptation, and it is a piracy if the appropriated series of events when represented on stage, although performed by new and different characters using different language, is recognized by the spectator . . . as conveying substantially the same impression to and exciting the same emotion in the mind in the same sequence or order. Tested by these principles, the ‘railroad scene’ in B’s play is undoubtedly, when acted, performed, or represented on a stage or in a pub­lic place, an invasion or infringement of the copyright of

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the plaintiff in the ‘railroad scene’ in his play. The substantial identity between the two scenes would naturally lead to the conclusion that the later one had been adapted from the earlier one.14

This decision relies on a number of assumptions, legal and otherwise, not only about the concept of origi­nality but about the function of theatre itself. First, what counts as the subject of contention is not the text itself or even the performance of similar actions but the order of the excitement of emotions. In this way, Judge Blatchford reveals an understanding of the writer’s job and objects of production rooted in an Aristotelian notion of telos. What counts for the writer is not the text itself but the experience of the audience encountering the play. The object whose authorship and ownership are in question, in this case, is a series of emotional stimuli offered in a particular order. Daly is the author not of a text but of the audience’s experience, an experience that both makes his work artistically unique and also renders it “attractive as a representation on stage.” The play only counts as property, as something that can be protected, insofar as it creates such a series of emotional reactions. Finally, Blatchford’s decision effectively granted Daly a patent on the plot device of the train bearing down on the hero. The court did not protect Daly’s design of the train effect, but his use of the very concept of the train scene. Even though Boucicault copied no dialogue or stage directions directly from Daly, Blatchford argued that Boucicault had engaged in “piracy” by making use of the same events, even with different characters and in a different scenario, to excite the same emotions in the same order. This decision suggests that the court, at least, defined a dramatic work by the series of emotions it excites. Following this decision, Daly could seek action against anyone who used the train scene, no matter how different their expression of the idea from Daly’s. In reaffirming Blatchford’s opinion during a later case, an appeals court maintained that in “plays of this class the series of events is the only composition of any importance” and that the particular dialogue used to instantiate the scene was irrelevant to its identity as a dramatic composition.15 Copyright law explicitly protects only the expression of an idea and not the idea itself, and the fact that the sequence of events and the emotions they excited counted as the expression rather than the text itself shows how deeply artistic practice and ownership were intertwined under the umbrella of authoring audience experiences. Daly claimed that the railroad scene was the genesis of Under the Gaslight rather than a fortuitous happenstance of the creative process. He knew he had a gimmick for which he could take sole credit and ownership. Even the writing of the scene itself exposes his understanding of

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both the incitement of emotions and the effect of spectacle. Laura, the heroine, is locked in the station house looking on “horror-­struck”— the construction of a sequence of emotional excitements being specified in the text—as Snorkey lies helpless, tied up on the tracks by the villain, Byke.



snorkey: Is there nothing in there?—no hammer?—no crowbar? laura: Nothing! (Faint steam whistle heard in the distance) O, heavens! The train! (Paralysed for an instant.) The axe!!! snorkey: Cut the woodwork! Don’t mind the lock—cut round it! How my neck tingles! (A blow is heard.) Courage! (Another.) Courage! (The steam whistle heard again—nearer, and rumble of train on track. Another blow.) That’s a true woman! Courage! (Noise of locomotive heard—with whistle. A last blow; the door swings open, mutilated—the lock hanging—and Laura appears, axe in hand.) snorkey: Here—quick! (She runs and unfastens him. The locomotive lights glare on scene.) Victory! Saved! Hooray! (Laura leans exhausted against switch.) And these are the women who ain’t to have a vote! (As Laura takes his head from the track, the train of cars rushes past with roar and whistle from L. to R.H.)16

Again, this passage reflects a number of assumptions underlying the construction of ownership at the time. First, as I mentioned, it creates a clear sequence of emotional representations and excitements. Laura progresses from horror-­stricken to paralyzed and then to bravery. Snorkey’s repeated chant of “Courage!” serves not only as an encouragement to Laura but also as a kind of invocation of emotion for the audience. The exclamation points through­out indicate the excited state of the characters. Just to make sure Laura’s level of excitement at finding the axe is clear, Daly provides three exclamation points at the end of her discovery. Daly understands that, in creating a clear sequence of specific emotional reactions, he made something that he could claim as his own totally origi­ nal property, in both commercial and artistic terms. In fact, he defines artistry in such a way that it must be commercial to count as art, at least within the legal conventions of his time.17 Excitements of this kind constituted key commercial and cultural capital for an author of melodramas. Joseph Daly bemoans the “disparagement” of melodrama hidden in the term “sensational drama,” arguing that “every great play [is] in some sense a sensational drama. The murder of Caesar and the harangue of Antony to the mob are colossal sensations, as is the Ghost in ‘Hamlet’ and the play within the play and . . . the attempted mutilation of little Arthur in ‘King John.’” Joseph goes on to assert that his brother’s play is more than just mere sensation and was

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recognized by critics to have literary merit.18 He argues that Gaslight’s literary merit rests on the excitement of the emotions and suggests that literary or artistic merit in general consists of such excitement. The excitement of the emotions in a specific, tightly controlled, climax-­driven sequence, therefore, serves three distinct but inseparable purposes. First, it makes the play commercially viable. Second, it constitutes the object of ownership, the thing to which Daly actually controls exclusive rights to use. Third, it serves as the basis for the play’s argument for literary achievement. These three identities of the play cannot be separated because the arguments for them all depend upon the same qualities of the play, suggesting a culture of ownership in which intellectual property protection, commercialism, and artistic integrity deeply depend upon each other. In other words, a play only counts as property, can only be owned insofar as it succeeds as a work of art, an excitement of the emotions in a particular, origi­nal order. Joseph’s argument represents more than just a defense of his brother, then. It reinforces conventions constructing a model of artistry in which sensation is not only permissible but necessary. Other contemporaneous intellectual property cases in theatre confirm the identification between artistic merit and the right to protection. The case of Martinetti v. Maguire shows that, during this period, certain standards of artistic merit served as a prerequisite for intellectual property protection.19 The plaintiffs in the case, a group of producers who owned and operated the Metropolitan Theater in San Francisco, claimed that they had secured exclusive rights to perform a play called The Black Rook, an origi­nal dramatic composition by James Schon­ berg written and copyrighted in Oc­to­ber 1866. Martinetti et al. complained that the defendants, operators of rival San Francisco theatre Maguire’s Opera House, had “by improper means procured a manuscript copy of The Black Rook” from an employee of the Metropolitan Theater, changed the title to The Black Crook along with some minor alterations to character names and dialogue, and produced the play. The defendants countered with the charge that Charles Barras had written and copyrighted The Black Crook in July 1866, making it, in fact, the origi­ nal and The Black Rook, written three months later, the fake. Each party, then, sought an injunction against the other’s production. Judge Deady, who presided over the case, decided that sufficient evidence existed to prove that The Black Crook, as produced by Maguire, came first. Even though Deady conceded that Martinetti may have believed he was producing the origi­nal, he denied Martinetti’s request for injunctive relief on the grounds that his “exclusive rights” were to a plagiarized and therefore unprotected copy rather than an origi­nal composition. Deady

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also denied Maguire’s request for an injunction, but for a very different and much more interesting reason. Deady expressed no doubt over the origi­nality of The Black Crook or Maguire’s having legally obtained exclusive rights to perform it. Deady claimed, however, that he could not grant an injunction because The Black Crook was a “mere spectacle” and not a dramatic composition and therefore could not be protected. He also points to the constitutional basis for copyright law, a clause granting the government the right to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Deady describes The Black Crook as lascivious, immoral, and without substance. As an immoral spectacle, it is not “useful” to society and therefore cannot be protected by the law. At this point, then, a play had to meet a certain threshold of both artistic merit and morality in order to qualify for protection as property. Oliver Gerland explains that the 1903 case of Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co.—regarding illustrations for circus posters—reversed the precedent defining usefulness in terms of moral edification and instead determined that “a work valuable enough to copy is valuable enough to protect.”20 But for Daly, usefulness was still the standard, and his play hit the threshold of artistic merit by exciting emotions in a specific order and the threshold of morality by showing nobility triumphing over evil. The Dalys’ conflation of literary credibility, commercial viability, and intellectual property, then, fits in perfectly with the property regime of the time in which legally protected value depended upon artistic merit—or at least relative adherence to dominant values and norms. Even while Joseph argues that the play had literary merit enough to succeed without the stage illusion of a hero barely escaping the engine barreling down the tracks, he acknowledges the significance of the train scene to the play’s success. In fact, Joseph argues that the device’s success despite technical difficulties on opening night proves that the impact of the train had more to do with the emotional stakes and “moral agencies” than with the “climax of the visible railroad train.” He even goes on to say that the particular staging and technology of the effect are not at issue,21 perhaps responding directly to Boucicault’s contention that the train scene was the invention of an anonymous English stage machinist in the 1840s. Boucicault’s “Lon­don stage machinist defense” failed for two reasons. First, Boucicault did not substantiate this claim, simply asserting that some nameless stage machinist had invented the effect in the 1840s for an unnamed production, rendering this claim specious at best. But more importantly, even if a stage machinist who had earlier created a train effect could have been produced, his testimony would have been irrelevant. For the Dalys, and, apparently, for the judge, that argument is rendered irrelevant because the emotional effect, not the technology, is

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the true product of origi­nal creation and therefore the object of ownership. Interestingly, the judge’s decision inverts contemporary intellectual property law, where the technical means for creating the train effect could be patented but an author could not own any and all uses of the plot device outside of her own particular instantiation within her own text. An author in the late nineteenth century could only hope to find financial and criti­cal success by creating new sequences of emotional incitement. Related to the question of origi­nality for playwrights is the question of what counts as origi­nality—or capital in general, for that matter—for other theatre practitioners. Recall Joseph Daly’s contention that sensationalism should not preclude his brother’s artistic achievements as an author because Shakespeare had used such sensationalist effects as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Both with regard to Shakespeare and his brother’s plays, Joseph never explains how any of these effects are to be pulled off. The closest he comes is when he mentions that, on the opening night of Under the Gaslight, something went wrong with the pivotal train scene and the legs of the person operating the train could be seen.22 This anecdote reveals that the train scene was carried out at least partly by human locomotion rather than solely by stage machinery. The designer of this effect, however, remains anonymous. Was it Daly? Or perhaps the same anonymous stage machinist Boucicault claims first created the effect in Lon­don in 1843? Less important than the efforts of the in­di­vidual artists in collaboration is the overall effect presented to the audience for which the playwright/manager receives the credit. In fact, J. Albert Brackett, in his layman’s guide to laws relevant to theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explicitly points out that elements such as design are not dramatic compositions and therefore not protected: “Divested of the person or the human dialogue the scenery and properties alone do not constitute a dramatic composition, no matter how elaborate, novel or unique they are. These make but a picture which, though moving and beautiful, attractive to the eye and satisfying to the senses, are, like a dance, merely spectacular, and devoid of that which is defined as dramatic, or of human interest. It lacks the human element which gives it dramatic life.”23 Here, the spectacle’s value depends on its relation to the emotional elements of the drama or “human interest.” The play as written, according to the assumptions underlying Blatchford’s decision, creates a chain of emotional reactions in a certain sequence, seemingly regardless of actor choices, and that sequence of emotions excited by the playwright’s particular arrangement of stimuli is the thing protected under copyright law. Therefore an actor is not necessarily subservient to the script but instead to the expected audience response to the

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script. In order for something to be covered under the law as a dramatic work, it had to contain some “element of human life.” This regulation, established in part by Daly v. Palmer, in one sense distinguished a dramatic work from any other kind of pub­lic performance such as a “fencing exhibition, a circus, a skating exhibition, [or] costume dance.” In another sense, however, this law effectively grants heightened legal status to realism, a judicial support to the entrenchment and dominance of that genre. Anything that represents “human life,” even if it has no spoken words and does so only through pantomime, can be protected as a dramatic composition, but this protection does not extend to dance in which human interactions are to any degree abstracted, as it “portrays no character and depicts no real emotion.”24 Blatchford’s and other decisions determining the legal status of theatrical productions reinforce the notion of playwright as authorizing force and sole limiter of a fixed emotional meaning, the object of ownership. Legal protection of dramatic sensenations required links to both human interest and emotional excitement, a fact that renders the commercial and the artistic inextricable. Daly’s plays were certainly meant to be moneymakers. This emphasis on the commodity value of the plays exerted no small influence on Daly’s litigiousness, but the very things that gave the plays their commodity value, the sensational effects, were also by definition the heart of Daly’s artistry, the incitement of emotions. Daly and later his estate continued to assert his ownership of the idea of the train scene through­out the late nineteenth century, with cases affirming Judge Blatchford’s decision to grant Daly exclusive rights to such sequences of events as late as 1899.25 Daly’s litigations not only protected his own writings and productions but affected the ways in which they could be received and understood. In successfully pursuing greater control of content, he achieved not only financial security but also a kind of unspoken validation for both his commercialism and artistry. He also, if for a brief time and with the support of the courts, institutionalized a very particular definition of artistry as controlled, planned excitement of emotions intrinsically tied to human interest, the very same kind of human interest that provided his commercial success. Commercialism today of­ten serves as a diametric opposite for artistic integrity, and cultural critics still lament spectacle as a means of pandering for mass appeal at the expense of substance.26 Lawrence W. Levine argues in his seminal book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America that America’s cultural hierarchy is a relatively recent invention, emerging really only at the end of the nineteenth century. He points out that while cultural differences certainly existed before that point, the idea of cultural hierarchy, the idea that some works or genres

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were intrinsically “better” or nobler than others, sharply contrasts from an earlier, more shared Ameri­can culture.27 The cases of Daly v. Palmer and Martinetti v Maguire suggest that not only was culture more shared across class lines, but also that later oppositions between commercialism and artistry had not yet evolved in this period. In fact, commercial and artistic motivations were seen as identical rather than contradictory in a culture that embraced commercial art in a way that somewhat strangely prefig­u res postmodernism while still clinging to the idea of the artist as in­di­vidual and origi­nal genius. Levine expresses a “sense of loss,” a sense that rigid cultural hierarchies have limited appreciation for any number of artists and works. Nostalgia aside, Levine’s argument importantly points out that these hierarchies are not intrinsic. It is easy to see Daly and Boucicault as sellouts or as crassly commercial, but such characterizations grossly oversimplify the issues by failing to understand the cultural conventions under which they operated. Selling out, in a sense, had not yet been invented because commercial success and artistic merit were built on the same foundation.

Notes 1. Oren Bracha, “The Ideology of Authorship Revisited: Authors, Markets, and Liberal Values in Early Ameri­can Copyright,” Yale Law Journal 118, no. 2 (2008): 186–271. 2. Oliver Gerland, “From Playhouse to P2P Network: The History and Theory of Performance under Copyright Law in the United States,” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 79. 3. Such cases of copying plays from memory did occur, and the legal issues involved were actually more complicated than this statement suggests. In the case of Keene v. Kimball, a Massachusetts court determined that Kimball, an associate of P. T. Barnum, had not stolen anything even though he had copied Keene’s production of the unpublished Our Ameri­can Cousin because there was “no property in gestures, tones, or scenery.” This precedent was reversed in the case of Tompkins v. Halleck, in which the defendant had hired two actors to memorize a play called The World and then mounted a production based on their recall. The judge in this case pointed out that The World was protected precisely because it was unpublished, and that had it been published its use would have been out of the control of the copyright holder. See J. Albert Brackett, Theatrical Law: The Legal Rights of Manager, Artist, Author, and Public in Theaters, Places of Amusement, Plays, Performances, Contracts and Regulations (Boston: C. M. Clark Publishing Company, 1907), 75–79. 4. Bracha, “The Ideology of Authorship Revisited,” 229. 5. Ibid., 241. 6. Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: Ameri­can Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 206.

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7. Joseph Francis Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly (New York: Macmillan Company, 1917), 77. 8. For some examples of the extent to which Daly has become identified with the hero-­tied-­to-­t he-­railroad tracks motif, see almost any theatre history textbook, in­clud­ing (as arbitrarily chosen instances) Edwin Wilson and Alvin Goldfarb, Living Theatre: History of the Theatre, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-­Hill, 2008), 353; or Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2008), 329. Both of these sources as well as many others list the railroad scene as one of Daly’s major accomplishments. 9. J. F. Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly, 75. 10. See Seldon Faulkner, “The Great Train Scene Robbery,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50, no. 1 (1964): 24–28, perhaps the first and for a long time the only scholarly attention to this incident. 11. Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly: An Account of the Late Nineteenth Century Ameri­can Stage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 55. 12. Ibid. 13. Augustin Daly, Under the Gaslight: A Totally Original and Picturesque Drama of Life and Love in These Times (New York: Samuel French, 1895). This is one of several different subtitles added to the play that got Daly into a completely different set of copyright troubles. The origi­nal subtitle for the production was A Drama of Love and Life in These Times, whereas the subtitle of the origi­nal publication was A Romantic Panorama of Streets and Homes in New York. The courts initially ruled that the variation between the titles rendered the copyright null; however, that decision was later reversed when the courts ruled that, for all practical purposes, the title of the play was simply Under the Gaslight. For discussion of this case, see Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly, 56–57; J. F. Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly, 474–75. 14. Quoted in Brackett, Theatrical Law, 64. 15. Daly v. Webster, 56 F. 486–487. 16. A. Daly, Under the Gaslight, 42–43. 17. Amy Hughes examines this scene at length in her recent book. She argues that the dismissal of Laura’s act of rescue and Snorkey’s comment on women’s suffrage as instances of effectual po­liti­cal commentary, along with the trope’s transforming the strong heroine into a damsel in distress, reveal a reactionary repression of radical politics in popu­lar culture. See Amy Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-­Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), especially 118–54. 18. J. F. Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly, 75–76. 19. 16 F. Cas. 920. See also Bracha, “The Ideology of Authorship Revisited,” 206–207. 20. Gerland, “From Playhouse to P2P Network,” 77n.7. 21. Ibid., 75. 22. J. F. Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly, 75. 23. Brackett, Theatrical Law, 60. 24. Ibid., 54–57.

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25. See Daly v. Webster, 56 F. 483 and Brady v. Daly, 175 U.S. 148. 26. For examples of this attitude, see almost any review for Baz Luhrman’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but especially Kenneth Turan’s review for NPR, available at http://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182800283/baz-­luhrmanns -­s tyle-­suffocates-­gatsby. 27. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), especially 7–9.

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Luggage, Lodgings, and Landladies The Practicalities for Actresses on the British Provincial Circuits in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Christine Woodworth

I

n the opening of E. L. Blanchard’s comic pantomime Aladdin; or Harlequin and the Wonderful Lamp, Abanazar the Af­ri­can Magician enters—“mysteriously”—and states, “Well, here we are again! Our luggage drop; Being where we are, I feel inclined to stop. Since last I saw these old familiar faces, We have had long journeys unto vari­ous places.”1 Abanazar’s line serves as an apt metaphor for the nomadic performers of the British provincial stage. Palace. Empire. Hippodrome. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, it seemed that every major (and minor) city in Britain was home to a theatre that hosted variety entertainments, holiday pantomimes, extravaganzas, burlesques, and national tours featuring actors and actresses, singers and dancers, and music hall artistes. Holiday pantomimes in particular were of­ten commercial juggernauts for producers who remounted successful productions annually, through­ out Britain. Professional performers were practically professional travelers as they embarked upon countless “long journeys unto vari­ous places.” When fully professional entertainments were not available, professional performers sometimes took low-­paying work in amateur theatricals in order to make ends meet.2 Whether the theatres were the large structures owned by circuits such as Moss Empires or small, saloon performance spaces, provincial performances were big business. Spearheaded by managerial impresarios such as Sir Horace Edward Moss, circuits merged and grew in strength, influence, and market share. By 1899, for instance, Moss’s circuit had joined with Thornton and Stoll theatres to form Moss’ Empires Ltd. This soon became “the largest theatre enterprise in the world.”3 Yet while business boomed for these titans of commercial management, the performers that

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made up their payroll of­ten faced daunting realities of life on the road. Stars of the circuits may have flourished economically, but the majority of the performers lacked the notoriety and salary that afforded them comfortable living conditions. And many performers struggled to get booked in the first-­rate circuits and had to make do with smaller, less financially stable theatres. Actresses in particular faced enormous challenges, from obtaining employment to securing temporary, safe, and sanitary lodgings. Whether actresses were scrambling for third-­class train fare to deliver them to their destination or battling sexual exploitation at the hands of corrupt theatre managers, women performing on the provincial circuits faced numerous obstacles to stardom or even respectability. Impresarios like Moss staked their fortunes on the eager and accommodating young women that constituted the bulk of their workforce. The decadent spectacle of holiday pantomime (such as Aladdin) belied the practicalities of life behind the scenes for late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century touring female performers. Blanchard’s Aladdin was origi­nally performed in Lon­don at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1874. Michael R. Booth notes that Blanchard was the “leading pantomime librettist of his time” and one of the most prolific writers in Britain. In addition to pantomime libretti, Blanchard wrote for a variety of newspapers in­clud­ing the Era and the Daily Telegraph.4 As with many popu­lar holiday pantomimes, the text was soon taken up by dozens of provincial theatres and performed continuously into the twentieth century. Jill Sullivan notes that beginning in the mid-­nineteenth century, pantomime productions followed a fairly standard format: “the ‘opening,’ culminating in a transformation scene, followed by a short harlequinade, and concluding with an optional finale, sometimes a ballet or tableau.” By the latter decades of the century, however, “the pantomime would of­ten be preceded by a short opening play, usually a comedy or farce, a practice which lasted until the discontinuation of the stock company at the local theatres.”5 Audiences were accustomed to these familiar structures as well as familiar titles. Other pantomime titles that saw repeated performances included Robinson Crusoe, Dick Whittington, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and The Forty Thieves. In the De­cem­ber 25, 1877, issue of The Theatre, in the weekly column dedicated to work “In the Provinces,” the author notes, “In the majority of the provincial theatres, it need hardly be said, pantomime forms the leading, if not the sole, feature of the program.”6 The holiday pantomime was a longstanding commercial tradition within Britain. In an 1882 article for The Theatre, W. Davenport Adams attributes this to the revenue brought in by these spectaculars, and the ways in which they served to subsidize the “legitimate” works found during other segments

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of the season. He notes “there are many theatrical establishments in this country which are practically kept up by the annual Christmas production—which, but for the money it brings in, would be speedily compelled to close their doors. . . . It is not only (when successful) a source of large revenue to the managers, but it is also the means of giving settled and permanent employment (for the season) to a very large number of employés.”7 But just how “settled and permanent” was a theatrical life for actresses in the provinces? Booth asserts that the legacy of the pantomime was soon joined by the extravaganza and burlesque and that all three forms bore many similarities, in­clud­ing their identities as “holiday theatre.” He writes that “whatever the season or genre the audience saw the embodiment in theatrical art of varying combinations of high spirits, whim, absurdity, grotesquerie, iconoclasm, fairy-­tale, scenic splendor, topsy-­turveydom, and nightmare. Much nineteenth-­century theatre was light entertainment. Pantomime, extravaganza, and burlesque comprised a great deal of it, attained heights of popu­larity, and then suffered severely in the esteem of critic-­historians (in­clud­ing contemporaries), who, if they had to write about what to them was the miserable degradation of nineteenth-­century drama, were certainly not going to descend to the darkest depths of popu­lar theatre.”8 Popu­lar theatre, however, meant big business for commercial producers for whom the sumptuous spectacles generated great profit. Yet the intricate fairytale worlds depicted onstage were only made possible through the elaborate mechanisms of capitalism and the labor of performers and technicians behind the footlights. In her book The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914, Tracy C. Davis notes, “Pretend­ ing that representation is not in league with markets, promoters, and technologies—­the usual purview of business and economic history— and that capital is not behind them all, is to clash the cymbals, throw a handful of fairy dust, and expect Clio to clap like a child at its first pantomime.”9 By applying that logic to the pragmatics of provincial engagements and tours for actresses in the nineteenth century, suddenly that fairy dust starts to sting. Thomas Postlewait has noted the preponderance of information on nineteenth-­century performers’ lives. He writes, “Because of the growing popu­larity of performers in the nineteenth century, the publishing market for theatre autobiographies and biographies outsold that for books of contemporary drama.”10 Many of those works featured the lives of celebrity fig­ures. In the last two decades, feminist historiography has turned its attention to the writings of female performers in order to distinguish the particular challenges for women on the stage. Viv Gardner has written about several female performers whose “relative ­‘ordinariness’. . .

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makes them especially interesting in a period in which ‘celebrity’ auto/­ biography had become a commonplace.”11 Single women touring in the provinces faced unique challenges while attempting to earn a living in the commercial theatre. Tracy C. Davis notes in Actresses as Working Women, “Career pathways multiplied but the constancy of touring, the fluidity of the acting community in touring companies, and the famous competition for employment had an even greater effect on theatrical women than on men because of the implications for restricted variety in casting, disruptions to family life, and the premium on ties to a management giving steady employment.”12 In the preface to The Diary of an Actress; or, Realities of Stage Life (the so-­called anonymous 1885 memoir believed to have been penned by Alma Ellerslie), the author writes, “Those who only see the stage through the glamour of the footlights, who picture the inner life of an actress through the medium of sensational novels or newspaper paragraphs have very little idea of the real difficulties, and imagine that it is easy to make a position through honest endeavor, and unaided and unadvertised talent.”13 For many women, just securing employment on the stage was a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Ellerslie recounts numerous instances of attempting to procure engagements through countless letters written, advertisements placed in newspapers, and fruitless meetings with theatrical managers. Her advertisement placed in the “Dramatic Cards” section of the Sep­tem­ber 17, 1898, Era simply reads, “Miss Alma Ellerslie. ‘Rosemary’ ‘Gudgeons’ and ‘Trilby’ Tours. Theatre Royal, Maidenhead, Sept. 10th, 6 nights.”14 Her diary oscillates between fear and hope. In one entry she bemoans her small salary that is used entirely on her food and lodgings, she worries about how she will purchase new dresses, which would be required should she ever book a higher profile engagement, and she wonders how she will pay her sister back all the money she has borrowed. The next entry offers a strikingly different tone. “So much better,” she writes. “That gloomy depression is gone, and I feel equal to anything. I have written eight business letters, and I hope I shall get a really good engagement.”15 Yet letter writing seldom yielded employment opportunities, as actress and singer Kitty Marion relates in her unpublished autobiography. After concluding a long-­term engagement in a pantomime entitled La Toledad, Marion tried to get booked into music halls to no avail. She writes: “In the meantime I was doing extra turns, benefit and charity performances, to which I invited agents, by letter and personal calls, to see me, but they never answered letters, and were usually too busy to see a new, unknown turn, or if I saw them in their office, instead of talking business, they veered off to impertinent personalities, ‘weekend’ and the old gag, ‘are

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you married,’ til I felt I wanted to vomit on them, and was glad to get out into fresh air. They had no use for women who merely wanted legitimate work.”16 Viv Gardner notes that Marion “chronicles with frequency her encounters with the predatory male members of the profession, from agents to managers.”17 Marion was discouraged by these repeated encounters but refused to give up on a theatrical career. She goes on to assert: “I found later that most women had to run the gauntlet in the same way. Heartsick and disgusted, I wondered some times [sic] why life was made so difficult for women, what was the use of struggling on when the odds were all against one, why not end it all with one plunge? Then I would remember the advantages that had been mine—and would be again. Encouraging words of Mr. Halford and other friends would spur me on. I gritted my teeth and determined that somehow I would fight this vile, economic and sex domination over women which has no right to be, and which no man or woman worthy of the term should tolerate.”18 This threat of sexual exploitation was a danger faced by many women in the theatre, as Jan McDonald asserts in her essay, “Lesser L ­ adies of the Victorian Stage.” She attests that “For the female recruit . . . the managers could prove not only coarse but unscrupulous in exploiting the inexperience and naïveté of the young women who entered their companies.”19 In the case of both Ellerslie and Marion, their unmarried status made them especially vulnerable, as did their lack of a family connection to theatre. 20 In From the Wings, a series of theatrical recollections by “The Stage Cat” and edited by actress Elisabeth Kirby, the author elaborates on the difficulties in procuring work. She writes: “Looking for an engagement is the nastiest part of theatrical life—I mean for the small fry, the beginners, and provincial stage folk.”21 She goes on to discuss how that process can become easier “when one has ‘made good’ and gained even a small Lon­don reputation.”22 Yet both Marion and ­Ellerslie both worked at vari­ous times in Lon­don and each discusses the persistent ­hustle necessary for continued engagements in both Lon­don and elsewhere. At one point in her autobiography, Marion discusses the arbitrary nature of her low wages. She notes that local managers were responsible for estimating the salary for each performer and sending that fig­ure to the head office, where the fee would ultimately be determined. During a fairly lean period of employment Marion writes, “Several Stoll dates came in and kept me going through Sept. and Oct. At one of the latter halls the manager, whom I had not met until treasury at the end of the week, said to me, ‘I am ashamed at having to pay you such a low salary after the success you have been here, who has booked this?’ . . . He told me that in his report to the head office he had valued me at more than double my salary.”23

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Once engagements were booked, actresses were responsible for their own transportation arrangements and train fares. In recollecting her first theatrical job—a pantomime in Glasgow—Marion fondly remembers her anticipation at the train station:



What a merry gathering at St. Pancras station for the midnight express to Glasgow, with reserved carriages for ‘theatricals’ of which I was one, think of it, though I seemed more of a quiet observor [sic] than a participant. There were a few other dancers, ‘old stagers’ joining us, the new ones, and the chorus, show girls, usually called the big six or eight, according to their number, who ‘dressed the stage’ garbed in gorgeous costumes, and, some of whom, I learned later, looked down upon the ballet, on anyone not in their own exalted sphere. In spite of the fundamental esprit de corps among theatrical people, some were great sticklers for class distinction rather than merit.24

In spite of her acknowledgment of the biases against “lesser” performers within the company, Marion was clearly thrilled to be part of this ensemble. Her recollection stands in stark contrast to Ellerslie’s exasperation over the drudgeries of train travel for provincial engagements. She describes herself as “tired out after third-­class journeys, weary with hunting about for lodgings, unpacking, dressing in some wretched corner, and all the miseries attendant on sec­ond-­rate management.”25 Even several years into her touring career Marion continued to characterize the travel challenges in a more positive light. Following an extension of her tour of Robinson Crusoe, Marion recalls, “Lesser lights in the theatre had to study economy, so some of us returned to Lon­don by boat from Leith, near Edinburgh which was only half price of the railway fare.”26 Even actresses from theatrical families struggled with the day-­to-­day practicalities of a life on the road. Jim Davis discusses the financial challenges faced by Jessie H. Wilton, whose father was the long-­t ime stage manager of the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton.27 Davis uses diaries and letters to reconstruct the fraught relationship between father and daughter, particularly in regards to financial assistance. Wilton arranged an engagement for Jessie in Bristol in 1874 and then continued to help her by “sending her a large box in which to pack her belongings and further subsidised [sic] her by paying her railway fare to Bristol, her rent arrears, her cab fare and money for sustenance.” Jessie continued to write, asking for more money to purchase more dresses and accessories, ostensibly for her work onstage.28 Jim Davis notes that actresses were not only responsible for providing their own costumes but had to take charge of their maintenance as well.29 Finding accommodations could be one of the most worrisome tasks of the provincial performer. Location, availability, and affordability were pe-

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rennial concerns. Landladies would generally charge a base rent, on top of which they might charge for amenities such as a bath or a piano.30 Practically every chapter of Ellerslie’s memoir is punctuated by struggles to find lodgings. She reveals, “I never go to the theatre to ask, as I find they invariably send me to the wife of some employé, who calls me ‘my dear,’ and has a mob of riotous children, and, of course, poor woman, lives in the roughest neighborhood.”31 Ellerslie recounts one “unutterably wretched” experience when her “tedious third-­class journey” brought her into a provincial town “too late to look for lodgings,” so instead she found herself on an omnibus alone, driven by a drunken bus driver. Two hotels were full, so she stayed in a room of a shop owner’s home. The next day she ended up taking a room in an “untidy-­looking house, with any number of children running about.” Its redeeming features were two large windows, which, evidently, the shop owner’s subpar accommodations had lacked.32 Marion’s autobiography is also riddled with stories about unfortunate lodging experiences. During an engagement in Nottingham, lodgings were scarce as another large production was also in town at the same time. After several hours of walking around the city looking for a room, Marion ended up in a “combined room” near the theatre. She writes, “The window, of course, was closed and the combination odor of paraffin from the lamp, of cooking in general and ‘dead’ cabbage in particular was unspeakable.” After opening the window to air the room out, eating a modest dinner, and unpacking her belongings that had been delivered from the theatre, Marion went to bed. Then, horror struck:



The sheets looked clean enough but reeked with the essence of cooking fumes, having evidently been ‘aired’ against the kitchen ceiling. The joys of touring! Very tired, I soon slept, but presently awoke, being ‘bitten’ all over. I lit the lamp and never shall forget the sight. Bedbugs! I had met a few odd ones before, but here they were in battalions. And my pretty pink summer dress which I had made myself and carefully hung against the door with other things, there being no wardrobe, was ‘studded’ with them. What a night of ‘bloody murder!’ I killed everything in sight, several times during the night repeating the operation until at last I slept from sheer exhaustion.33

When she confronted the landlady the next day, the proprietress insisted that Marion had brought them in herself. It was only when Marion turned over the picture frames on the wall and showed the woman the degree of infestation that she apologized. On a more lighthearted note, in another town, Marion was considering one set of lodgings and the landlady showed her what she believed was a recommendation from another actor

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that had previously stayed with her. In the register this actor had merely written, “Quoth the Raven,” which was enough for Marion to continue her search elsewhere.34 Finding a suitable landlady was of­ten aided by the network of performers who discussed their experiences—both good and ill. As Marion notes, “Some landladies became so well-­k nown, one only need mention their name or street to know which town they lived in.”35 Travel took its toll on the physical and emotional health of performers. “Interesting and enjoyable as touring was in many respects,” Marion notes, “it had its heartaches for me. Nearing our destination on Sunday evening, listening to the church bells of villages past which the train crawled, made me feel very lonely and homesick. The atmosphere of the new ‘digs’ would always be disturbed by either someone in the house, or next door, both ways, thumping out hymns, all out of tune, on a piano, or grinding them out on an Ameri­can organ, mostly the latter, and all going at once. Meeting the Lord with the most dismal, dreadful noise.”36 On top of travel, securing lodgings, and the procurement and maintenance of costumes, actresses were also subject to brief but intense rehearsal periods. Ellerslie recounts, “My real rehearsals are usually at night, when I am playing the part,” verifying that the rehearsal process does not afford much opportunity to delve into the material. Instead, she notes that “in this kind of theatre the pieces are changed so of­ten that one is always playing a different part, and there is little opportunity of improving on the first representation. I can see my mistakes and faults but I have no time to correct them. There is always something else to be learned: so many pages of dialogue to be crammed into one’s head. It is difficult to think of anything except the words and cues, when one has had only one or at most two rehearsals.”37 Marion recounts the time she joined the cast of A Trip to Chinatown in the principal role of Mrs. Guyer. The origi­nal actress had left the company and the understudy was performing poorly. So Kitty was brought in as a last-­minute replacement. She writes, “I brought home the part, rehearsed Friday and Saturday, watched the show at night, and opened with it following Monday at Burnbey.”38 Complicating the rehearsal process further was the fact that many actresses (although clearly not Marion or Ellerslie) “could barely read or write,” making the compressed rehearsal period all the more challenging.39 Once a piece was playing for an audience, conditions of­ten remained fairly spartan for actresses within the theatres. McDonald asserts, “Within a company performers were segregated according to their earnings, admissions to the appropriate greenroom being determined by income. Supers and ballet-­girls had to stay in over-­crowded dressing rooms, either at the very top of the theatre or, worse, under the stage.”40 The of­ten unpleasant conditions for actresses and dancers behind the scenes were

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rarely glimpsed by most audiences witnessing elaborate spectacles, such as Blanchard’s Aladdin. About halfway through Blanchard’s pantomime, Aladdin visits the Garden of Jewels, populated by the Jewel Fairies who conclude the scene with the Brilliant Ballet of Gems. Before they dance, Aladdin sings:



Oh, what a wonderful treasure to find! Here we have duty and pleasure combined; Jewels so bright that bewildering me, Much would delight my dear mother to see. Each one advancing, beauty enhancing, Fortunate youth such a sight to behold; Gems in a cluster showing such luster, None I am sure could believe it if told.41

The “lustre” of the gems, depicted by the ballet-­girls in the ensemble, obscures the much less shiny practicalities of life backstage and offstage for late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century female performers in the provinces. Aladdin acknowledges the “duty and pleasure combined,” which is made manifest in the Jewels. Much like the opening scene of the pantomime, this passage can once again be read as emblematic of the tensions between the glamour and beauty of women’s depictions onstage and the trials they endured off. Interestingly, it was a holiday spectacle that drew Kitty Marion to her career in the stage. She writes, “During a Christmas Pantomime season, I was taken to see ‘Babes in the Woods’ at Drury Lane Theatre. The wonder, grandeur, magnificence, beauty, music, singing, dancing, comedy, swept me right off my feet.”42 Michael Booth describes pantomime as a “curious combination . . . of elaborated fantasy and comic nightmare,” a duality which is also found in extravaganza in “a mixture of the same kind of fantasy, even richer and more dream-­ like in texture, with homespun down-­to-­earth domesticity.”43 Although he is referencing the contrasting symbolic worlds within the marked aesthetic event, this duality can also be seen in the struggles faced by provincial actresses as they grappled with nefarious managers, strained finances, busybody landladies, shady lodgings, and, sometimes, armies of bedbugs.

Notes 1. E. L. Blanchard, Aladdin; or Harlequin and the Wonderful Lamp, in Nineteenth Century Plays, Volume V: Pantomimes, Extravaganzas, and Burlesques, ed. Michael R. Booth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 343.

Luggage, Lodgings, and Landladies      31

2. Jan McDonald, “Lesser Ladies of the Victorian Stage,” Theatre Research International 13, no. 4 (1988): 234. 3. Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 176. 4. Booth, English Nineteenth Century Plays, Volume V, 339. 5. Jill A. Sullivan, The Politics of Pantomime: Regional Identity in the Theatre, 1860–1900 (Hertforshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011), 26. 6. “In the Provinces,” The Theatre, De­cem­ber 25, 1877, 339. 7. W. Davenport Adams, “The Decline of the Pantomime,” The Theatre, February 1, 1882, 85–86. 8. Booth, English Nineteenth Century Plays, Volume V, 2. 9. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914, 2. 10. Thomas Postlewait, “Theatre Autobiographies: Some Preliminary Concerns for the Historian,” Assaph 16 (2000): 158. 11. Viv Gardner, “The Three Nobodies: Autobiographical Strategies in the Work of Alma Ellerslie, Kitty Marion and Ina Rozant,” in Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 10. 12. Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7. 13. The Diary of an Actress; or, Realities of Stage Life (Lon­don: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, 1885), xix. 14. “Dramatic Cards,” Era, Sep­tem­ber 17, 1898, 5. 15. The Diary of an Actress; or, Realities of Stage Life, 28–29. 16. Kitty Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” New York Public Library, 72. It should be noted that the page numbering of the Marion papers is in a shambles. Numbers are skipped or duplicated, and certain sections restart the pagination. I have listed the page numbers as marked on each page. However, there are multiple pages with the same number in vastly different segments of the autobio­ graphy. 17. Gardner, “The Three Nobodies,” 26. 18. Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” 73. 19. McDonald, “Lesser Ladies of the Victorian Stage,” 237. 20. Gardner, “The Three Nobodies,” 15. 21. Elisabeth Kirby Fagan, ed., From the Wings; by “the Stage Cat” (Lon­don: W. Collins Song & Co. Ltd., 1922), 25. 22. Ibid. 23. Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” 84. 24. Ibid., 8. 25. The Diary of an Actress; or, Realities of Stage Life, 89–90. 26. Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” 11. 27. Jim Davis, “Jessie H. Wilton, Victorian Provincial Actress: Two Historiographical Approaches to Documentation; Part I ‘Tell me whether I am to be starved to death or what. . . ,’” Theatre History Studies 12 (1992): 108.

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28. Ibid., 111. 29. Ibid., 108. 30. Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” 31. 31. The Diary of an Actress; or, Realities of Stage Life, 99. 32. Ibid., 38–39. 33. Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” 40. 34. Ibid., 32. 35. Ibid., 50. 36. Ibid., 33. 37. The Diary of an Actress; or, Realities of Stage Life, 23–24. 38. Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” 84. 39. Davis, “Jessie H. Wilton,” 107. 40. McDonald, “Lesser Ladies of the Victorian Stage,” 244. 41. Blanchard, Aladdin, 358. 42. Marion, “Kitty Marion Papers,” 6. 43. Booth. English Nineteenth Century Plays, Volume V, 21.

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl” Constructing Margo Jones in Rehearsal Boone J. Hopkins

I

n an interview, Brooks Atkinson recalled a young woman approaching him boldly in a hotel lobby, saying, “Mr. Atkinson, my name is Margo Jones. You don’t know me, but someday you will.” The warmth and self-­confidence of the young Texan made an immediate impression on Atkinson, who remarked that Jones had “the mind of an adult and the heart of a girl.”1 Though paternalistic, Atkinson acknowledges one of Jones’s great talents: her innate ability to promote herself. Terms like charisma, drive, and intuition are frequently employed in describing Jones as a champion of regional playwrights, a pioneer of arena staging, and an advocate for the decentralization of theatre in the United States. The majority of his­tori­cal readings cast Jones in the role of proponent of the decentralization of Ameri­can theatre in the twentieth century. However, to know Margo Jones involves a more careful parsing of her motivations and the ways she transformed herself to meet the expectations of a changing marketplace. While Jones’s mutable personality and tactics of charm and persuasion can be read as chameleon-­like and perhaps inauthentic, Jones’s promotion of her theatre and herself through a variety of methods can also be read as evidence of her intuitive understanding of the demand for virtuosity in the theatre. This article examines representations of Margo Jones, particularly through the ways her directing persona and charisma were documented for two productions between 1949 and 1950. An Old Beat Up Woman by Sari Scott and South­ern Exposure by Owen Crump premiered at Jones’s Dallas theatre and were then developed for Broadway audiences. The driving force for Jones behind moving these plays to Chicago and then New York was the promise of profit based on the highly successful per-

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formances in Dallas. The surety for investors was Jones’s attachment to each project. As an artistic leader, Jones capitalized on her bourgeoning celebrity as conveyed through publicity photographs and heard in interviews promoting the two plays. The unique contributions of Margo Jones, captured in these rehearsal and publicity documents, are registered in the outward extensions of her craft—her body and voice. To this end, I consider the following in examining the career and creation of Margo Jones as director and regional theatre leader: What is directing charisma and how is it mobilized in accounts of rehearsal? How can Jones’s work be read beyond her manifestos or anecdotal accounts of her personality? In short, how is charisma constructed in the marketing of celebrity directors? While Jones is studied as a famous female director in Ameri­can theatre history and leader of the United States regional theatre movement, the period of Jones’s mid-­career is characterized by her risks and commercial failures in New York. Leading the theatre community in Dallas would not advance Jones’s career, nor would it extend her notions of a decentralized Ameri­can theatre. Jones described the balance that she maintained between art and commerce explicitly in a 1948 interview: “Figure that I’m 51 percent creator and 49 percent promoter.”2 The keen awareness in this brief comment that selling her art was just as important as creating it is noteworthy because her statement is also contingent on the idea of selling the artist. An emphasis on promotion enabled Jones to advance the plays, the regional theatre movement, and her own image simultaneously. In transcripts of Dictaphone tapes recorded in advance of a lecture tour in 1951, Jones described, in her estimation, the heart and mind of an ideal director: “To me the pertinent factor in establishing a successful theatre is getting one person who is a combination of business and artistic leadership. The theatre impulse comes from within . . . one person, one leader, could make a difference.”3 While describing the unique qualities of an ideal regional theatre director, Jones was also articulating her own it-­factor. She was able to teach these traits and embody them for a national audience in a process of self-­construction. In light of the commercial failures of An Old Beat Up Woman and South­ ern Exposure, we can more clearly see the creation of a directing persona through the events of Jones’s mid-­career. As Joseph Roach reminds us, “It is the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them. The possessor of It keeps a precarious balance between such mutually exclusive alternatives.”4 “It” for Jones was constructed through a pub­lic presentation of her idealism and pragmatism as a director. As she

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”      35

prepared An Old Beat Up Woman and South­ern Exposure for New York audiences, Jones demonstrated that while the dramatists had created good plays, with her skill and effort the plays would be made into something truly great. In the rehearsal photographs of Jones, she consciously embodies her confidence in her regional theatre as a testing ground for Broadway productions. These photographic and recorded representations of Jones capture the complex power balance that she maintained in Ameri­can theatre. The conscious staging and promoting, both of and by Jones, in this context offers an opportunity to consider the multifarious performances enacted by directors.

Still Shots of a Sweet Tornado The work of a director can be difficult to ascertain as rehearsals are intended to disappear in favor of showcasing the results of the labor via the final production. Similarly, few images of Jones in rehearsal are archived in the director’s collected papers at the Dallas Public Library’s Texas History Archive. Most of the photographs, catalogued and saved by Jones in large scrapbooks, are from press clippings and production photographs. One might conclude from the lack of documentation that Jones did not consider rehearsal to be significant in her larger plans to self-­promote and further the regional theatre movement. However, a recently launched database entitled the “Life Magazine Photo Archive” reveals over two hundred loosely labeled images of Jones in rehearsal that were never published.5 These rehearsal images present gestures and behaviors that remain common in contemporary regional theatre practice. Included are images of the director talking with actors to explain her vision and gesturing for emphasis as the actors look on, casually but attentively (see fig­ure 1). Or the director watches the actors working from different angles, observing the performance with a script in front of her (see fig­ure 2). These stills are placed beside other images where the actor’s behavior takes place outside the performance matrix (see fig­ure 3). What makes all these photographs of Theatre ’49 rehearsals in Dallas remarkable is that the director is the focal point of every image. The performance of rehearsal is reframed in the “Life Magazine Photo Archive” to capture the virtuosity of the director instead of the usual object of attention, the performance of the actor. This shift embodies the very movement Jones anticipated: the decentralization of Ameri­can Theatre beyond the celebrity of New York actors. In 1951, shortly after the photographs were taken, Jones wrote, “I like to think that if I decided to take a cross-­country trip along in 1960 I

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Figure 1. Margo Jones directs actors in Sari Scott’s An Old Beat Up Woman for Theatre ’49 in Dallas, Texas; photo credit Joe Scherschel, Life magazine photo archive hosted by Google (http://images.google.com/hosted/life /42aa54cde5c54671.html).

could stop in every city with a population of seventy-­five thousand and see a good play well done.”6 Jones knew that accomplishing this objective in ten years would require strong, charismatic directors in each city. Her theatre in Dallas was modeling not only arena staging practices and fundraising strategies but also particular leadership traits. The photographs that focus on a director working with actors help to explain Jones’s charisma as well as why she circulated images of herself as director. When considering the reasons for taking a picture and its intended message, Roland Barthes reminds the reader to place the image in context, both for the moment in which it was taken and for its intended audience. Earlier, in 1947, Margo Jones famously began a non-­profit repertory theatre in Dallas, naming it Theatre ’47 and updating the name of the company each year. Her initiative was the first of its kind in the country and is of­ten characterized as the catalyst for the progress of women as directors in the regional theatre movement. This evolution of theatrical leadership continued through Zelda Fichandler of the Arena Stage in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and Nina Vance of Houston’s Alley Theatre. Helen Krich Chinoy maps a common history for these three directors: “These women turned their backs on making it on Broadway. They rejected what

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”      37

Figure 2. Jones closely watches actors engaged in a scene; photo credit Joe Scherschel, Life magazine photo archive hosted by Google (http://images.google .com/hosted/life/0a7ebe896d944c68.html).

sociologists consider the male preoccupation with power and climbing the ladder in the cash nexus world.”7 The rejection of commercialized Broadway and a cultivation of regionally specific theatre has become part of the prevailing his­tori­cal narrative for Margo Jones. However, Jones did not reject publicity and commercial success; it was simply denied to her and other women directors at the highest levels of commercial theatre. These images, then, offer a nuanced message of a director affirming her control over an artistic movement while simultaneously controlling an in­di­vidual artistic process and advancing her own career agenda. Jones’s specific focus on a broader national audience never faltered in her career. Her designs for a network of regional theatres across the country impacted the ways her company worked and how she promoted herself through her work with actors. The conscious staging of process in these photographs captures the constituent gestures that compose the larger regional theatre movement in the United States. Photographs of rehearsal, like theatrical stills, are elusive because they seem to hold a permanent and trustworthy account of the creative moment; however, they are actually visual shots of slippage. The meaning of the photograph slides further away from the viewer the more removed

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Figure 3. Jones listens to an actor in rehearsal; photo credit Joe Scherschel, Life magazine photo archive hosted by Google (http://images.google.com/hosted /life/c6f b20770e4e4c40.html).

in time they are from the moment the image was captured. According to Stuart Hall, all images are both encoded in the production process and placed within a certain cultural setting, and decoded by the v­ iewers/ readers.8 The only captions for these photographs in the “Life Magazine Photo Archive” indicate the photographer’s name, Joe Scherschel; the date, De­cem­ber 12, 1949; and the general heading “National Theatre Essay.” What has been lost in this instance and what is frequently lost in large-­scale archival purging of this kind are the textual details that ground the spatial and temporal markers of the photograph. Many ­t heatre historians have experienced this when trying to order the events of a play from a photo shoot or publicity materials. Detailed captions would anchor the image as a particular instance of creative work while

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”      39

also revealing the frame for the images that the editors of the magazine might have hoped to construct. To order the images and make sense of each photograph, a reader might consider the collection as a whole and in doing so utilize the sheer quantity of images as a resource in parsing the meaning of each photograph. Scherschel took two hundred and three photographs of Jones’s directing, all on the same day and during a contained period of time, judging from the clothing worn and the relative placement of objects like scripts and burning cigarettes in ashtrays. The date of the photographs and the three actors pictured suggest that the play being rehearsed is An Old Beat Up Woman by Sari Scott. The play deals with domestic violence in a small Texas town and was expanded from a one-­act play at Jones’s urging. Jones championed Scott’s work as an emerging female playwright and said of the play after its premiere, “There is a theatrical poetry in the rough and tough language of these people, in their actions, in their warm-­heartedness and much dramatic power in the situations they create for themselves.”9 The origi­nal cast members that are pictured, however, did not warm hearts enough to keep their roles as the piece evolved. After a poor criti­cal reception in Dallas, Jones prepared the piece for Broadway, trusting in her intuitive belief in the play and its author but rationalizing that a casting change was what the play needed to succeed. Further lowering the morale of her company, Jones returned to Dallas with her new cast to rehearse, while Theatre ’49 continued its repertory season. Her actions seem incongruous with the director whom Chinoy describes as rejecting commercialized Broadway. Rather, Jones’s strategic development and marketing of An Old Beat Up Woman signals her deliberate positioning of herself and her work within commercial Ameri­can theatre. To venture further into some of the messages latent in these photographs, a focus on two particular images suggest Jones’s directorial style. Figures 4 and 5 offer insight into Jones’s personality and directing aesthetic, in­clud­ing the ways she may have wanted to be perceived by a larger national audience. By analyzing her corporeal presence in the frame it is possible to see Jones positioning herself in relationship to the work, the actors, and the national theatre scene—the physicality of Jones is exaggerated as her responsibility to order the action of the play gives way to demonstrating the performer’s actual movement (see fig­ure 4). The heightened engagement of the director’s body in this context is made more dynamic beside the disengaged physicality of the actors in the photograph. The physical contrast creates juxtaposition as the actor becomes the audience and the director becomes the performer. Jones holds her body in opposition, with her hips and shoulders trans-­stated in op-

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Figure 4. Jones demonstrates the staging for the benefit of the actors; photo credit Joe Scherschel, Life magazine photo archive hosted by Google (http://images .google.com/hosted/life/d1cfa47eeafc3b56.html).

posite directions and her arms extended to provide a point of counterbalance as she shifts her weight into the bed. Her focus is directed at the woman in the scene and she seems to be using the demonstrative moment primarily for the actor’s benefit. Based on the physicality that is being demonstrated by Jones, one might imagine this to be one of the moments of violence perpetrated against the woman in Scott’s play. Jones, however, maintains ease in this precarious demonstration of balance as indicated by her execution of this movement with a cigarette held in her right hand. Reading the body of the director in this paradoxically static yet dynamic position is similar to the work of dance and po­liti­cal theorist ­A ndre Lepecki, who suggests that in photographs of postmodern dance we are momentarily deceived into believing that the bodies can actually be suspended in this type of stillness. The exhausted body, Lepecki notes, is the body that must fall, a body marked by the influence of power and effort and gravity that is constantly exerted on and through the living body.10 While Jones may look graceful, she is in fact laboring to convey meaning to her company, working to make the play a success and pushing against the limits of her own power in this context. In the final image, Jones is lying on the floor, turned toward the actor sitting on the bed (see fig­ure 5). Her shoulders are rolled forward and she

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”      41

Figure 5. Jones coaches the actor within the performance space; photo credit Joe Scherschel, Life magazine photo archive hosted by Google (http://images .google.com/hosted/life/a040efe307fad472.html).

is raised on her left elbow with her right arm pointed toward the actor. The body of the director, though laid out on the floor, is by no means relaxed. Jones is fully engaged with the expectant tension of the scene at hand and she is extended in the direction of the actor. The body of the director is fully immersed in the feeling of the actor. Even the tips of her fingers grasp in the direction of the actor, claiming a hold on the energy of the scene and the emotional content of the performance that she helps to orchestrate. The lighting in this photograph is also at a greater intensity than in the other images, and Jones’s face is perfectly positioned among the shadows of the bed in a window of light. It is possible that the choice to get down on the floor in this photograph reveals some of the assumptions Jones has about what a director must see. She is not concerned with the sightlines of the audience from

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this peculiar vantage point. Rather, Jones seems to privilege a perspective that is more in tune with the inner life of the characters. The truth available to her from the floor could, if unlocked, reveal a more truthful moment in performance. Or the shift to the floor could be read as a move to show herself as the adroit and able director, a gifted and vibrant artist in her own right, capable of creating with a dexterous performing body just like the actors. The question about the director’s motivation then becomes: For whom is she performing? The presence of a photographer further complicates her performance, adding as it does to the multiple spectators for Jones’s direction, which already includes the actors and the future audience. Now the photographer holds in his hand the moving eye of a national audience. Jones was fully aware that the photographer in her rehearsal was from Life magazine and eagerly anticipated the photographs circulating to a wide readership. In a letter to producer and friend Manning Gurian, she described the potential for promoting Scott’s play.11 A national audience could further legitimate Jones’s regional theatre in Dallas and help her enhance her reputation as a director and producer. With this in mind it becomes difficult to read these pictures as a true representation of her directing. How much was she playing to the camera? How of­ten did she actually get down on the floor in rehearsal? When did she perform moments for the camera and when is she performing for the actors? These questions surrounding the layers of audience witnessing a director’s performance are significant in mapping the ways a director’s own authority operates within larger systems of power. Beyond what we can see, two significant absences appear in these photographs when considering them as his­tori­cal evidence of rehearsal practice. Ironically, given Jones’s frustration with the star sys­tem in Ameri­can theatre, the photographer Joe Scherschel, while out of frame, may have had a hand in staging the shots, essentially directing the director as star actor in these compositions. Imagining Scherschel in this role completes the picture of Jones’s conscious staging and expectations. Secondly, the absent producers, the Life magazine editors, must be included in considering the ways this photo shoot was origi­nally packaged to Jones and her company and how it was ultimately circulated and preserved. In fact, the magazine did not run the “National Theatre Essay” for which these photographs were taken. Instead, subscribers read “Life Visits a School for Future Broadway Stars,” published Janu­ary 9, 1950.12 The fact that these images of Jones did not circulate seems as important for constructing a full account of her legacy as the intentions behind the photo shoot itself. However, the images were preserved and are now archived as part of a recent online collaboration between Life magazine and Google Image

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”      43

Search. The database includes millions of photographs from the magazine’s photographers that were never published, stretching from the 1860s to today. This new pub­lic archive offers a space for considering the influences that guide the packaging of popu­lar culture. The creator and founder of the Life magazine pictorial style and aesthetic, Henry Luce, was also engaged in a process of promotion, and the Theatre ’49 photo shoot did not match these aspirations. Chris Vials maps the emerging aesthetic of the magazine in the early 1940s: “[Life] had a circulation of 2.86 million and a high ‘pass along rate,’ multiplying its actual readership. With his influence now firmly secured, Luce began to see himself as a man of destiny, imbued with both the power and the responsibility to mold the national mind single-­handedly.”13 Ultimately, Life magazine’s publishers deemed that the national mind would not be molded by photographic representations of Jones’s company at work. An Old Beat Up Woman advanced to Boston before closing on Janu­ary 28, 1950, to poor criti­cal reception. The production lost thousands of dollars for the Dallas investors that had supported the play, first among them John Rosenfield, Jones’s longtime supporter, critic, and mentor. Rosenfield blamed the losses on producer Manning Gurian because he did not challenge Jones’s direction of the piece. Rosenfield wrote, “A director has to go beyond the play. She didn’t try to improve the play or change it.”14 However, when considering the rehearsal photographs a reader can recognize the deliberate attempt by Jones to put her mark on the piece. Her direction was an investment of skill in the rehearsal hall and also a commitment of her reputation to the project. The unsuccessful results meant Jones would need a new strategy to launch her next production to greater heights on a national stage.

“Dahling, Dallas is Mah Town!” In the spring of 1950, rehearsals for Owen Crump’s South­ern Exposure began in Dallas. As the final play of Theatre ’50’s spring season the production was popu­lar with Dallas audiences and was able to gain financial backers as a broad comedy, even in the wake of An Old Beat Up Woman. Jones did not work as much with the accomplished Hollywood screenwriter Crump as she did with Scott in developing the play script. In an interview with Rosenfield for the Dallas Morning News, she said, “The play came to us very nearly perfect—we just brought it life.”15 The “very nearly perfect” play was received well by Theatre ’50’s patrons. South­ern Exposure was such an outstanding financial success—with high audience demand for single tickets—for the Dallas theatre that Jones decided to run the play for an additional week. The melodramatic satire

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of Crump’s play lacked plot sophistication and Jones called it a “light, charming little piece of fluff.”16 The play follows an aging south­ern belle, Miss Penelope Mayweather, who cannot pay the mortgage on her grand antebellum mansion in Natchez, Mississippi. To cover the bills, Mayweather allows gawking Yankee tourists to tour her home, and among them is the charming young writer John Salguod. Unbeknownst to Mayweather, Salguod is really John Douglas, the author of a scathing best seller about race relations in the South that has been banned in Natchez. The performance of Jones as director for South­ern Exposure emerges at a different site of publicity than the unpublished Life magazine spread. While Jones demonstrated her physical dexterity and acumen in the Life photographs, for her new project in the fall of 1950 she adopted a conscious shift in her dialect. With Dallas reporters she maintained her sophisticated and witty banter, but in anticipation of the move to New York, Jones’s voice changed. Biographer Helen Sheehy speculates that Jones transformed her affect for practical reasons: “Probably because of the south­ern setting of the play, when talking to New York reporters who didn’t know her, Margo changed her normally fast-­paced, well-­articulated diction to a thick south­ern drawl.”17 For this production, Jones also made a cast shift that she thought could improve the play as it transitioned from Dallas to New York. Notably, she hired Cameron Mitchell to play John Salguod immediately following his engagement as Happy in the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. The cast, the large proscenium space of the Biltmore Theatre in New York, and the play’s pub­lic reception were all marked differences from the play’s Texas run. The confidence Jones had regarding the success of the play was diminished along with her diction. She shared a pint of bourbon with a Dallas reporter after previews for the play began and, seemingly forgetting her audience, poured on the South­ern charm. “Honey, theatre is business to me in Texas just as it is up here at the Biltmore. Since 1947 . . . ah’ve never had a losing week. . . . No matter what happens to the play, ah’ve done the best ah can . . . and ah’ve had the time of my life doin’ it.”18 Jones adapted so quickly to promote the new production that by the fall of 1950 she was losing track of her roles. To imagine Dallas theatre patrons reading this interview and hearing a discouraged and unsophisticated Jones is to put her performance of self in relief. The Texas Tornado—or Speed Jones, as Atkinson called her—was spinning and shifting with intense fervor to try to assert her national prestige. South­ern Exposure premiered at the Biltmore Theatre on Sep­tem­ber 26, 1950. Dozens of theatre enthusiasts from Dallas attended the opening and loyally supported the performance. Brooks Atkinson would write

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”      45

in his review of the production, “The Texans present were the people who enjoyed Mr. Crump’s lampoon of Natchez most thoroughly,” then added, “They know the Natchez private jokes more intimately than we do away off in little old up here.”19 Richard Watts of the New York Post wrote that the play should have stayed in Dallas, and most critics agreed.20 The production played for only twenty-­t hree performances in New York and closed on Oc­to­ber 14, 1950. In a recorded interview with talk-­show hosts Jinx McCrary and Tex Falkenburg to promote South­ern Exposure, Jones said, “Ah can’t stop thinkin’ of Broadway as The Road. Dallas is mah town!”21 To read this quote in the New York Herald-­Tribune loses the richness of hearing Jones elongating the “a” and dropping the “g” in an aural claim to her Southwest­ern roots. The quote is further heightened when one considers the professional defeats that Jones suffered in New York while the same productions flourished in her Dallas theatre. Broadway was never a consistent home for Jones despite her constant focus on it as the mark of professional success.22 Moreover, Jones performed unique identities contingent on her audiences. She adapted to the role of the south­ern outsider for New York critics while playing the culturally savvy, erudite director with New York connections for her Dallas constituencies. Like the turn toward the camera in the rehearsal photographs, the turn of phrase marks a director at work, promoting her craft while at the same time asserting her own multifaceted identity.

Selling the Director Despite her attempts to bring new plays from regional voices to the Broadway stage, Jones never found success equal to her first Broadway direction of A Glass Menagerie until Inherit the Wind premiered in 1955. Her attempts to produce and direct in the 1950–51 season with An Old Beat Up Woman and South­ern Exposure demonstrate her commitment to bridging the creative and cultural gap between regional theatre and Broadway. Jones leaned on her reputation and sought financial and criti­ cal support based on her own intuition. Jones’s persistence and personality were key factors in moving these productions from a regional stage to a national audience, and the relative failure of the productions financially does not correlate to artistic failure. In contrast, her virtuosic performance of personality operated effectively as Jones, the dynamic regional director, gained enthusiasm and support for her project. The history of Margo Jones has been both captured and erased in these photographs and interviews that offer a complex representation of the director at work, both in process and as product. The images and re-

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cordings provide a necessary addition to the his­tori­cal record and a useful tool for interpreting Jones’s directing style. However, simply reducing these efforts into a single gesture—a turn away from Broadway toward an idealized regional theatre—would ignore these images and neglect the moments of self-­promotion that comprise the tenuous social position within which Jones, as a strong female director, operated in 1950. Unfortunately, Jones’s theatre did not survive her death. As Zeigler notes, “The legend of Margo Jones rests on the fact that when she died, her theatre also perished; it could not survive the loss of her leadership. I believe that at least subconsciously Margo structured her theatre so that it could not survive the one who had willed it into being.”23 Theatre ’47, created by Jones’s tenacious will—a will that launched the Ameri­can Regional Theatre Movement and promoted a conscious performance of directing— died with its creator. The archive of photographs and recordings of Margo Jones are what remain. Considering the archival pictures and recordings of Jones, we construct a forever incomplete yet somehow still vital image of a director demonstrating her craft. The statement that opened this article, “You don’t know me, but someday you will,” mirrors our reconstruction of Margo Jones through archival images and recordings so that we may continually re-­meet and, perhaps, someday know her. In this regard, the visual and aural archive becomes a space where we can experience charisma being constructed, a process that insists on inclusion in the legacy and reputation of Margo Jones.

Notes 1. Helen Sheehy, Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1951), 27. Atkinson’s impression of the mind and heart of Jones, though troublingly misogynist in its Cartesian carving, does capture her remarkable capacity to connect with others, share her dreams, and, ultimately, bring those dreams to fruition. 2. Murray Schumach, “A Texas Tornado Hits Broadway,” New York Times Magazine, Oc­to­ber 17, 1948. 3. Transcripts of Dictaphone tapes, March 27, 1951, Margo Jones Collection, Texas/Dallas History & Archives, Dallas Public Library, http://www.lib.utexas .edu/taro/dalpub/06201/dpub-­06201.html, accessed March 22–­23, 2011. 4. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 8. 5. Life magazine photo archive hosted by Google, http://images.google .com/hosted/life, accessed March 22–23, 2011. 6. Margo Jones, Theatre-­in-­the-­Round (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1951), 49. 7. Helen Krich Chinoy, “Art Versus Business: The Role of Women in Ameri­ can Theatre,” Drama Review 24, no. 2 (1980), 7.

“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”      47

8. Stuart Hall, “The Television Discourse—Encoding and Decoding,” Education and Culture 25 (Summer 1974): 8–14. 9. Jones, Theatre-­in-­the-­Round, 176. 10. Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), 41. 11. Margo Jones to Manning Gurian, De­cem­ber 10, 1949, Dallas Public Library. 12. “Life Visits a School for Broadway Stars,” Life Magazine, Janu­ary 9, 1950. 13. Chris Vials, “The Popu­lar Front in the Ameri­can Century: Life Magazine, Margaret Bourke-­W hite, and Consumer Realism, 1936–1941,” Ameri­can Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 16, no. 1 (2006): 74. 14. Sheehy, Margo, 196. 15. John Rosenfield, Dallas Morning News, April 25, 1950. 16. Margo Jones to George Freedley, May 6, 1950, Dallas Public Library. 17. Sheehy, Margo, 203–4. 18. Robert Wahls, “She Never Had a Losing Week,” Dallas Times Herald, Oc­ to­ber 1, 1950. 19. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, Sep­tem­ber 27, 1950. 20. Richard Watts, New York Post, Sep­tem­ber 27, 1950. 21. Jinx McCrary and Tex Falkenburg, New York Herald-­Tribune, Dallas Pub­ lic Library. 22. South­ern Exposure and An Old Beat Up Woman were not Jones’s sole Broadway directing ventures. She codirected Tennessee Williams’s 1945 play The Glass Menagerie with Eddie Dowling to great reviews and commercial success. However, her direction of Williams’s 1948 play Summer and Smoke on Broadway was, like the majority of her New York directing projects, a criti­cal and commercial failure. 23. Joseph Wesley Ziegler, Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), 23.

Puttin’ the Profit in Nonprofit Broadway Theatre Companies Dean Adams “We on Broadway look like the nonprofit theatres, and they look like us.” —Rocco Landesman “Considering that the nonprofit theatre arose in protest against the habits of Broadway and that Broadway has previously looked upon the rest of us as the farm teams, this is a historic development.” —Zelda Fichandler, “The Profit in Nonprofit,” Ameri­can Theatre (De­cem­ber 2000)

T

he history of the intersection of nonprofit and commercial theatre has been marked by profound evolution, in part from changes in tax code, in part from changes in audience demands. Recently, there has been tremendous blurring of the two business structures with most of the general pub­lic unaware of which productions or theatres are nonprofit and which are commercial. While new business models have helped many large nonprofits survive, even thrive, the question is whether, as Oskar Eustis pointed out in a recent conference, “the nonprofit theatre [does] theatre that is driven by values not determined in the marketplace.”1 Complex business financing, accounting and tax innovations, and fickle audience demands have changed the artistic and management structures of both commercial and nonprofit theatres. Some producers have criticized the favorable tax structures of their competition, and both commercial and nonprofit producers have found unique ways to take advantage of the tax code. While creative financing and new business structures have helped many nonprofits survive, such practices have led to more commercial works being featured in nonprofit theatres, and fewer risks taken in the season selection. The regional theatre movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led by such visionaries as Zelda Fichandler (Arena Stage) and Tyrone Guthrie (Guthrie Theatre), served to provide an alternative to the more commercial

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Broadway fare. These theatre companies were imbedded in their communities and provided content that would resonate with their local audiences. By creating stable year-­round employment for professional actors and theatre artists, the theatre company would literally be in residence in its community. These nonprofit companies (now called “not-­for-­profit” theatres, or NFP theatres) would take advantage of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code that allowed them to focus on the organization’s mission in the community. As organized under Section 501(c)(3), they could raise money from donors who could then deduct the contribution on their federal income taxes. Accordingly, many such NFP companies reported significant donations on their yearly IRS Form 990. This fundraising mechanism was distinct from Broadway investing since the donors would not own any shares of the future “profits” from in­di­vidual shows or seasons. All proceeds would benefit the organization, not the donor. When the National Endowment of the Arts was created by an act of Congress in 1965 to help fund some of these initiatives, regional theatres flourished as a model not only of what theatre could bring to com­ munities, but also as a means for creating new work. In 1961, there were only twenty-­t hree regional theatres when the first organization of nonprofit theatres was formed. By 2003, that number had ballooned to 1,800.2 Since these theatre institutions and the buildings and infrastructure that house them require consistent income, the challenge has always been to balance the economic necessity to get audiences in the door with the mission to create meaningful work for the community and its local artists. Ideally, both happen simultaneously. In 1967, Wash­ing­ton, D.C.’s Arena Stage, funded in part by the NEA, produced The Great White Hope, a new play by Howard Sackler that investigated segregation and prejudice through the lens of a boxer who feels pitted against the world. Issues of race and identity were at the forefront of Ameri­can politics in 1967, no more so than in Wash­ing­ton, which had by the 1960s become predominately Af­ri­can Ameri­can.3 Arena Stage and the production of The Great White Hope had been supported by two grants from the NEA, one to support a playwrights’ experimental theatre ($25,000) and a resident professional theatre grant to support the production of new plays ($22,500). Jane Alexander and James Earl Jones, members of Arena’s resident company, were cast as the leads, and their careers would be launched by the success of this production. But The Great White Hope would be significant for a much different reason: it was the first time an entire cast of a regional theatre and its origi­nal work transferred to Broadway. While this raided the resident acting company of Arena Stage at the time, it also highlighted the ability

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of a resident company that was miles away from New York City to create Broadway-­ready work. The Broadway production ran for over 500 performances and won three Tony Awards (Best Play, Best Actor, and Best Actress) in addition to a Pulitzer Prize. Since no one could foresee the potential for a Broadway run, Arena Stage did not negotiate a deal to share in the production’s financial or commercial success. In fact, the Broadway Playbill for The Great White Hope did not credit Arena Stage as developing the work. The success of the show led to a rethinking of the infrastructure for developing new works and the artists who create them. Shouldn’t the originating theatre, even an NFP, which bears the risk of developing a new play or musical, share in some of its future financial and pub­lic relations gains? Monumental changes would transpire in the theatre industry from the 1960s through the end of the century, changes that would expand the types of business models for producing a new play or musical while at the same time blurring the definitions of commercial and not-­for-­profit organizations. These new models would lead to a redefinition of what was “commercial” and what was “not-­for-­profit.” The Holy Grail of NFP theatre success would be the Public Theatre’s production of A Chorus Line, a production that was created and funded within the Public Theatre’s NFP organization but which relied on the Shubert Organization for its Broadway transfer. In turn, the Shubert Organization, a for-­profit corporation, is wholly owned by the Shubert Foundation, an NFP organization. The Shubert Foundation was formed in 1945 by the Shubert brothers as a means of protecting their theatre assets and income, but, as will be seen, it was transformed into an organization that could shelter profits for the for-­profit corporation. In the 1980s Rocco Landesman, a student of Robert Brustein at Yale, approached his mentor with a production that he had taken under his wing. By that time Brustein had left Yale for Harvard, where he founded the Ameri­can Repertory Theatre, and Landesman asked Brustein if he would be interested in a production at ART. That production, Big River, was first produced at ART in 1984 under the direction of Des MacAnuff. It was then taken to La Jolla Playhouse, where it received further changes before it transferred to Broadway. Brustein recalled: “And we were happy to see it on Broadway, happy to see it get a larger audience. It was an extraordinary production. But we were also happy that we had no part in the producing of it [on Broadway] and I thought that was important. We were happy to get our, whatever it was, three percent, four percent.”4 In the eighteen years between the regional launches of The Great White Hope and Big River, an enormous change in the business and new-­ work development processes for Broadway productions had taken place,

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a change that would continue into the next century. By 2007, sixteen of the thirty-­t hree Broadway openings had originated in not-­for-­profit theatres, and seven were Lon­don imports. There are several possible not-­for-­profit and commercial partnerships, each with its own set of advantages and challenges:



1. Not-­for-­profit self-­financing. A not-­for-­profit can transfer a production to Broadway using its own financing. The Public Theatre used a donation from a Board member and several loans to help finance the transfer of A Chorus Line to Broadway. The profits from the show helped fund additional Public Theatre productions for over fifteen years. 2. Enhancement funding. A commercial producer can approach a not-­for-­ profit (of­ten a regional or LORT theatre) and offer money to help fund a show that the producers have in development. The money usually goes to fund the high production costs, particularly musicals. The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta has presented several of these productions, in­clud­ing Aida, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, and Bring it On. 3. Collaboration funding (joint ventures). In the case of the 1994 production of Carousel, British producer Cameron Mackintosh approached Lincoln Center with his National Theatre production directed by Nicholas Hytner and offered to put up half the cost for the production. 4. Forming a separate for-­profit entity. Manhattan Theatre Club formed a “wholly owned for-­profit subsidiary . . . with the producers who put up all of the capital. We [MTC] put up the expertise and the rights to the play . . . and they [the commercial producers] put up all of the capital. When the production shows a profit, the subsidiary would pay tax on it and the remainder is reinvested into institution as a dividend.”5 In this model, the not-­for-­profit pays unrelated business income tax (UBIT) on the revenues, just as a for-­profit producer would. 5. Forming a separate not-­for-­profit entity. The Shubert Foundation provides millions of dollars in unrestricted grants to not-­for-­profit theatres so that they can create new work. This unique business structure positions the not-­for-­profit Shubert Foundation as the sole owner of the for-­profit Shubert Organization. Some profits from the Shubert Organization ($15 million in 2011) are transferred to the Foundation, which in turn makes grants to other not-­for-­profit theatre and dance companies.

ACT I: The First Annual Congress To discuss these sweeping changes, in 1974 Princeton University hosted the First Annual Congress of Theatre (FACT), a well-­meaning attempt to get a large group of representatives together from the flourishing regional theatre movement, the struggling Broadway and Off-­Broadway theatres, and the emerging theatre artist/ensemble companies like The

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Wooster Group (then known as The Performance Group) to talk about creating new work and the evolving business structures. As might be expected, it was a contentious meeting. Julian Beck of the Living Theatre called for the shuttering of Broadway:, “The alternative theater is a theater which has always been opposed to the Broadway theater. We want to destroy it. It is now being destroyed. It is in fact dying, and that is good.”6 The year 1974 was arguably the nadir of Broadway commercial theatre— before the “British Invasion” of the 1980s or the “Corporate Takeover” of the 1990s. Theatres were being bulldozed, attendance was down, and the Broadway Theatre district was physically in shambles. Fabled 42nd Street was rife with porn shops and shuttered buildings, and even the now-­grand (following a 1990s renovation) New Amsterdam Theatre was on its last legs as a converted movie theatre. The timing was fortuitous for a new business model in the commercial sector. In 1969 Congress passed a tax law that generally prohibited private charities from owning a controlling stake in a for-­profit business. One purpose involved preventing wealthy people from running shell corporations to avoid paying taxes. Yet through a series of strategic maneuvers by the Shubert Foundation, it avoided having to divest ownership of the Shubert Organization. The Samuel S. Shubert Foundation was formed in 1945 and had been operating in secrecy for many years, with little reporting on what monies it would distribute from year to year and most people not even knowing it existed. The Shubert Foundation Board and that of the for-­profit corporation are identical, an unusual arrangement. Whatever profits are made by the Shubert Organization are taxed at the standard corporate rates, but the remaining cash flow can then be transferred to the Foundation, where such funds can be invested and grow tax-­free. According to its 2011 Form 990, the Shubert Foundation received $15 million from the Shubert Organization as a “dividend.” The 1969 tax law requires foundations to distribute at least 5 percent of its endowment each year, and the Shubert Foundation in 2012 gave a record $20,515,000 in general operating support to 448 not-­for-­profit organizations, mostly theatre companies.7 While this makes the Shubert Foundation one of the most generous performing arts foundations in the United States, it is important to note that their yearly payouts are the minimum required by the tax code. The complaint against this business structure is that while the Shubert Foundation is a not-­for-­profit organization that must disclose its financial operations in yearly IRS 990 forms, its wholly owned subsidiary, The Shubert Organization, is privately held within the Foundation and has no such pub­lic reporting requirements. The 1969 Tax Code change stated that private charities could no longer own a controlling stake in

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a profit-­making business. But a member of the Shubert Board, Lee J. Seid­ler, made a request to the IRS stating that if the Foundation had to divest itself of its theatres, “the legitimate theatre would be destroyed” and the theatres would be used “commercially, such as for the showing of pornographic films, [or for] parking lots,” or sold “for maximum real estate value.”8 The Shubert Organization’s mid-­1970s financial statements were used to support the case, statements that reflect some of Broadway’s worst years financially. In a controversial 1979 ruling, the IRS agreed that the Shubert Organization constituted a “functionally related business” and that the ownership of theatres was a “program-­related investment,” meaning that theatre properties did not have to be counted in the total for the 5 percent that the Shubert Foundation was required to divest each year. Most agree that the Shubert Organization and its Foundation were the beneficiaries of good timing. Pamela Mann, the head of the charity division of the New York State Attorney General’s office, calls it “a case without parallel,” and Bill Lehrfeld, a Wash­ing­ton lawyer specializing in foundation law, was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “If the I.R.S. said the theatres were a program-­related investment, that’s nutty.”9 Because the details of the for-­profit arm are shielded, much is unknown about the Shubert Organization’s finances. However, certain pub­lic information can be used to approximate the cash flow of the operation. The Broadway League reports weekly grosses of Broadway productions, in­clud­ing those at each of the Shubert theatres, and the information is available on such websites as Playbill.com. In a recent week, the total gross income was $10.5 million, which would extrapolate to approximately $528 million in gross annual sales for the seventeen theatres, in turn representing half of the approximately one billion dollars in Broadway grosses for the year 2012. Some will not find the fig­ure surprising, since the Shubert Organization owns approximately half of all Broadway seats. The typical rent arrangement at a Broadway theatre is six percent of gross revenue, so the Shubert Organization share of gross income is approximately $32 million. This does not include any licensing or producing arrangements when the Organization capitalizes and invests in shows (the Organization is invested in the current hit Once, for example). Presumably, half this total would cover taxes and operating costs and the remaining $15 million is funneled to the Foundation, but there are no pub­lic financial statements to confirm this. One controversy arises because the Foundation values its “investment in the Shubert Organization” at $49 million.10 Dividing its seventeen Broadway theatres by this amount, the average theatre is valued at slightly less than $3 million, the approximate listing price of a luxury

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condo in the Times Square district. In contrast, the Manhattan Theatre Club purchased the Biltmore Theatre (now the Samuel J. Friedman) for $15 million over a decade ago.11 Not counting the full values of the theatres greatly reduces the yearly payout the Foundation must make. Since the Foundation makes generous donations to a wide swath of theatres and dance companies across the company (and attaches no restrictions to how the money is spent), this creative accounting on the value of the Shubert Organization is generally ignored.

ACT II: The Theatre Congress Reconvenes Twenty-­six years after the tumultuous meeting of FACT, the Theatre Congress reconvened in ACT II in 2000, and the fortunes of the Shubert Organization and the other commercial producers had been reversed. The Broadway theatre had enjoyed record profits in the 1980s and 1990s and every one of its theatres was lit, while the regional theatre movement now struggled with identity and funding. The conference was organized by the League of Ameri­can Theatres and Producers, representing the commercial theatre producers as well as the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), representing NFP companies. What emerged from this sec­ond conference was that there was more in common than divergent between the commercial producers and the not-­for-­profits, in both content and financing. Rocco Landesman, then best known as a commercial producer and president of Jujamcyn Theatres, wrote in a New York Times piece published prior to the conference that the nonprofit theatre had “lost its way” and was almost indistinguishable from commercial producers. A companion piece in the Times by TCG’s Ben Cameron noted that in 1999, “income to nonprofit theatres from commercial producers had increased 240 percent over the last three years, although it was concentrated in only nineteen theatres with three theatres alone accounting for 80 percent of all 1999 enhancement funds.”12 The four largest NFP Broadway theatre producers, The Public, Lincoln Center, The Roundabout Theatre, and Manhattan Theatre Club, had created new not-­for-­profit Broadway business models, as close to the Shubert structure as the IRS would allow, to sustain and grow their organizations. According to the Shubert Foundation annual report, each of these “super NFP” organizations that operate Broadway theatres received more than $200,000 of unrestricted funding from the Shubert Foundation. While questions arise about the artistic sacrifices that are sometimes made by these organizations in order to address the “bottom line,” the grants from the Shubert Foundation are unrestricted. As ­Oskar

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Eustis pointed out at the conference: “The Public has never been able to perform its mission without an infusion of income from the commercial sector. So there’s got to be a business model that deals with the reality of what we’re in and doesn’t just bemoan the fact that we’re not in a different reality.”13 The Public Theatre As the not-­for-­profit theatre movement was emerging in the late 1960s, Joe Papp had already been successfully producing free Shakespeare productions, first on the Lower East Side and then in Central Park, for ten years. He lobbied the city under a new building preservation law to save the old Astor Library, later named The Public Theatre. Papp’s vision was to have a year-­round facility to focus on new work, and the inaugural show was the counter-­cultural musical Hair. The Shubert Organization passed on this production, deeming it too controversial. Although Hair eventually transferred to Broadway and ran for 1,750 performances, the Public received only modest royalties from the revised Broadway production. Papp would not make this mistake again. The 1971 Broadway transfer of Two Gentlemen of Verona from the free Delacorte Theatre to the Broadway St. James was the first time a not-­for-­profit theatre company directly transferred a show to Broadway. This was followed by the creation, and ultimate Broadway production, of A Chorus Line that was first developed by the Public in the mid-­1970s. When A Chorus Line transferred to Broadway, the Playbill listed two producers, New York Shakespeare Festival and Plum Productions, the producing company of director/choreographer/creator Michael Bennett. The capitalization costs were borne by the Festival with some help from the Shubert Organization (which wanted the show as a tenant, its principal source of income) and LuEsther Mertz, whose donation as chairman of the board of the Public made the transfer possible. While she enjoyed a tax deduction, she held no investment share of the show. The Playbill also clearly stated, “All income from this production is used to help support the Festival’s work at Lincoln Center, the Public Theatre, free Shakespeare in the Park, and the Mobile Theatre.”14 Since A Chorus Line, the Public has had an equal share of Broadway successes and losses. A revival of On the Town (1998) and a new musical The Wild Party (2000) both lost money, but the revival of Hair (2009), which grossed over $50 million, was 20 percent capitalized by the Public and 80 percent by commercial producers. The Public followed this success by unsuccessfully attempting to raise 50 percent of the $4.5 million capitalization costs for Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. The commercial coproducers ultimately had to make up the difference, and the show

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closed without making back its money. The Public was more successful with a limited-­run revival of its Delacorte Theatre (Free Shakespeare in the Park) production of The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino that recouped its capitalization costs after ten weeks at The Broadhurst, a Shubert property. These recent productions are not funded in a typical way, however. Beginning with the revival of Hair, The Public created a for-­profit subsidiary using a pool of “twenty or so investors who wanted to put money into Public productions on Broadway.”15 The Public is then able to have a stake in the Broadway transfers without having to finance them with its own operating funds. This unique organizational subset protects The Public from losses but gives it a potential upside if the show is a hit. Profits from the subsidiary can be “donated back” to the non-­profit arm. While similar to the Shubert Foundation/Shubert Organization tax structure, the “program-­related” investment is the production itself, not the building that houses it. Lincoln Center Theater Since 1985, the Broadway-­classified Vivian Beaumont Theater has been operated by Lincoln Center Theater, currently under the direction of artistic director Andre Bishop and executive producer Bernard Gersten and guided by the motto and mission statement, “Good Plays, Popu­lar Prices.” The Center also operates The Mitzi Newhouse Theater and the Claire Tow Theater, both considered Off-­Broadway houses. The 1994 production of Carousel, produced by Lincoln Center in association with Cameron Mackintosh and the Royal National Theatre, was first produced at the Olivier Theatre in Lon­don. Since the origi­nal Lon­don production was produced on a thrust stage, Mackintosh approached Lincoln Center since its Beaumont stage has a thrust configuration. Mackintosh put up half the money for the Broadway production, but Bernard Gersten insisted that “we were in charge of the production. We managed it in every respect, and this was totally acceptable to our tax attorneys.”16 Andre Bishop’s support of Contact, however, was closer to the non-­ profit model established by Joseph Papp with A Chorus Line. Bishop gave Susan Stroman and John Weidman eight weeks to work on anything of their choosing. After they showed him what they had produced, Bishop and Gersten gave the go-­ahead to produce the work as a full production. The result played for over two years and won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Unlike the Shubert model, the theatre is owned by the producing organization that is providing content for its own space. More recently, the choice of Jed Bernstein as the next leader of Lincoln Center (beginning Janu­ary of 2014) demonstrates that commercial

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theatre experience is a criti­cal prerequisite to leading a Broadway NFP organization. Ordinarily, leaders of these organizations are chosen from the nonprofit world or from government agencies, but Bernstein’s background is in business and marketing, in­clud­ing successful service as executive director and then president of the League of Ameri­can Theatres and Producers (now the Broadway League). He established corporate tie-­ ins such as Continental Airlines being designated as the official airline of Broadway and Visa as Broadway’s preferred card. Through his production company, Above the Title Entertainment, he has also coproduced numerous Broadway commercial projects, in­clud­ing the recent productions of Hair, Equus with Daniel Radcliffe, and Driving Miss Daisy with Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones—all revivals with big-­name stars. Roundabout Theatre Founded by Gene Feist and Elizabeth Owens and also a product of the mid-­1960s, the Roundabout Theatre Company was on the verge of bankruptcy when, in 1990, artistic director Todd Haimes looked to corporate financing and a mission statement that was much more populist in programming than is typical for a not-­for-­profit theatre company. The Roundabout now operates five theatres, three of them Broadway-­class theatres. The Ameri­can Airlines Theatre, formerly the Selwyn, was one of the 42nd Street theatres that was renovated in the late 1990s. Studio 54 was acquired by the Roundabout to transfer its production of Cabaret. The Stephen Sondheim Theatre (origi­nally the Henry Miller Theatre) was purchased in 2007 and first renamed the Kit Kat Club for the revival of Cabaret before a construction accident next door forced it to move to Studio 54. It was renamed the Stephen Sondheim in honor of Sondheim’s eightieth birthday. Ironically, the commercial Pee-­Wee Herman Show was the first production at the Sondheim, followed by a very successful run of an equally commercial Anything Goes. The programming at the Sondheim has been indistinguishable from the commercial Broadway theatres. In addition, the Roundabout has leveraged its Broadway successes with national tours that also compete with commercial producers. She Loves Me was the Roundabout’s first Broadway musical in 1993. Since then the Roundabout has produced twenty-­two musical revivals, which, according to its website, have earned five Best Musical Revival Tony Awards and thirty additional Tony nominations and awards. As part of its mission, the Roundabout wants to take “a lead role in producing musical revivals and preserving the Ameri­can musical theatre tradition on Broadway. Over the past several years, Roundabout has single-­handedly produced almost one-­t hird of all musical revivals on Broadway.”17 Even though the Roundabout continues to produce more cutting-­edge works

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in its Off-­Broadway theatres, the majority of its income flows from its commercial Broadway fare. According to its 2012 Form 990 and grosses reported by the Broadway League, over $48 million of the Roundabout’s $58 million ticket income came from its five Broadway productions, with Anything Goes accounting for over $34 million. The Roundabout also received over $12 million in charitable donations, which, combined with its earned income, makes it the biggest NFP player on Broadway—a tremendous leap from its bankruptcy filing in the 1970s. Manhattan Theatre Club Since its founding in 1970, The Manhattan Theatre Club has produced plays both on and off Broadway. MTC purchased the 622-­seat Biltmore Theatre in 2001 and opened it in 2003 after extensive renovations. The newly renamed Samuel J. Friedman Theatre has housed such productions as Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-­Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play that was commissioned by South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, an NFP regional theatre. MTC has been more aggressive in providing commissions to new playwrights than other NFPs, participating in an initiative called “The Writers Room” that recently awarded five commissions to new playwrights worth between $5,000 and $10,000. According to MTC’s website, its mission is to bring theatre to the widest possible audience, adding that it “collaborates with leading regional theatres to bring major new Ameri­can plays to New York.” Its Broadway-­categorized Friedman Theatre, however, has relied on a mix of productions that reached a nadir in 2009 when Time Out critic Adam Feldman wrote: “Yet Accent on Youth feels distressingly aged and extraneous; you forget it even as you watch it. What is happening at MTC? The com­pany’s website bills it as ‘one of the only institutions in the U.S. solely dedicated to producing new plays and musicals.’ But its Samuel J. Friedman Theatre began the season with the new-­in-­name-­only To Be or Not to Be, adapted from the 1942 film; then came a revival of 1990’s The Ameri­can Plan; and now this. When did the MTC’s mission become a nostalgia trip? Are its captains asleep on the job? With productions like this one, no one could blame them.”18 Since that review, MTC has presented a mix of well-­received new works—a limited-­engagement run of David Lindsay-­Abaire’s Good People and Richard Greenberg’s Assembled Parties—as well as revivals that relied on star-­power to entice Broadway audiences: Enemy of the People, Wit, and Master Class. At the same time, Ruined, brought to New York after a successful Chicago run at the Goodman Theatre, played in MTC’s Off-­Broadway “Stage 1,” where it enjoyed several extensions. The Lynn Nottage play about abuse of women in the Congo went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, but it was not eligible for the Tony Awards since it didn’t move to MTC’s Broadway house. For MTC,

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it would seem that commercial considerations trump the artistic mission in deciding which play to program into which space. Future Not-­For-­Profit Broadway Theatre Owners The Second Stage Theatre is a not-­for-­profit theatre company whose mission is to “produce a diverse range of premieres and new interpretations of America’s best contemporary theatre. Founded in 1979 to produce ‘sec­ond stagings’ of contemporary plays, Second Stage Theatre has expanded its mission to include the development and production of new plays and the creation of programs that nurture young theatre artists. This commitment has manifested itself in many ways, from presenting new productions to providing long-­term residencies for playwrights, directors, composers, and lyricists.”19 Initially, the company produced in a series of rental spaces. It settled at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre on Broadway and 76th Street. In 1999, the theatre acquired a sec­ond space, the Tony Kiser Theatre at 43rd Street and 8th Avenue. When Rock of Ages closes at the Helen Hayes Theatre, Second Stage Theatre has the option to purchase the 597-­seat theatre and would become the fourth not-­for-­profit theatre company to own a Broadway House.

ACT III: The Third Theatre Congress, “In The Intersection: Partnerships in the New Play Sector” In No­vem­ber 2011, the “third act” of the Broadway profit/nonprofit conferences occurred in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., at Arena Stage. Twenty-­five theatre professionals gathered for a meeting hosted by the Ameri­can Voices New Play Institute, then at Arena Stage, now moved to Emerson College. This was a significantly smaller group than the origi­nal gathering of 224 at Princeton in 1974, or ACT II in 2000. The primary goals of this third meeting were to discuss the evolution of commercial and nonprofit partnerships, particularly as they related to new work, and sec­ond to examine the impact these partnerships had on the sponsoring organizations and the artists who were creating the work. The participants of this conference were a who’s who of Ameri­can artistic directors and producers, in­clud­ing Rocco Landesman (then head of the NEA), Robert Brustein, Oskar Eustis, Gregory Mosher, Tony Taccone, Kevin McCollum, Sue Frost, and Kevin Moore. While the greatly reduced numbers at the table reduced the divergent voices of the first two conferences (particularly of smaller theatres), it allowed for a more targeted discussion of the intersection of not-­for-­profits and the commercial theatre producers. As might be expected, there were many spirited volleys between com-

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mercial producers and not-­for-­profit artistic directors, but there were no chairs thrown, and no more calls for the shuttering of Broadway. Much of the focus of this conference was on the eroding values of not-­for-­profit’s missions, or, as Oskar Eustis stated, “The nonprofit theatre is supposed to do theatre that is driven by values not determined in the marketplace.”20 The emergence of the large NFP presence on Broadway and the significant shift toward commercial work concerned many at the conference. Were these new business relationships limiting the number and diversity of voices?

Conclusion The early model for regional theatres was to form resident companies to produce work that was relevant to their communities. For many reasons, mostly financial, these resident companies have all but disappeared, and nonprofit theatres now find themselves at a crossroads between serving their missions and maintaining the bottom line. While the groundbreaking production of The Great White Hope had a Broadway run, its initial development did not have that as a goal. Many regional theatre productions today have sights specifically set on Broadway, calling into question how these productions fulfill a nonprofit theatre’s mission, particularly when funding comes from commercial producers. The First Ameri­can Congress (“FACT”) in 1974 sought to revive a dying Broadway industry. The Second Ameri­can Congress (“ACT II”) in 2000 explored ways that commercial and nonprofit producers could take advantage of their unique business structures. The recent 2011 conference, appropriately titled “In the Intersection,” brought together a far smaller group, in­clud­ing the key players from both the commercial and nonprofit theatre worlds, to debate the new production financing models that have benefited both commercial and nonprofit companies. Blurring the distinctions, bringing profits to nonprofits, can be hazardous to a nonprofit’s mission (or definition), even as these new financial arrangements provide nonprofits with an infusion of funds, a company’s lifeblood, to help ensure survival.

Notes 1. Diane Ragsdale, “In the Intersection: Partnerships in the New Play Sector” (Theater Commons/HowlRound.com, 2012), Kindle e-­book, “What Brings Commercial Producers and Nonprofits into the Intersection?,” paragraph 7. 2. Richard Zoglin, Time, “Bigger than Broadway,” February 27, 2003, 66. 3. Campbell Gibson and Kay Young, “His­tori­cal Census Statistics on Popu-

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lation Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States,” U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Sep­tem­ber 2002, Working Paper Series No. 56: District of Columbia, Table 23, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation /twps0056/twps0056.html. 4. Ragsdale, “In the Intersection,” location 968. 5. Steven Adler, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way (Carbondale: South­ern Illinois University Press, 2004), 117. 6. Robin Pogrebin, “Theatre for Fun or Profit; Producers Two Camps Remain Uneasy Allies,” New York Times, July 15, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com /2000/06/15/theater/theater-­for-­f un-­or-­profit-­producers-­t wo-­camps-­remain -­uneasy-­allies.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm, accessed March 15, 2013. 7. Shubert Foundation 2012 Annual Report, http://www.shubertfoundation .org/files/FoundationBrochure2012_reader.pdf, accessed March 13, 2013. 8. N. R. Kleinfield, “I.R.S. Ruling Wrote Script For the Shubert Tax Break,” New York Times, July 11, 1994, B6. 9. Ibid. 10. Guidestar.org, “Shubert Foundation 2011 Form PF990 Part II, Attachment 12,” http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2011/136/106/2011–136106961 –0804dcaa-­F.pdf, accessed March 20, 2013. 11. Backstage.com, “Biltmore Theatre Deconstructed at Planning Commission,” July 13, 2001, http://w w w.backstage.com/news/biltmore-­theatre -­deconstructed-­at-­planning-­commission, accessed March 20, 2013. 12. Ben Cameron, “Finding the Right Way to Cross the Divide,” New York Times, June 4, 2000, http://search.proquest.com/docview/91659106?accountid =11824, accessed March 10, 2013. 13. Ragsdale, “In the Intersection,” location 747. 14. Playbill: A Chorus Line, No­vem­ber 1975, Shubert Theatre edition, 9. 15. Patrick Healy, “Nonprofit Theaters Take on Bold Broadway Ventures This Fall,” New York Times, August 31, 2010, C1. 16. Adler, On Broadway, 124. 17. Roundabout Theatre website, http://w w w.roundabouttheatre.org /About/Key-­Programs/Musicals.aspx, accessed May 5, 2013. 18. Adam Feldman, Time Out, May 7, 2009, http://w w w.timeout.com /newyork/theater/accent-­on-­youth, accessed May 5, 2013. 19. Guidestar.org, Second Stage Theatre 2011 IRS Form 990, 2, http://www .guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2011/133/021/2011–133021180–08365968–9.pdf, accessed March 30, 2013. 20. Ragsdale, “In the Intersection,” location 245.

Commercial Necessities Reviving Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company at the Turn of the Millennium Jeff Turner

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he Ameri­can musical is of­ten positioned as a uniquely open   and malleable text. Discussing the popu­lar form, Mitchell Morris acknowledges the “matrix of commercial necessities” that demands new productions of any given musical to move away from the origi­nal, adapting to and privileging new audiences, embracing the contributions made by emerging directors, designers, and performers, and implementing newly revised dialogue and song selection. Morris argues that revivals and dramaturgical revisions constitute a complicated yet integral part of the Ameri­can musical theatre tradition: “Attributes such as these indicate a general assumption that the his­tori­cal location of a musical— not simply its place in the chronological sequence—is an important aspect of its framing.”1 The idea of the musical as an ever-­evolving text not limited by its sequential place in the canon but framed by any given his­tori­cal moment is a compelling one. In Oc­to­ber 2012, for example, Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis presented Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s groundbreaking musical comedy Company.2 This production sought, in part, to position itself in opposition to the Minnesota Same-­Sex Marriage Amendment on the No­vem­ber 6, 2012 ballot, and worked to stage a complex yet entertaining portrait of a man on the cusp of personal discovery as well as a forthright examination of marriage as a vital and evolving institution.3 Updating the action to the present and utilizing smart phones, tablets, and video projections of social media platforms, director Peter Rothstein sought to underline the text’s concern with, according to Sondheim, the great “difficulty of making one-­to-­one relationships in an increasingly dehumanized society.”4 Twin Cities spectators were in-

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vited to deliberate and discuss, teasing out personal responses to one of the most meaningful choices any two people can make. Indeed, the Theatre Latté Da production of Company underlined the privilege to make such a choice during those po­liti­cally charged weeks when the marriage equality debate was at the front lines of cultural discourse at home and across the nation. A closer look at the musical’s evolution, informed by a thorough examination of the relationship between the 1970 Broadway premiere and the revisions made by Sondheim and Furth for the 1995 revivals in New York and Lon­don, generates a far more complicated set of responses. The 1995 revision of Company bifurcates the text and produces a strange hybrid that hovers awkwardly between past and present.5 While perhaps more commercially viable, this version works to close up gaps and holes, especially when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality. Returning to the 1970 book and lyrics, one notes a caustic, more rebellious interrogation of Ameri­can marriage as a fundamentally monomythic institution.6 In particular, the musical’s engagement with the “Silent Generation”—­t hose Ameri­cans in their thirties and forties for whom the 1970 Broadway production would resonate so powerfully—seems crucial to understanding the forces of conflict that shape the dramatic action. It is hard to imagine a time when Stephen Sondheim’s eminence was ever in question, yet on the evening of April 26, 1970, waiting for the curtain to rise on Company, his first Broadway show in five years, the forty-­year-­old composer and lyricist remained an artist in transition. The measure of his success was still up for debate. The new musical was highly conceptual, yet, according to Sondheim, quite simple in design: “A man with no emotional commitment reassesses his life on his thirty-­ fifth birthday by reviewing his relationships with his married acquaintances and his girlfriends. That is the entire plot.”7 Sondheim, Furth, and director/­producer Hal Prince must have been devastated by the New York Times review in which Clive Barnes castigated Company for trafficking in cocktail party grotesques, a slick portrait of the urban jungle for tourists seeking out an authentic New York City experience. Although Barnes acknowledged Sondheim to be “one of the most sophisticated composers ever to write Broadway musicals,” praising his lyrics for their “sparse, elegant wit,” he suggested the songs to be overtly clever. Barnes, who appreciated Boris Aronson’s constructivist-­inspired scenery, argued that Prince did not generate the appropriate pacing necessary to sustain the repetitive dramatic action, and he dismissed Furth’s characters as “trivial, shallow, worthless and horrid.”8 Such a review had the ability to close a show in 1970, but something intriguing happened the very next day. Times critic Mel Gussow ack­

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nowledged that the reviews were mixed, but observed “the ones that were favorable were violently favorable, the kind of notices that send people running to stand in line at the box office.”9 Company would eventually run for 690 performances and win six Tony Awards. Sondheim had indeed arrived, his reputation unqualified, and over the next decade he would produce four additional successes in collaboration with Hal Prince—­ Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). Subsequent hits ­include Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), Assassins (1990), and Passion (1994). As scholar Ethan Mordden argues, Sondheim had surely become an Ameri­can “master without equal.”10 In the early 1990s, however, there was a palpable anxiety over the longevity of Sondheim and Furth’s innovative production. There was some concern that Company had become a vintage relic recalling an extended episode of Love, Ameri­can Style.11 Yes, Sondheim’s songs were brilliant, but they were better appreciated on headphones than live onstage. For many, Furth’s book just could not shake that polyester-­infused, 1970s aura. This sentiment was reinforced when Angela Lansbury, who acknowledged Company to be one of America’s “most revered and least revived” musicals, welcomed 3,000 fans to a one-­night concert performance of the score sung by most of the origi­nal Broadway cast at the Terrace Theatre in Long Beach, California, on Janu­ary 23, 1993.12 While much of Michael Bennett’s origi­nal choreography was included, Furth’s book was jettisoned in favor of narrative transitions recited by George Hearn. At the evening’s close Lansbury spoke movingly of three men involved in the origi­nal production who had died of AIDS (Bennett, actor Larry Kert, and production manager Fritz Holt), reminding the audience that the show would serve as a benefit for the Actors Fund of America AIDS Initiative. In little more than a decade, the AIDS crisis had transformed the sociocultural landscape. Perhaps Company’s central character, Bobby, a playboy and social voyeur whose ambivalence toward settling down and conforming to social norms dismays his married friends, was no longer relevant. Ten months later, the Long Beach Civic Light Opera mounted the musical featuring Patrick Cassidy as Bobby and Carol Burnett as Joanne (an acerbic, thrice-­married character who belts out one of Sondheim’s signature showstoppers, “The Ladies Who Lunch”). Los Angeles Times critic Sylvie Drake recognized the musical to hover in a “kind of cultural limbo.” She writes, “After its enormous initial impact, the non-­ book-­driven, multilevel, multilayered social study known as ‘Company’

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withdrew into genteel obscurity. It has been familiarly revered in abstentia, played on albums, written about, televised in rehearsal, revived in concert and staged mostly in remote outposts where it is less risky to test the durability of the ’70s mentality that spawned it.” Drake admired the production as a pre-­A IDS period piece that still had the power to move an audience with its trenchant examination of urban loneliness exacerbated by a fear of commitment. Still, she argued the show was “a lovingly-­assembled, somewhat by-­the-­book revival, respectable if not electrifying.”13 This was not a production that would inspire a return to Broadway. Musical theatre is the backbone of Broadway and accounts for the majority of box office receipts and profits. Here art and commerce intermingle, and, as Stacy Wolf has written, despite “their unapologetic ­commercialism . . . musicals have achieved supreme artistry and have influenced culture as much as if not more than any other art form in America.”14 As of May 1, 2013, thirty-­one productions were running or in previews on the Great White Way. More than half of these were revivals or “jukebox” musicals.15 One particular revival, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, premiered a brand new book written by Douglas Carter Beane in which, this time around, it is Cinderella’s turn to rescue the prince. Writing for Time R ichard Corliss noted, “Revivals are to Broadway what sequels are to Hollywood: a way to mint money from familiar materials.”16 The revival certainly opens up new modes of spectatorial engagement, but, much like the 2013 production of Cinderella, they also provide an opportunity to reconfig­ure “canonical” texts for new audiences. Central to this idea is Bruce Kirle’s argument that musicals are inherently incomplete texts open to revision and reappraisal and that they speak to shifting ideological forces as they move through time. In particular, Kirle questions what exactly constitutes an authoritative production of a Broadway musical:



[The concept] of the ‘definitive,’ closed performance . . . is a result of the marketing of origi­nal Broadway cast recordings beginning in the 1940s. When these ‘authentic’ cast albums first emerged, ‘definitive’ performances were recorded for posterity and subsequent studio recordings were denigrated as inauthentic. With the passage of time and the popu­larity of revivals on Broadway, however, other ‘definitive’ performances of these same musicals have been recorded. . . . There can be no definitive production of a musical apart from a given cultural moment and that, consequently, the texts of musicals are in themselves necessarily incomplete. . . .  Rather than closed, the texts become unfinished, because the characters must be played to conform to changing societal conventions and audience tastes.17

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Such an approach is not surprising in a capitalist economy where the Broadway revival is a unique commodity: it functions to maintain the brand of the artists involved, sell cast recordings and other merchandise, keep the songbook alive, license touring companies and regional productions, and allow the project to be commercially viable by addressing social, cultural, and po­liti­cal concerns deemed less problematic in the past. If that requires rewrites and revisions, so be it. In 1993, for example, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret was transformed with new orchestrations and major revisions to Joe Masteroff’s book.18 Directed by Sam Mendes at Lon­don’s Donmar Warehouse, this new version heightened the show’s polymorphous perversity, cutting and reimagining songs from the origi­ nal 1966 production while adding songs written for the 1972 film directed by Bob Fosse. Opening on Broadway in 1998, the Mendes production ran for 2,377 performances, the third-­longest revival in Broadway musical history. Annie Get Your Gun (first produced in 1946 with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and a book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields) was reworked with new orchestrations and a revised book by Peter Stone for a 1999 Broadway revival that ran for 1,046 performances. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song (first produced in 1958) was revived in 2002 with a new book by David Henry Hwang. West Side Story (first produced in 1957 with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bern­ stein, lyrics by Sondheim, and direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins) was revived in a 2009 production that interspersed Spanish dialogue and lyrics into the existing book for greater authenticity.19 Finally, in 2011, Porgy and Bess (first produced in 1935 as a folk opera with music by George Gershwin, book by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin) was renamed The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and arrived on Broadway with new orchestrations, a book adapted by Suzan-­ Lori Parks, and music adapted by Diedre Murray.20 It soon became the longest-­running Broadway production of Porgy and Bess ever. On Oc­to­ber 5, 1995, the Roundabout Theatre Company opened its doors to the first Broadway revival of Company. Directed by Scott Ellis, the production would include revisions to the book by Furth, new lyrics from Sondheim, and a new song not included in the origi­nal. The intent was to make subtle changes in the text to provide a stronger narrative arc for Bobby, in­clud­ing the addition of a first-­act closing number, “Marry Me a Little.” Additionally, longtime Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Tunick provided new orchestrations, minimizing the origi­nal’s reliance on synthesizers in favor of a warmer tone featuring saxophone and oboe. In essence, Ellis worked with Sondheim and Furth to distance the show from its origi­nal cultural context, arguing Company could not “be a show about the 1970s because that’s not what it is.”21 Critical response was mixed.

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Linda Winer of Newsday was equivocal, calling out Rob Marshall’s choreography as “hokey” and suggesting Ellis did not trust the material. Winer concluded, “Perhaps we need this show too much and know it too well to ever be completely satisfied with a revival.”22 Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News was unequivocal, describing Ellis’s direction as “cartoonlike” where “only a few moments seem genuinely human.”23 Clive Barnes in the Post was more matter-­of-­fact: “When all is said and sung, the sad suspicion remains that Company itself is better entertained, and more entertaining, on a turntable, away from Furth’s twittering dialogue, than in a theatre.”24 Vincent Canby of the New York Times concurred, wondering if any production can live up to Sondheim’s “dazzling and bittersweet show tunes.” He wrote: “It’s not a matter of having idealized the score. Instead, there’s the realization that you’ll always know it better for what it reveals over time, in comparative privacy, than for what will ever appear in a single pub­lic performance.”25 After sixty performances and forty-­t hree previews, the show closed at the Roundabout but was unable to make the leap to another theatre and an open-­ended engagement. With previews beginning on De­cem­ber 1, 1995, Sam Mendes’s staging of Company at Lon­don’s Donmar Warehouse was unafraid to drag the dramatic action into the 1990s. In the wake of Mendes’s bruisingly electric revisal of Cabaret, this Company was bold and irreverent. Adrian Lester, the first black actor to play Bobby, drank, snorted cocaine, and chased women with a casually seductive, nihilistic allure. Updating the telephone busy signal that served as a metaphor for urban disconnection in the 1970 origi­nal, Mendes relied on the high-­pitched beep of an answering machine. Describing the production as “hugely entertaining,” Paul Taylor of The Independent hailed Mendes’s staging to be a triumph of theatrical mendacity.26 Writing for the Sondheim Review, Jo Davies noted: “Mendes claims to have reduced what he calls ‘the front-­on revueish quality’ of the origi­nal by keeping Bobby on stage for most of the evening, experiencing each number surrealistically inside his own head. What we are shown is Bobby’s filtered experience of his birthday party. How he feels about his friends speaking to him, but never speaking to him. Communicating, but not communicating.”27 The set juxtaposed the multi-­colored, kaleidoscopic world of Bobby with the mundane existence of the five married couples costumed in black, white, and shades of grey. Describing the production as “sharp, witty and lean,” The ­Guardian’s Mike Billington suggested that Company tells the “story of a born loner who realises he is defined by other people’s expectations.”28 Benedict Nightingale, in the Lon­don Times, acknowledged the play was anything but sentimental and noted, “There is something sinister and menacing

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about Robert’s married chums.”29 Watching selections from a 1997 televised recording, it appears as if Bobby’s friends wish to pull him out of the universe of color into a world of compromise and regret where being sorry and grateful in equal measure, “always wondering what might have been,” is the definition of being an adult.30 One change in the 1995 revivals is the inclusion of material that serves to address Bobby’s sexual identity. At the end of the first act in the 1970 version, Bobby bluntly proposes to a confused and anxious Amy on her wedding day just sec­onds after she has told her fiancé Paul she doesn’t love him enough. “Marry me! And everybody’ll leave us alone!” Bobby pleads.31 This desperation to enter into a marriage of convenience suggests a man uncertain as to who he is or what he wants. The moment is more than enough to jar Amy out of the neurosis that had fueled her hysterical patter song “Getting Married Today” only minutes before. As she runs off stage to find Paul and happily tie the knot, Bobby is left alone in the space as the “Bobby Baby” refrain is heard offstage and the spectators are suddenly returned to the birthday party that frames the dramatic action. The coolly detached guests are in tableau as Amy reenters with a lighted cake. The tone here is contemplative yet unsettling. Bobby’s isolation from the ensemble is tangible. The addition of the song “Marry Me a Little” in the 1995 revivals, however, counters the uncertainty. The tone is more encouraging, and the lyrics serve to mitigate Bobby’s interaction with Amy to suggest the potential for personal growth and forward momentum. However nuanced, “Mary Me a Little” sof­tens the abruptness of the origi­nal ending, generating melodic warmth and emotional empathy for a man who wants someone to love him “just enough” while keeping a “tender distance” so he “won’t have to give up a thing.”32 Nevertheless, articulating a union where a man wishes to abide by the rules of social decorum without negating his true self has generated plenty of contradictory responses, and critics, scholars, and Sondheim devotees have been questioning Bobby’s “true” motivations since the musical’s premiere. Indeed, is it possible Bobby is gay? One can point to the lack of gender-­specific pronouns in the musical’s climatic number “Being Alive” as evidence to support such a claim. When Bobby sings “Somebody hold me too close,” the desire for genuine intimacy is wide open to interpretation. According to Sondheim biographer Meryle Secrest, the composer/lyricist was ambivalent about his sexuality while working on Company, and he was very much in the closet when it came to his pub­lic persona. It was not until 1971 that Sondheim’s friends first remember seeing him in social settings with a boyfriend.33 Briefly attached to an unrealized film adaptation of the musical, Academy Award– winning screenwriter William Goldman also questioned Bobby’s motiva-

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tions: “I remember seeing Company five times and I loved it, and I had a huge fucking problem, which was that the main character’s gay but they don’t talk about it. Hal, George, and Steve all think it’s about a guy with commitment problems.”34 Charles Marowitz was in agreement, suggesting “the effect of the show, which relentlessly depicts the bloodless compromises and painful adjustments to which all marital togetherness is prone, is that there is some more perfect state to be attained; higher than and ultimately more satisfying than conventional heterosexual coupling.” For Marowitz, the musical suggests that marriage is nothing more than a “monument to false consciousness,” that Bobby, in the final number, “is still vaunting his singularity” and that Sondheim and Furth have embedded in the text a “secret agenda” which opens up the possibility of same-­ sex unions as a “viable social alternative.” Ultimately, Marowitz argues that “there is a murky undertow to Company which prevents it from realizing its full potential. It feels like a musical enclosed in a plain brown wrapper.”35 Though queer readings of the musical persisted, until 1995 Sondheim was adamant that productions of the show adhere strictly to the origi­nal text. Scott Miller, however, has made the case that the musical cannot move forward without acknowledging social and cultural redefinitions of marriage and same-­sex relationships since 1970. He argues, “Company isn’t just about marriage. It’s about sustaining a long term commitment in our increasingly mechanized and depersonalized society.” Directing the show for Saint Louis’s New Line Theatre in 1995, Miller submitted a request to Music Theatre International and Sondheim (who sat on New Line’s Board of Trustees) to allow him to cast one of the couples with two men. “They both replied immediately that under no circumstances could we make one of the couples gay,” Miller recalls. “Apparently, mine was not the first request.”36 Stephen Citron points to another production in 1995 where theatre artists worked to queer the text. The Alice B. Theatre in Seattle, an organization committed to LGBTQ subjectivity, staged a production of Company in which several of the couples were gay, in­clud­ing an erotic encounter between Bobby and a male flight attendant which leads into the playful, morning-­after duet “Barcelona.” The producers had not submitted a formal request to make these changes, however, and when Sondheim learned about the casting and production choices, lawyers threatened to close down the show. In the end, with only a handful of performances left in the run, no action was taken.37 Although not included in the Broadway revival directed by Scott Ellis, Sondheim and Furth did expand a scene with new material in the Donmar Warehouse production. Here, in the third scene of the sec­ond act, a newly divorced Peter, still living at home with his children and ex-­wife

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Susan, propositions Bobby. After circling around the subject for some time while Bobby maintains a laconic distance, Peter fully commits:



peter: I think that sometimes you can even know someone for, oh, a long, long time and then suddenly, out of nowhere, you just want to have them— I mean, even an old friend. You just, all of a sudden, desire that intimacy. That closeness. robert: Probably. peter: Oh, I’m convinced that two men really would, if it wasn’t for society and all the conventions and all that crap, just go off and ball and be better off for it, closer, deeper, don’t you think? robert: Well, I—I don’t know. peter: I mean like us, for example. Do you think that you and I could ever have anything like that? robert (Looks at him for a long and uncomfortable moment. Then a big smile): Oh, I get it. You’re putting me on. Man, you really had me going there, you son of a gun.38

The impact of this interaction can be read in two ways. First, the scene underscores Bobby’s ambivalence about relationships in general. As Billington noted, “Sondheim now even addresses the question of whether Robert is gay: the answer is just a little but never quite enough.”39 A sec­ond reading suggests a level of authorial declaration. From this perspective Sondheim and Furth shut down the debate around their central character’s sexuality. Bobby doesn’t so much recoil from Peter’s risky proposal as he deflects and belittles the moment. The way the dialogue is constructed positions Bobby as “straight man” to Peter’s loquacious and comic fumbling. The dramatic shape of the scene affirms Bobby’s status as a “normal” heterosexual male. There is something cruel and absolute about it. While Bobby may have experienced a few sexually adventurous encounters in his past, the text suggests he is in no way closeted as Peter appears to be. This reading is made significantly clear in both John Doyle’s 2006 Broadway revival starring Raúl Esparza as Bobby and Lonny Price’s 2011 staging of the New York Philharmonic concert performance staring Neil Patrick Harris. In each production, the revision works to erase the ambiguity around the central character’s sexual identity as both Esparza and Harris generate sympathy and audience laughter by positioning Peter as an obstacle that Bobby must overcome through dryly arch vocal intonations and physical choices suggesting comic discomfort.40 The scene deflects any homosexual anxiety produced by the text onto the character of Peter, whose hyper-­masculine persona and strong desire to live vicariously through Bobby’s sexual exploits is sud-

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denly called into question as little more than a performance of heteronormativity masking homoerotic desire. Although the 1995 revisions suggest an oppositional reading, Bruce Kirle has posited that a contemporary production of Company must “confront Bobby’s sexual ambiguity rather than push it under the table. The character can still remain enigmatic, even sexually confused, but it is not enough . . . to leave him a cipher.”41 To accomplish this, however, one must resist Kirle’s central thesis and reevaluate Sondheim and Furth’s revisions. Theoretically, Kirle’s reading of musicals as always and forever unfinished, “because the characters must be played to conform to changing societal conventions and audience tastes,” is apt.42 Company, however, might provide an exception to Kirle’s thesis. This is a text so bound up in its his­tori­cal moment that it is hard to imagine it as anything other than a period piece,43 but not one whose dramatic and thematic impact is mitigated by a gauzy kind of nostalgic reverie where, as Rebecca Ann Rugg has suggested, spectatorial response is “grounded in in­di­vidual memory and familiarity.”44 Writing during a cultural moment when Matthew Weiner’s AMC television series Mad Men provides a narrative of the 1960s that, according to M. J. Moore, “compels its protagonists to face the increasingly surreal and riotous mayhem of America’s social and po­liti­cal panorama in the late 1960s,” Company’s dramatic action seems as vital and relevant as ever.45 The epochal conflicts and tensions that fueled Prince, Furth, and Sondheim’s work—and shaped what sociologists refer to as the “Silent Generation”—seem central to the musical’s fragmented narrative. To better understand the sociohis­tori­cal forces that give shape to Bobby’s ambivalence on his thirty-­fifth birthday, it is important to understand what it meant to confront one’s midlife transition in 1970. On No­vem­ ber 5, 1951, Time published a study of Ameri­can youth, contrasting their values with those born during the first two decades of the twentieth century. “By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers and mothers, today’s younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the ‘Silent Generation.’”46 These are predominantly children of the Great Depression, whom sociologists labeled silent due to their need for security and their adherence to civic engagement, suburban prosperity, and corporate hegemony.47 Members of the Silent Generation “were more sober and conservative,” favoring uniform allegiance to behavioral norms.48 Time concluded its study by suggesting they were “the oldest young generation in the world.”49 Two decades later, in 1970, Gerald Clarke, an associate editor for Time,

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revisited what he termed the one truly lost generation of the century: “To be in your 30s is, by popu­lar definition, to be in the middle—the middle of your career, the middle of your marriage, the middle of your life.” Recognizing his to be the last generation of Ameri­cans to accept without question the traditional values of patriotism and hard work, Clarke added, “We stand between two angry lines of what has become a war of generations. The middle in any war is seldom safe ground, but when we look at today’s angry, frustrated youth and their equally angry frustrated parents, the middle is where we would elect to be.” Sandwiched between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers, the Silent Generation was too young to fight in World War II yet too old to initiate the progressive cultural shifts of the 1960s. By the time many reached their thirties and forties, they found themselves subject to (yet observing from a distance) the destabilizing forces of social change. One area of concern was marriage. Writing in the same year that Company opened on Broadway, Clarke observed, “Many of our marriages have not survived the strain of being pulled in two directions. The number of divorces for those in their 30s is alarming, the number of unhappy marriages staggering. Sex is probably the same for us as it is for everyone else past puberty. The difference is that our expectations are now those of the young, while many of our marriages were formed according to the rules of the old.”50 Marriage in America went through an unprecedented revolution in the twenty years between the Time magazine articles. According to Stephanie Coontz, this once stable institution “lost its role as the ‘master event’ that governed young people’s sexual lives, their assumption of adult roles, their job choices, and their transition into parenthood. People began marrying later. Divorce rates soared. Premarital sex became the norm. And the division of labor between husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker, which sociologists in the 1950s had believed was vital for industrial society, fell apart.”51 When Company opened in 1970, Stephen Sondheim had just turned forty. George Furth was thirty-­eight. Hal Prince was forty-­t wo. With brutal honesty and a wry sense of humor, their musical reflected the world as they were experiencing it. It can be argued their central character, Robert, stood for an entire generation of Ameri­ cans who faced an uncertain future in the wake of seismic change. Company was the first successful Broadway musical to confront this audience head-­on. Stephen Sondheim, George Furth and Hal Prince did not utilize history as a distancing effect as Prince had done in Cabaret (1966). This was no Weimar Germany functioning as metaphor for the social inequalities that shaped Ameri­can cultural discourse in the 1960s. It certainly did not fall in line with the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, whose “integrated musicals” celebrated romantic love and postwar

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Ameri­can idealism. Explicitly located in what the 1970 version of the text declares as “NOW,” a land of skyscrapers and vodka stingers, Company generated the acerbic force of a comedy by Edward Albee, going straight for the jugular while interrogating marriage, male chauvinism, and the capricious social mores of New York City’s privileged jet set. The 1970 premiere utilized irony, temporal complexity, narrative fragmentation, and Brechtian-­inspired commentary to confront the mythopoetics of traditional musical theatre narratives, holding a mirror up to its audience as products of a hurried, urban landscape while focusing on a self-­ questioning central character whose inner-­directed ambivalence reflected an entire generation of Ameri­cans ushering in the “me decade.” Thus, the musical makes uncomfortably visible the shifting social ideologies of sexuality and gender during a period of Ameri­can history marked by great uncertainty. Editor’s Note: In Oc­to­ber 2013, Stephen Sondheim confirmed that he was working with director John Tiffany on a revised version of Company that reconceives Bobby as a gay man with commitment issues and selectively changes the gender of other characters. He made the announcement as the Roundabout Theatre Company prepared a closed-­door reading of the revision in order to evaluate its potential for production. Even in light of expanded definitions of marriage since its premiere, Sondheim asserted that commitment remains the primary focus of the musical.

Notes 1. Mitchell Morris, “Narratives and Values,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ameri­can Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9. 2. The Theater Latté Da production was staged in the Ordway McKnight Theatre and ran from Oc­to­ber 25 to No­vem­ber 18, 2012. In the interest of transparency, it should be noted that I served as dramaturg on this production. 3. The Minnesota Same-­Sex Marriage Amendment was a legislatively referred constitutional amendment. It was defeated with 52.5 percent of the pub­lic voting against the measure. 4. Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 166. 5. Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Company: A Musical Comedy (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996). The 1996 publication, which is an amalgamation of the 1995 revisions made in New York and Lon­don, is considered the definitive version and is currently licensed by Music Theatre International for professional and amateur production. 6. Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Company, in Ten Great Musicals of

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the Ameri­can Theatre, ed. Stanley Richards (Radnor, Pa: Chilton, 1973), 643– 719. This 1973 publication contains the 1970 book and lyrics. 7. Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, 165. 8. Clive Barnes, “Theater: ‘Company’ Offers a Guide to New York’s Marital Jungle,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, New York Times, April 27, 1970, http://search.proquest.com/docview/119129822?accountid =28109. 9. Mel Gussow, “Sondheim Scores with ‘Company,’” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, New York Times, April 28, 1970, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/119005851?accountid=28109. 10. Ethan Mordden, One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 31. 11. Love, Ameri­can Style was an anthology television series that ran for five seasons on the Ameri­can Broadcasting Company, from 1969 to 1974. 12. Don Shirley, “Revisiting ‘Company’ of Days Past Original Cast, Creators of 1970 Musical Gather for Reunion Benefit,” Los Angeles Times, Janu­ary 25, 1993, http://search.proquest.com/docview/281865090?accountid=28109. 13. Sylvie Drake, “Weekend Reviews: Stage Civic Light Opera Turns Long Beach into a ‘Company’ Town Fit for Sondheim,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Los Angeles Times, Oc­to­ber 4, 1993, http://search .proquest.com/docview/282167794?accountid=28109. 14. Stacy Wolf, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ameri­can Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3. 15. Broadway.com, 2013, http://www.broadway.com, accessed May 1, 2013. 16. Richard Corliss, “Why Broadway Hates Stephen Sondheim,” Time, June 22, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1996260,00.html. 17. Bruce Kirle, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-­in-­Process (Carbondale: South­ern Illinois University Press, 2005), 12. 18. Masteroff had also contributed revisions to his book for Hal Prince’s unsuccessful 1987 Broadway revival starring Joel Grey. 19. For more on that production, see Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949–2009,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 2 (May 2012): 231–47. 20. For more on the controversy surrounding this production, see “The Culture at Large: Stephen Sondheim Takes Issue with Plan for Revamped ‘Porgy and Bess,’” Arts Beat (blog), New York Times, August 10, 2011, http://artsbeat .blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/stephen-­sondheim-­takes-­issue-­w ith-­plan-­for -­revamped-­porgy-­and-­bess, accessed March 24, 2013. 21. Quoted in Eric Grode, “Company Revival: It Won’t Have a ’70s Sound,” Sondheim Review 2, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 8. 22. Linda Winer, “Sondheim’s ‘Company’ Still the Best Kind,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Newsday, Oc­to­ber 6, 1995, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/278932797?accountid=28109. 23. Howard Kissel, “‘Company’ of Strangers Sorry Staging of Sondheim’s Urban Fave Might Play in Peoria,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and

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George Furth, New York Daily News, Oc­to­ber 6, 1995, http://www.lexisnexis .com/hottopics/lnacademic. 24. Clive Barnes, review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, quoted in “The Critics’ Views of the Company Revival,” Sondheim Review 2, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 6. 25. Vincent Canby, “Theatre Review: A Revival Both Familiar and New,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, New York Times, Oc­ to­ber 6, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/06/theater/theater-­review -­a-­revival-­both-­familiar-­and-­new.html. 26. Paul Taylor, review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, The Independent, De­cem­ber 15, 1995, http://search.proquest.com/docview/312424110 ?accountid=28109. 27. Jo Davies, “In Lon­don, Bobby and His Friends Are in the ’90s,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Sondheim Review 3, no. 3 (Winter 1996): 7. 28. Mike Billington, “First Night: Less Glitz, More Wit and Point,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, The Guardian, De­cem­ber 14, 1995, http://search.proquest.com/docview/294951005?accountid=28109. 29. Benedict Nightingale, “Find Bliss in Blisters,” review of Company by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, The Times, De­cem­ber 15, 1995, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/318522045?accountid=28109. 30. “Company—Donmar Warehouse 1996—Have I Got a Girl for You_ Someone is Waiting,” YouTube Video, 5:20, from a performance televised by BBC2 on March 1, 1997, posted by “cowfootman,” No­vem­ber 12, 2010, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mzAJs5WSEE. 31. Sondheim and Furth, Company, Ten Great Musicals of the Ameri­can Theatre, 690. 32. Sondheim and Furth, Company: A Musical Comedy, 70. 33. Meryle Secrest, Sondheim: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1998), 268. 34. Ibid., 371. 35. Charles Marowitz, Alarums & Excursions: Our Theatres in the Nineties (New York: Applause, 1996), 111. 36. Scott Miller, “Separate and Not Equal,” Ah, But Underneath: Deconstructing Steve (blog), Sondheim, http://www.sondheim.com/discussions/miller /past/equal.html, accessed April 25, 2013. 37. Stephen Citron, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber: The New Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 173. 38. Sondheim and Furth, Company: A Musical Comedy, 102–3. 39. Billington, “First Night: Less Glitz, More Wit and Point.” 40. See Company: A Musical Comedy, directed by John Doyle (2007; New York: Image Entertainment, 2008), DVD; and Company, directed by Lonny Price (2011; New York: Image Entertainment, 2012), DVD. 41. Kirle, Unfinished Show Business, 183. 42. Ibid., 12. 43. One obvious comparison point would be another text defined by a specific period of Ameri­can history—the counter-­culture rock musical Hair (music by

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Galt MacDermot and book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni). Hair opened at the Public Theater in 1967 and transferred to Broadway with a heavily revised book, a new director, and thirteen new songs on April 28, 1968. It ran for four years and 1,750 performances. 44. Rebecca Ann Rugg, “What It Used to Be: Nostalgia and the State of the Broadway Musical,” Theater 32, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 47. 45. M. J. Moore, “End of an Era,” Paris Review Daily (blog), The Paris Review, April 9, 2013, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/04/09/end-­of -­an-­era, accessed May 2, 2013. 46. “The Younger Generation,” Time 58, no. 19 (No­vem­ber 5, 1951), 46. 47. Although there is no absolute consensus, most sociologists categorize a generation as being born within an approximate twenty-­year time span. Members of the “greatest generation” were born during the first two decades of the twentieth century and are of­ten associated with World War II. Those in the Silent Generation were born between approximately 1925 and 1942 and are of­ten considered children of the Great Depression. The Baby Boomers were born approximately between 1945 and 1964. See William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069 (New York: Morrow, 1991). 48. “The Younger Generation,” Time, 48. 49. Ibid., 52. 50. Gerald Clarke, “The Silent Generation Revisited,” Time, June 29, 1970, 46, http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=4&sid=9db068f2 -­42a7-­4 306-­9 0d0-­0 b783f3b8c8f%40sessionmgr4001&hid=4109&bdata= JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=53803255, accessed Sep­ tem­ber 24, 2012, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost. 51. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 247.

Power in Weakness Musicals in Poland under Communism Jacek Mikolajczyk

O

n June 11, 1987, Pope John Paul II visited Gdynia, a major Polish port city by the Baltic Sea. Over 500,000 people assembled at Gdynia’s main square to meet him. A mass celebrated by John Paul II was broadcast all over the world. The government tried to undermine the importance of the event, but officials overlooked one important detail, which eventually contributed to its subsequent symbolic meaning. Adjacent to the square, there was a huge sign on the façade of the building of Gdynia’s Musical Theater advertising its most recent production. All over the world people saw pictures of the pope in the center of a city in communist Poland addressing a crowd beneath a string of large glittering letters spelling out the words “Jesus Christ Superstar!” This is how the world came to see that Broadway musicals were in fact being produced in the People’s Repub­lic of Poland.1 Arguably, few people would expect musicals to be produced in communist countries.2 Musicals are a uniquely Ameri­can genre, deeply rooted in an Ameri­can sys­tem of commercial theatre, and communist regimes were typically anti-­A meri­can. The government, having introduced proactive censorship after World War II, had all the means to control the culture in the country. Moreover, in the People’s Repub­lic of Poland there was no free theatrical market as all theatres were run by the state. If musicals were to make it to the stage, the government must have approved or at least tolerated the musical as a genre. The conundrum is why the government would allow and tolerate such productions. An answer to this question presents a paradox. The power of the musical in Poland resided in its weakness. Ameri­can musicals were staged in operetta theatres and, accordingly, they were regarded by the authori-

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ties and members of the theatre industry as a relic of the old days of nineteenth-­century operetta. This kind of theatre was tolerated only because of its popu­larity among less educated spectators, and it was largely scorned both by theatre artists and politicians. On the other hand, this is exactly why musical theatre artists sometimes had more artistic free­ dom than directors of more respected productions in dramatic theatres. Since musical productions seemed less serious, the government control was much less strict in their case. As it turned out, while resistance against the government grew and censors were increasing their pressure on dramatic theatre, there were far more productions that conveyed meaningful po­liti­cal attitudes in musical theatre. Interestingly, the musical genre was only introduced to Polish theatres because of the po­liti­cal change that accompanied the fall of the Stalinist dictatorship early in the history of communist Poland. In 1956, the so-­ called “Thaw,” announced in the Soviet Union by Nikita Khrushchev, coincided in Poland with both the death of Bolesław Bierut, a leader of the regional Communist Party, and the first mutiny of Polish laborers in Poznan´. Władysław Gomułka, one of the leaders of Polish communists during the 1930s, became the new First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party. His regime was much more liberal than the previous one. Censorship was loosened and culture in the country opened up to the West. Generally speaking, for eleven years following World War II, Poland was separated from the West; hence, it is not surprising to find Polish artists and consumers abruptly trying to catch up with recent developments in West­ern culture. In numerous theatres, plays by Beckett, Ionesco, and Sartre were staged, and the very availability of West­ ern works encouraged managers of operetta theatres to look around the world’s stages. In 1956, the Everymen Opera Company visited Warsaw with their production of Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin. It was probably the first visit of an Ameri­ can theatre group in Poland, and both audience and critics welcomed it as a sensational event. In the following year, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate opened at the Comedy Theatre in Warsaw.3 This first production of the Ameri­can musical sparked a veritable wave of Broadway musicals opening in Poland as Polish artists tried to catch up on their long backlog. However, that first experiment with Ameri­can material was not particularly momentous, as not a single theatre critic noticed that anything had changed in Polish musical theatre. There were no reviews of the production. In the following year just one critic mentioned it, recalling ironically that the Polish version of Porter’s musical “looked like a beggar’s play, imitating millionaires.”4 At first, musicals were regarded as an Ameri­can form of the operetta and they were staged exactly in this mode, as spec-

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tacular and kitschy revues. Other musicals by Cole Porter were produced, and Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady even turned out to be a modest commercial success in Poland. Only in 1970, when Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion, and Mitch Leigh’s Man of La Mancha was produced in the Silesian Operetta in Gliwice, did it turn out that musical performance could be successful not only as a form of entertainment, but as a serious artistic event too. Also, it could function as a commentary to important current po­liti­cal events. Indeed, it was a triumph. A picture of Stanisław Ptak as Don Quixote was on the cover of Teatr magazine, the most important theatre journal in Poland, the only instance in Poland’s history when a musical play was so highlighted.5 Mieczysław Daszewski directed the show, and it was his approach that made its success possible. First and foremost, Daszewski as a director had been staging mainly dramas, and for him Man of La Mancha was merely a play that demanded a serious approach. This kind of thinking was not common among operetta directors, who in general did not care much about anything apart from spectacular theatrical effects in the show. However, what was most important was the content, the message of Man of La Mancha. It was a musical about totalitarianism, about the enslaving of a man by a state, and about his struggle to preserve independence when confronted by a cruel and ruthless state. It is not surprising that this type of subject electrified audiences in a country that was subjected to Stalinist dictatorship just a dozen years earlier and still far from democracy. In 1970, the year of Man of La Mancha’s opening, there were fierce riots and clashes between workers and police in Gdan´sk, during which forty-­one people died and more than 1,000 were injured. The struggle for workers’ rights in Gdan´sk found a counterpart in Gliwice, a similar working-­class region, where the audience could visit a theatre to see a musical about a solitary man fighting against a cruel regime to reclaim his personal free­dom. It was an early example of so called “allusive theatre,” in which seemingly innocent content in a broader social or po­ liti­cal context revealed its highly charged po­liti­cal message, full of allusions to current po­liti­cal issues. In the 1970s and the 1980s, allusive theatre was a popu­lar strategy of bypassing censorship in Poland. The very fact that the po­liti­cal situation in Poland was indirectly criticized from the musical theatre stage was surprising, if not shocking. When Man of La Mancha was performed in Warsaw on the stage of the National Theatre, Zdzisław Sierpin´ski, a critic of Polish daily paper Z˙ ycie Warszawy, wrote: “Finally! It turns out, that you can visit an operetta house not being forced to watch any gaga counts, stupid dukes or sheikhs of non-­existing countries; that you can listen to beautiful music and well-­performed songs, being moved by the main character’s misfor-

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tunes; that you can simply watch well-­danced dance and decent theater, and at the same time realize that the plot of a commercial production may even contain deeply humanistic content.”6 In 1970 the generalized description of “deeply humanistic content” would have to do; the readers had to sketch in the real meaning of this phrase by themselves. And most likely, they did. Interestingly enough, in the 1970s, when social disturbances settled down in Poland and the country under the leadership of Edward Gierek stepped into a short period of economic prosperity, Ameri­can musicals almost disappeared from Polish stages. Only a few new shows were performed, and none of them gained broader acclaim. In this period critics proposed a new direction in the evolution of the musical in Poland, postulating the promotion of native Polish musical theatre. In particular, in the Musical Theater in Gdynia many origi­nal shows were performed, and some critics even nicknamed it the National Polish Musical Theater. It was Gdynia where Kole˛da-­Nocka (Carol Singing Night) opened, the most po­liti­cal musical production in the history of theatre in Poland under communism. Carol Singing Night premiered on De­cem­ber 20, 1980. The opening night was scheduled just a couple of months after the biggest wave of anti-­government protests in the history of the People’s Repub­lic of Poland. In August 1980, there was a major strike in the Vladimir Lenin Shipyard in Gdan´sk, followed by fierce protests through­out Poland’s largest cities. The government was coerced to sign the so-­called Gdan´sk Agreement, which enabled the establishment of the first independent labor union called Solidarity. It marked a short period of elation and relative free­dom in Gdan´sk and the neighboring city of Gdynia. It gave people hope that po­liti­cal change was possible. This was exactly what the creative team of Carol Singing Night wanted to convey in their performance. They used the structure of a traditional Polish nativity play, presenting on the stage a number of characters representing different social ranks in Poland. It was a fleeting moment in which the nation awoke from decades of sleep. There were many recognizable symbols on the stage, in­ clud­ing shipyard cranes, representing the region in which the play was set, and scenes illustrating a brutal and bloody quelling of labor protests in Gdan´sk in 1970. The play’s final scene became famous in Poland. The scene depicted angels attempting to fly but prevented from doing so by the fact that the actors were equipped with only one wing each. Additionally, a featured song, “The Psalm of People Waiting in a Line,” became one of the biggest popu­lar hits in Poland; members of opposition parties of­ten sang it as their unofficial anthem there.

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The production was one of the biggest successes in the history of Polish musical theatre. Buses with spectators traveled to Gdynia from all regions of Poland. Demand for tickets was so vast that a special distribution sys­tem was introduced. Some of the Gdan´sk’s labor union leaders watched the performance, among them Anna Walentynowicz. In 1981 the production was performed in Warsaw. The audience featured a study in diversity of backgrounds. Crowded into the theatre were workers of the biggest mutinied mills, as well as the most important fig­ ures of Polish art and academic communities, and even members of the diplomatic corps. Despite their varied backgrounds, audience members responded to the performance unanimously—the standing ovation lasted for twenty-­t hree minutes. Krystyna Pron´ko, who sang “The Psalm” mentioned above, became a star of the Polish popu­lar music scene almost overnight.7 It is worth stressing that Carol Singing Night was only one attempt to deal with the events that took place in 1980 by contemporary Polish theatre. It was not coincidental that it shared the fate of the movement, the ideas of which its creators had tried to convey. In De­cem­ber 1981, Martial Law was declared in Poland, marking an end to the period of relative free­dom. The local government in Gdan´sk was ordered to destroy the decorations of the production in order to prevent its restaging in the future.8 The executive director of the Musical Theater was fired, and the theatre fell into a period of deep crisis. It survived mainly thanks to efforts by Jerzy Gruza, a popu­lar Polish TV director, who in 1983 was appointed as a new executive and artistic director of the Musical Theater in Gdynia. During his tenure, he initiated a period of the biggest triumphs of Broadway musicals in communist Poland. However, it is worth noting that in the 1980s, after the muting of the Solidarity movement, the function of the Ameri­can musical in Polish society had changed. In these new conditions, in which the country was immersed in stagnation and apathy and the government regained full control over society, linking the productions directly to politics became impossible. On the other hand, it turned out that the musical could fit perfectly into frames of the new official cultural politics, and many artists managed to seize this opportunity. In the 1980s, communists introduced many popu­lar genres to Poland, in­clud­ing cheap Holly­wood movies designed as a diversion. The intention was to distract people from participating in native cultural activities propagated in the works of the most acclaimed Polish artists—movie and theatre directors, among others—­who supported the Solidarity movement and contested the regime. Tired of the monotony of the 1980s, people welcomed the

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new repertoire. However, it is also worth stressing that artists like Gruza were able to sneak the their own message into their commercial productions, of­ten challenging assumptions of the official state ideology. The production of Fiddler on the Roof in 1984 was Gruza’s first huge success. The musical had its Polish premiere in 1983 in the Musical Theater in Łódz´, but it was Gdynia’s production that was acclaimed by the critics and welcomed by broad audiences all over Poland. Polish producers had been trying to obtain the rights to perform Fiddler on the Roof for several years, but this proved impossible, mainly due to problems of obtaining West­ern currency in Poland. West­ern agencies did not want to be paid in zlotys, which is why Broadway musicals almost completely disappeared from Polish stages during the 1970s. Eventually, the owners of the rights for Fiddler on the Roof agreed to a cashless transaction, channeling the royalties to the noble cause of preserving old Jewish cemeteries in Poland. Unfortunately, it turned out that all the money earned this way was enough to conserve only one Jewish grave.9 These kinds of problems were quite typical in musical theatres in Poland. For example, in 1986 Philip Morris sponsored the acquisition of the rights to My Fair Lady to make it possible to produce this musical in Gdynia. The company used that project as an occasion to advertise the Marlboro brand in Poland. The main cause of Fiddler on the Roof’s success in Gdynia was the fact that, at least according to contemporary theatre critics, it was the first production in Poland that could be compared to high West­ern standards of musical theatre. Lucjan Kydryn´ski, the most important Polish popu­ lar music and theatre critic, wrote about the performance, “It is the first Polish production among all I have seen in my life, that measures up to West­ern ones.”10 All the earlier musical productions in Poland were staged in operetta style, by singers, dancers, and members of the choir educated in classical singing and acting. Operetta singers, who possessed limited acting abilities in many cases, of­ten could not create plausible theatrical characters, and yet were cast in leading roles. The first Polish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Łódz´, mentioned above, was performed exactly in this style. However, Gruza based his production mainly on the film adaptation of the musical, creatively developing solutions proposed by its authors. As a result, Marc Chagall’s motifs were visible in the scenography, and the choreography was designed in the style of the movie. The staging was praised for its picturesque stage design and the authenticity of reconstructing Jewish rituals. Gruza invited Jan Szurmiej, acclaimed actor of the Jewish Theater in Warsaw, to his production, and Szurmiej eventually became its codirector. His choreography, especially in crowd scenes,

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marked a kind of model for Fiddler on the Roof’s staging in Poland. There were no operetta singers in the cast, only actors skilled in singing. The rigid classification within the company into choir, ballet, and singers was abandoned, which gave an impression that the performance was unified and fully professional. As a result, Fiddler on the Roof proved popular with audiences and the decision to base it on the film version turned out to be a clever choice. After forty years of communism, people in Poland craved anything related to West­ern popu­lar culture. Gruza managed to attract completely new audiences to his theatre. There were no operetta theatres in Gdynia, and he had to appeal to young people, accustomed to popu­lar rather than classical music. While Fiddler on the Roof fulfilled the expectations of a young audience, it was the production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1987 that confirmed that there was a fully professional musical theatre in Gdynia. This time Gruza’s approach was quite origi­nal and his production was praised as creative and unique. Curiously enough, it was possible partly because of serious issues with copyrights that Gruza had to overcome. He had no rights to the Polish premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar, but only to its sec­ ond production. Unfortunately, after months of rehearsals, it turned out that Maciej Englert, who was planning the Polish premiere in Warsaw, canceled his production and expected Gruza to do the same. However, Gruza decided to perform the musical as an “open rehearsal,” an outline of the final production.11 It started as a trick, but soon he realized that it was actually an interesting approach to this material. Therefore, Jesus Christ Superstar was staged with sparse décor. The actors, with some exceptions, wore their everyday clothes instead of costumes, and the musical was performed as an experiment that attempted to tell the story of Jesus Christ by the means of rock music and rudimentary props. Gruza also invited real Polish rockstars to be in the cast, namely Marek P ­ iekarczyk from the rock band TSA and Małgorzata Ostrowska from Lombard. All these combined elements helped to create a very authentic, although quite rough, version of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical. Moreover, this production was largely conceived as a manifestation of passive resistance against the regime in Poland. In Catholic but communist-­governed countries such as Poland, the combination of religious content (although drawn in a very unorthodox way) and post-­ hippie aesthetics had a huge impact on the audience. Gruza, taking advantage of the government’s policy to try to lull the people by opening the country to the influence of West­ern popu­lar culture, achieved two goals. First, he produced the musical production that was a dream of most Polish directors of his generation. Second, he simultaneously sent his audience a message, and a subversive one at that, when viewed in the

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context of communist Poland. Of course, Jesus Christ Superstar was as successful as Fiddler on the Roof, and the production toured the biggest theatre and music venues in Poland, selling out everywhere. Thanks to these two productions, the theatre run by Jerzy Gruza became known as “Broadway by the Baltic Sea.” Moreover, the 1980s was a period of perpetual crisis in Polish theatre, and, in this context, the Musical Theater in Gdynia became one of the most important and interesting cultural institutions in the country. It was praised not only by Polish critics and theatregoers but even West­ern producers, who recognized Gruza’s theatre as meeting most of their professional standards. In 1989, Cameron Mackintosh signed the contract with the Musical Theater in Gdynia, allowing it to produce an origi­nal version of Les Misérables. It was the first and last such case in the history of musical theatre in Poland; all other musical productions were non-­replica shows. Cases examined in this essay in no way prove the point that musical theatre in Poland under communism played a major po­liti­cal role. It was neither a tool for direct critique of the regime nor a means for open expression of a general social mood. Instead, my intention is to outline a very specific and paradoxical situation. Within the po­liti­cal system, one that effectively negated commercial theatre as a whole and pushed it into the margins of artistic life, the same commercial theatre was surprisingly able to prove its importance, relating to the social mood and presenting content that would seem to be difficult to find there. In each case, relating to the social mood was quite different in character. In Man of La Mancha it took shape as allusive theatre; in Carol Singing Night it changed into theatre directly engaged in po­liti­cal activity. In his productions Gruza offered his audience the world contrasted with the gloomy reality of the 1980s, deep humanistic values wrapped as a product of popu­lar culture. Those kinds of approaches laid a solid base for the future development of the musical in Poland after overthrowing communism in 1989. Thanks to that approach, in the 1990s the musical in Poland was regarded as a relatively noble genre, a product of high culture.

Notes 1. Sławomir K itowski, “Jesus Christ Superstar—20 lat mine˛ ło,” Gazeta Wyborcza—­Trójmiasto, June 11, 2007, http://www.e-­teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/40303 .html, accessed May 6, 2013. 2. Actually, it would be surprising even for some Polish critics or scholars. Both the musical and commercial theatres are not very popu­lar subjects of academic research in Poland. There are only a few books published on the musical, and only one of them describes the history of musical in Poland (Jacek Mikołajczyk, Musical nad Wisła˛. Historia musicalu w Polsce w latach 1957–1989

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[Gliwice: Gliwicki Teatr Muzyczny, 2010]). Most Polish critics seem to recognize only musicals produced after 1989 as the beginning of the musical in Poland. 3. Małgorzata Komorowska, Kronika teatrów muzycznych PRL (Poznan´ : Poznan´skie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, 2003), 91; “Teatr w Polsce—polski wortal teatralny,” http://www.e-­teatr.pl/pl/index.html, accessed May 6, 2013. 4. Jerzy Waldorf, “Gdziez˙es´, o podkasana?,” S´ wiat 24 (1962): 15. 5. The cover appeared on Teatr 12 (1971). 6. Zdzisław Sierpin´ski, “Udany Człowiek z La Manchy,” Z˙ ycie Warszawy 95 (1971): 6. 7. Joanna Prosin´ ska-­Giersz, “Pastorałka, która przemieniła sie˛ w pasje˛,” Rzec­zpospolita, De­cem­ber 23, 2000, http://archiwum.rp.pl/artykul/315940 -­Pastoralka-­ktora-­przemienila-­sie-­w-­pasje.html, accessed May 6, 2013. 8. Joanna Prosin´ska-­Giersz, “Pastorałka, która przemieniła sie˛ w pasje˛ .” 9. Tomasz Raczek, “Dom dla Albertynki,” Polityka 12 (1985): 8. 10. Lucjan Kydryn´ski, “Teatr Muzyczny w Gdyni: Skrzypek na dachu,” Przekrój 2101 (1985): 9. 11. Barbara Harasimowicz-­Waliszewska, “Przebój sezonu,” Polityka 26 (1987): 11.

The Recent Trend in Licensed Broadway Musicals in South Korea Hybrid Cultural Products of K-­Drama and K-­Pop Jae Kyoung Kim

T

he mass-­industrialized musical companies from Broadway and the West End have already encroached on the world theatre market with their megamusical productions filled with flashy dance numbers and thrilling spectacles. As a result of expansion overseas by these West­ern companies, Asians, like New Yorkers and Lon­doners, can easily attend popu­lar mega-­productions at local theatre venues. These global musical “McTheatres,” a term coined by Dan Rebellato, make a profit on their origi­nal productions in foreign countries in two ways: either by dispatching their international tour troupes for a short-­run show or by selling licenses to foreign production companies for a long-­run show. South Korea (hereafter, Korea) has been seen as a lucrative market for Broadway hit megamusicals, in­clud­ing not only Ameri­can musicals but also European musicals that became Broadway hits. The performances of inter­national tour productions, by showcasing ready-­made productions to Korean audiences, provide an almost one-­way cultural flow, which has been considered an undesirable intercultural exchange by some scholars, in­clud­ing Rustom Bharucha and Patrice Pavis.1 On the other hand, the licensed Broadway musicals (hereafter, licensed musicals) have triggered a hybrid intercultural adaptation controlled primarily by the performances of Korean actors, though considering this intercultural flow to be a good example of a two-­way intercultural exchange is also debatable. While the traditional characteristics of megamusicals are described as “a sung-­t hrough score with no spoken dialogue, lavish and complicated sets, and an extremely emotional, larger-­t han-­life plot,”2 star casting has become indispensable in licensed megamusicals in Korea. Star casting has created a new phenomenon in the domestic musical industry, owing to

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its correlation with Korean popu­lar entertainment, especially K-­drama (Korean television drama) and K-­pop (Korean pop music). In light of these developments in Korean popu­lar culture, this paper examines the cast, target audience, and publicity of Broadway musicals that are reproduced as licensed musicals in Korea. Within a context of commercialism and capitalization, I maintain that although the licensed musicals in Korea have promptly evolved from theatre to popu­lar show and media business, they still need to build their own aesthetic territory, and move beyond star casting and the strictures of the origi­nal creators. The licensed musicals in Korea refer to a set of West­ern musicals, which are produced and performed by Koreans. These productions of­ ten get technical assistance from origi­nal creative teams in the West, but they are mostly performed by Koreans with translated Korean lyrics. Korea’s musical industry, with licensed musicals at its center, has achieved rapid growth as a major entertainment player, and the preferences of Korean audiences have had a decisive effect on the marketing strategy of these licensed musicals. The Korean cultural phenomenon described as h­ allyu (translated as the Korean Wave in reference to recent success across entertainment industry platforms) is essential to explaining the use of K ­ -­drama and K-­pop stars, who are mostly young and attractive, in l­icensed musicals. Jekyll and Hyde (2004) and Catch Me If You Can (2012), both successful cases of star marketing, are typical of this trend.3 These two productions sold out more quickly than other better-­k nown licensed musicals (e.g., The Lion King, Aida, Mamma Mia!, Chicago, and Cats) because they featured powerful male stars rather than experienced en­sembles. That this phenomenon appears more of­ten in licensed musicals than in origi­nal domestic musicals shows that the rapid commercialization of licensed musicals, boosted by the popu­larity of K-­drama and ­K-­pop, is the primary cause of the gap between licensed musicals and origi­nal domestic musicals. Indeed, if the licensed musical is ever to embrace a more diverse audience, star casting needs to be supplemented by adding more creative and aesthetic contents.

A Brief History of the Licensed Musical Industry in Korea The history of the licensed musical in Korea is roughly divided into two periods, before and after observance of the international license laws; from this point onward, the licensed musical has reshaped its character as gigantic, systematic, commercial, and international. Since 2000, the musical industry has accounted for roughly 50 percent of the profits of the performing arts industry in Korea, chiefly attributable to foreign musicals. Especially in recent years, the market for licensed musicals has

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grown remarkably. According to Kim Byeong-­suk of CJ Entertainment (CJ E&M), licensed musicals now account for 80 percent of the profits of the entire musical industry in Korea.4 Compared to the present success of the licensed musical industry, the first period was relatively immature and unsystematic. West­ern musicals were introduced in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s by a few domestic theatre artists who studied abroad. Prominent Ameri­can titles included Porgy and Bess (1962) and The Fantasticks (1973). Upon noticing the positive reception of Korean audiences, domestic artists rushed to translate and reproduce vari­ous musicals in the 1980s, though the quality of these productions was hardly comparable to the origi­nals. The main reason for this loss in quality was that they had to imitate Broadway musicals without the creative and technical know-­how that a license would provide. At the time, there was no well-­established national organization to guide license law or protect intellectual property in Korea. Accordingly, many theatre artists, striving to make a living, had no choice but to translate, adapt, and stage these musicals to the extent that their own producing ability permitted. Jesus Christ Superstar (1980), The Sound of Music (1981), Evita (1981), Guys and Dolls (1983), West Side Story (1987), and Les Misérables (1988) were all performed by domestic artists without the consent of the origi­nal creators. The international licensing laws for protecting overseas musicals have been tightened since 1995, when the Korean government joined the World Trade Organization, and especially since 1996, when copyright law acquired legal force. Around that time, Korean producers who thought that their past ignorance of copyright law had given West­erners a negative impression of the Korean musical market finally began to reshape the licensed musical market as a legitimate entertainment industry. Financial stability was a prerequisite for license acquisition, so domestic producers turned to large corporations for investment funding. One early example was when producer Seol Do-­y un attempted to premiere 42nd Street in 1996.5 Declaring that “the musical is an industry,”6 he produced this musical by combining the brains of the Broadway creative team with the money of Samsung and the labor of domestic performers. Acquiring a license at last gave Korean artists an official opportunity to learn the origi­nal team’s techniques and to produce musicals that could rival their origi­nal productions. On the other hand, under the license law, Korean artists began to be carefully controlled by origi­nal West­ern creators, who issued instructions for direction, choreography, stage design, and even marketing. As more and more Broadway hit musicals were introduced in Korea, the producers needed to upgrade the existing musicals by add-

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ing elements that made them more attractive to current musical fans. Brad Little, who has played the role of the Phantom in many countries, pointed out that younger audiences, usually women in their twenties, constitute the primary target audience in Korea: “The average age is twenty years younger here in Korea.”7 Therefore, producers had to adopt production and marketing strategies that would help them appeal to the specific tastes of this young, predominately female, audience. Under the strict regulation of the origi­nal creators, however, the producers were not allowed to change the content of a show. The major change the producers were able to make was in the casting. Therefore, the outcome of Korean producers’ attempts to reach young audiences was star marketing. Casting domestic stars, especially men, boosted the popu­larity of licensed musicals. This star marketing not only appealed to existing musical fans, who hoped to see something special, but also to musical novices, who were more accustomed to other forms of entertainment outside of musicals. Accordingly, when these audiences choose which musicals to see, many look to the casting rather than the creator, the music, the story, or even international fame. As a result, West­ern musicals that spotlight a single hero above the rest of the characters came to be considered as the best candidates for licensed musicals in Korea. At the center of this trend is the cultural phenomenon known as hallyu.

Licensed Musicals and Hallyu from K-­Drama to K-­Pop Hallyu refers to the international popu­larity of Korea’s broad spectrum of popu­lar culture, in­clud­ing, but not limited to, drama, film, and music. The late 1990s, the early stage of hallyu, saw the broadcasting of vari­ous Korean television dramas, which became big hits in Japan, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore.8 The popu­larity of K-­drama has contributed to the success of K-­films (Korean films). Since the majority of drama fans are women, their fandom is tied to the idolization of male stars. For example, when the K-­drama Winter Sonata was broadcast by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nippon Ho¯so¯ Kyo¯kai, NHK) in 2003 and 2004, Bae Yong-­joon, who played the role of Kang Joon-­sang, was idolized by many Japanese women, who nicknamed him “Yon-­sama” (“sama” is a Japanese suffix for addressing people much higher in rank). Furthermore, this popu­larity made Japanese women, who once “turned to blue-­ eyed Ameri­cans but never looked twice at a Korean,” generalize the image of Yon-­sama’s character to other Korean men and even seek out Korean men as boyfriends and husbands.9 As the demand of K-­drama and films has risen sharply beyond Korea, screen stars have introduced themselves through television programs and vari­ous events in other Asian countries.

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However, because their overseas schedules are irregular and reach a limited fan base, hallyu fans have taken to visiting Korea, where the dramas and films are made and their stars live. Under a well-­designed training system, many young K-­pop stars make their debuts as singers or dancers but subsequently train to become well-­ rounded entertainers. They might start as members of a young dance group, but once the group attains a certain level of popu­larity in the K-­ pop market, their management companies encourage each member to branch out to different entertainment industries, in­clud­ing variety television shows, television dramas, and films. This strategy might be described as “one-­source, multi-­u se”; indeed, according to former Vice Culture Minister Yoo Jin-­r yong, the development of hallyu “is not just a cultural phenomenon but is about the country’s economic future.”10 By crossing different genres and presenting new talents, K-­pop stars aim to provide new forms of entertainment to keep expanding their fan base. Accordingly, as a way of showcasing new talent, the stars have begun to perform on the musical stage in recent years. Unlike income from other parts of the entertainment industry, in­clud­ing television, music, and film, “income from theaters is limited by the number of seats, performances per week, and, most importantly, by the scarcity of saleable attractions, or products.”11 Stars’ appearance onstage has come to be an effective and “saleable attraction” in the musical industry. Attempting to appeal to the young generation, who are the primary musical consumers in Korea, the Korean musical industry, especially licensed musicals, has increasingly recruited K-­pop idols to star in its productions. Doing so benefits both the stars, who can mask their immature acting skills with their singing and dancing skills, and the producers, who can use the star power to advertise the shows and sell tickets. K-­pop stars also help licensed musicals attract foreign tourists to Korea. As a result, at many of the licensed musical shows in Korea, one can easily find not only young Korean fans but also Japanese and Chinese tourists in the audience. Two recent surveys conducted by the magazine The Musical demonstrate these fan trends. The first survey, which targeted a large group of Korean musical fans, confirms that many consumers of licensed musicals in Korea are young women whose primary goal is to see their favorite stars onstage.12 The survey also revealed that these young women, especially those who are single, would frequently become repeat patrons, returning to the theatre to watch a particular musical multiple times as long as their idols were performing. The sec­ond survey, completed by Japanese fans who watched musicals in Korea, not only confirms the findings of the first but also indicates some qualities of hallyu fans. Considering

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that 70 percent of the foreign visitors who watch domestic live shows (in­ clud­ing musicals) are from Japan, this survey, despite its small sample, represents a recent trend among foreign K-­musical fans. For this survey, the majority of respondents, who were women, watched licensed musicals, especially Mozart! (2010 and 2011) and Elisabeth (2012), specifically because they featured K-­pop star Kim Jun-­su (a member of boy group “JYJ”). Furthermore, most watched the same musical multiple times during a three-­or four-­day stay in Korea. Due in part to hallyu fans’ loyalty to Korean stars, more than half of the respondents commented that Korea’s licensed musicals were better than either Broadway musicals or Japan’s licensed musicals.13 In sum, the unusual love that foreign audiences have for Korean licensed musicals is difficult to explain without considering the casting of hallyu stars.

Jekyll and Hyde and Catch Me If You Can: From Actors to Idols Licensed musicals that feature K-­drama and K-­pop stars intensify sexual, emotional, and communal experience among young female fans. Several scholars and practitioners have attempted to use sexual metaphors to describe the experience of watching musicals; for example, the Broadway musical “offers us an emotional orgasm. . . . Its audiences are transformed as if they are being made love to.”14 Others have focused on the emotional and communal satisfaction that musicals provide to audiences. Richard Kislan defined musical theatre as romantic popu­lar theatre “if the audience smiles deeply as it leaves the theater, . . . less out of relief than out of recognition of a shared humanity experienced in a collective act of involuntary emotional response.”15 When K-­drama and K-­pop fans watch licensed musicals as fans of the same star, complete strangers can form a strong emotional bond. By viewing their idols live onstage, listening to their serenades, watching their acting, and finally applauding and screaming in response to their performance, audiences experience “a modern version of catharsis” that goes beyond age and nationality.16 This catharsis might be a unique experience that is difficult to achieve with other online and off-­line events. Two exemplary musicals, Jekyll and Hyde and Catch Me If You Can, demonstrate this tendency because of each show’s success in spotlighting a single male star. The licensed musical Jekyll and Hyde by Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse initiated star casting by helping Jo Seung-­woo make a successful transition from the screen to the stage. Jo had had a successful career as a movie star after debuting as the main character of Chunhyang (directed by Im Kwon-­taek) in 2000. Following his success in films in the

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early 2000s, when he began to appear on the musical stage, many of his movie fans headed to the musical theatre to see him live. Among many of Jo’s musical appearances, Jekyll and Hyde was the one that made him a musical star.17 Producing Jekyll and Hyde proved costly, but its unremarkable ticket sales on Broadway meant that it was also risky. Thus, recreating the main character Jekyll to focus on Jo’s starring role was a reasonable approach to attract domestic female audiences. At that time, Jo’s success onscreen as well as onstage was a rare phenomenon in the musical industry because television stars were cautious about crossing multiple genres, especially recorded film and live musical stage. Jo’s unusual success encouraged him to play the role of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde repeatedly between 2004 and 2011, interrupted by his mandatory military service from 2008 to 2010. When he returned from the military and reactivated his professional career in the 2010 production of Jekyll and Hyde, it produced a frenzy of fans who had waited for his comeback: an online reservation server crashed and the houses were sold out for all of Jo’s performances. On the last night of his comeback, May 11, 2011, he addressed the audience during the curtain call on his thoughts on his last performance. Considering the audience as regulars, he asked them to come back and see Jekyll and Hyde two or three more times, even though another actor would be playing the role. From his last request, it seems that everyone, in­clud­ing the audience, producers, other performers, staff, and Jo himself, implicitly agreed that this successful long-­run show was made possible by Jo’s loyal fans, who had watched the show multiple times. Jo’s performances in Jekyll and Hyde resulted in two phenomena in Korea’s musical industry. First, the success of the musical led to the unusual popu­larity of composer Frank Wildhorn’s music and his other musicals in Korea. For example, as the musical was adapted into a concert version, Jekyll and Hyde: In Concert, its origi­nal company dispatched a tour group for the concert to Korea from 2004 to 2007. In addition, in 2013, five of his musicals (Jekyll and Hyde, Rudolf—The Last Kiss, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Bonnie and Clyde, and Carmen) were onstage in Korea. As to why his musicals have been so popu­lar in Korea, Wildhorn responded that Korean audiences always have an open mind and love a “big melody,” just as he does.18 Other elements in­clud­ing epic plots, his­tori­ cal settings, and splendid sets in his shows also appeal to Koreans’ tastes. However, without Jo’s success, the concert tour might not have been possible; furthermore, without Jo’s appealing interpretation of the character Jekyll/Hyde, domestic producers would never have had enough courage to present Wildhorn’s other works in Korea. Second, since Jekyll and Hyde became a big hit, Jo’s performance fee has risen dramatically because casting him virtually guarantees the suc-

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cess of the show. Accordingly, the musicals Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2005, 2007, and 2008), Rent (2007), Man of La Mancha (2007), Zorro (2011 and 2012), and Doctor Zhivago (2012) were hits due to Jo’s enthusiastic performances. Hedwig and the Angry Inch was hugely popu­lar in spite of its mono-­drama structure, small stage, simple set, and relatively unfamiliar story about a transgender singer: every show sold out within ten minutes. Afterward, ticket brokers would sell tickets illegally at about seven times the origi­nal price. While many of Jo’s fans had no knowledge about this musical, they were eager to watch it because they wanted to see Jo’s transgender costume and makeup. As Carey Wall stated, “The star-­sys­tem makes us aware of the star as much as of the character; and in that stardom which brings applause at the first entrance on the stage, we see the self approved, magnified, validated.”19 Indeed, audiences were simply happy to see Hedwig played by their star, regardless of Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s origi­nal creators or its previous success. Rent had already enjoyed a long run in Korea beginning in 2000, but when Jo’s casting was announced in 2007, every ticket was sold out within twenty minutes and the official website crashed with the rush of requests.20 Because of his popu­larity with audiences, he was paid about four hundred million won (about 360,000 USD) for the show.21 At that time, even the most experienced musical star’s performance fee was no more than one hundred million won (about 80,000 USD). It was Jo who initiated the era of star casting in the domestic musical industry. In recent years, with the number of new hit shows in decline, star marketing has become a prerequisite condition to produce licensed musicals. Domestic production companies have even begun to cast K-­pop idols with no stage musical experience because they believe that doing so will transform domestic and foreign K-­pop fans into licensed musical consumers. As expected, whenever idols are cast in licensed musicals, their fans buy tickets and applaud their performances unconditionally. Furthermore, to maximize the effect of idol casting, producers have begun to cast multiple stars for the same major character. In doing so, production companies are following the demands of commerce rather than the standards of quality performance. The premiere of the licensed musical Catch Me If You Can (2012) clearly shows this trend. Although the origi­nal tour production of Wicked made its successful premiere in Korea in the same year, it was the licensed production of Catch Me If You Can that received the most media attention. The major reason for this was the unusual appearance of so many popu­lar stars. The production company M Musical cast five stars in the role of Frank, in­clud­ing Kyu-­hyun (a member of boy group “Super Junior”), Kim Ki-­bum (also known as Key, a member of boy group

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“Shinee”), Kim Jeoung-­hun (singer), Eom Gi-­jun (television actor), and Park Gwang-­hyeon (television actor). The production also cast a couple of female idols in the role of Brenda, in­clud­ing Dana (a member of girl group “The Grace”) and Sunny (a member of girl group “Girls’ Generation”), although, as the official musical poster shows, the publicity materials emphasized the male stars to appeal to the young female fans. This blatant marketing ploy proves that this musical was produced only for the star power it could wield. Furthermore, because five actors were playing the same role, K-­pop fanatics were willing to see the musical multiple times to see each actor perform live. As a result, many Japanese and Chinese tourists visited Korea to see this musical. Catch Me If You Can ran twice a day, six days a week from March 28 to June 10. Most shows do not have large enough audiences to fill matinee showings; however, Catch Me If You Can was exceptional because foreign tourists purchased mati­ nee tickets. The Musical editor Park Byeong-­seong commented on this unique situation: “Despite many people’s concerns about ticket sales for the matinee performances, every daytime performance drew a large audience because of foreign K-­pop fanatics who visited Korea to see their stars.”22 Based on data provided by Interpark, a major ticket-­selling website, more than 10 percent of tickets were purchased by foreigners.23 Catch Me If You Can showed a new trend in musical casting: channeling K-­pop popu­larity for maximum profit in ticket sales. Considering its relatively short run from March 28 to June 10, this multi-­casting for the main character was unusual. In the 1990s and 2000s, when production companies pursued star marketing, they usually cast one star with another experienced musical actor; these two actors would take turns playing the main character. For example, when Jo performed as Jekyll in 2004, the company double-­cast musical performer Ryu Jeong-­ han in the role of Jekyll. However, Catch Me If You Can broke the mold by having multiple idols in tow. Companies now cast multiple stars so that each group of fans competes with the other for greatest ticket power. At the same time, multi-­casting helps production companies accommodate the busy schedules of the most popu­lar idols. In addition, considering the huge performance fees that companies pay these stars, multi-­casting allows them to bring some less expensive performers into the mix. Despite these advantages of multi-­casting, many critics and other producers have not favored the production Catch Me If You Can. Among these five stars in the role of Frank, three were performing on the musical stage for the first time, and their performance onstage was the target of criticism by critics and practitioners. However, in my interview with Jang Won-­ suk of the Seensee Company, he observed that while pop idols who had never been trained in stage musical performance were below par, the au-

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diences were still very satisfied because their stars were on display. Catch Me If You Can will possibly remain the most commercial example of idol casting, and this type of casting will continue at least until the popu­ larity of hallyu shrinks. In licensed musicals, star casting of domestic performers is the defining characteristic; musical director Jo Yong-­sin says, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the development of the musical industry in the last decade corresponds to the development of casting.”24 Jang Won-­suk also commented that although star marketing is not a desirable phenomenon, ignoring the ticket power of star casting is difficult.25 As examples of hits that pander to stars’ fandom, Jekyll and Hyde and Catch Me If You Can demonstrate that star marketing in licensed musicals has evolved from spotlighting a single star to using multiple idols. This change also reflects the trend of hallyu, which started from a few charismatic actors of ­K-­drama and K-­film and then boomed to include many boy groups of K-­pop. The big shift in casting goes hand in hand with the increasing influence of hallyu on the popu­larity of Korea’s musical industry among foreign audiences. The result of putting hallyu stars live onstage is that licensed musicals have become a cultural product to increase tourism. While the casting of stars in licensed musicals produces profits in many fields, relying too much on star marketing raises a few issues. It could cause a power imbalance between stars’ management companies and musical producing companies and between stars and other performers. As Jo states, “Because of the significance of the cast, as in the film industry, the role of the casting director has become very important. Therefore, when musicals are produced, management companies of stars are in an advantageous position.”26 Furthermore, although each idol only appears onstage two or three times a week, the ensemble appears onstage every day. In the case of Catch Me If You Can, the ensemble had to perform twelve times a week. This tough schedule has also been criticized by performers because these relatively minor players deserve equal respect from the company. In addition to the huge cost of the licensing fee, stars’ high performance fee is also a major reason for the escalation of production costs and the inflation of ticket prices. Accordingly, without developing innovative licensed productions, the production companies are limiting their own theatrical creativity by confining themselves within a commercial framework. Furthermore, productions with high ticket prices but low artistic presentation make some audiences turn their backs on licensed musicals. Finally, many idols in licensed musicals rely on their “day jobs” in the entertainment business, not on their performances in musicals; thus, we are not sure how long these idols will be willing to perform onstage or how long their fans will

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be willing to visit musical theatre to watch their stars. Along with developing star casting, the licensed musical industry needs to research and develop other elements to survive.

Conclusion In recent years, licensed musicals in Korea have been developed as a major entertainment product, emphasizing commerciality and following the trends of hallyu in particular. Large companies that invest in the musical industry tend to treat the licensed musical as an extension of existing entertainment branches, in­clud­ing film, broadcasting, and music. Accordingly, young television stars have easily attained the chance to perform on the musical stage not because they want to be professional musical performers but because they need to please their fans by showing off their new talent. Idol casting has characterized licensed musicals in Korea by creating a new type of musical audiences, who purchased their first musical tickets just to see K-­drama and K-­pop stars and then became regular musical fans. While the popu­larity of licensed musicals among K-­pop fans has been a big advantage in expanding the domestic musical market abroad, we cannot ignore the side effects of idol casting, in­clud­ing high performance fees, low quality performances, and skepticism about its ongoing success. The licensed musical in Korea has become a part of big business. Accordingly, the close bonds between capital, star, and show business are hard to sever. Nonetheless, the commercial theatres that put on licensed musicals need to employ different tactics. Korean producers and performers still want to exert their own creative power. Simply following the meticulous directions and strict regulations of West­ern producers limits the aesthetic autonomy of Korean artists; at the same time, it elevates the cast as one of the few elements that distinguish Korean productions from West­ern productions.

Notes 1. Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Patrice Pavis, ed., The Intercultural Performance Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996). 2. Jessica Sternfeld, The Megamusical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 9. 3. Jekyll & Hyde, as a popu­lar production, has been staged of­ten since 2004, but this paper focuses on its first appearance in Korea. 4. Park Byeong-­seong, “Interview with Kim Byeong-­suk,” The Musical, no. 111 (De­cem­ber 2011): 48.

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5. In this paper, Korean names are presented in Korean order: last name followed by first name. I also use the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s romanization system, with a few exceptions: in the case of famous people, I have retained their familiar names even if they do not follow the romanization system. All translations from quotations and sources are my own, unless otherwise noted. 6. Seol Do-­y un, Hey, Mr. Producer (Seoul: Dahal Media, 2010), 81. 7. Brad Little, “Interview with Brad Little from The Phantom of the Opera,” The Musical, no. 113 (February 2013): 29. 8. Since early 2000, Hallyu has built a strong fan base not only in East Asian countries but also in South­east Asia, some parts of the Middle East, Europe, and North and Latin America. Brian Yecies and Shim Ae-­g yung. “Contemporary Korean Cinema: Challenges and the Transformation of ‘Planet Hallyuwood,’” Acta Koreana 14, no. 1 (2011): 2. 9. Norimitsu Onishi, “W hat’s Korean for ‘Real Man?’ Ask a Japanese Woman,” New York Times, De­cem­ber 23, 2004, http://w w w.nytimes .com/2004/12/23/international/asia/23JAPAN.html?_r=0, accessed Sep­tem­ ber 1, 2013. 10. Na Jeong-­ju, “‘One-­Source, Multi-­Use’ Strategy Will Boost Hallyu,” Korea Times, July 25, 2012, http://w w w.koreatimes.co.kr/w w w/news/nation /2013/03/181_115952.html, accessed Sep­tem­ber 1, 2013. 11. Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg, The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 7. 12. This survey, conducted by The Musical, collected 1,000 domestic responses from July 15 to July 22, 2012. “The Reality of Korean Musical Fandom” (Hangukmusicalpandomui silche), The Musical, no. 107 (August 2012): 93–96. 13. Park Byeong-­seong, “Survey: For the Visiting Musical Fans from Japan,” The Musical, no. 105 (June 2012): 50–55. 14. Martin Gottfried, Broadway Musicals (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 343. 15. R ichard Kislan, The Musical: A Look at the Ameri­can Musical Theater (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-­Hall, 1980), 174. 16. Robert Lawson-­Peebles, “Introduction: Cultural Musicology and the Ameri­can Musical,” in Approaches to the Ameri­can Musical, ed. Robert Lawson-­ Peebles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 4. 17. Jo’s early appearances in musicals (in­clud­ing origi­nal domestic and licensed West­ern musicals) include Blood Brothers (2000), Line 1 (2001 and 2006), The Last Empress (2001), The Sorrows of Young Werther (2002), and Carmen (2003). However, in these productions, Jo played less central characters than the ones he has played since Jekyll and Hyde. 18. Frank Wildhorn, “Interview with Frank Wildhorn,” Yonhap News, February 1, 2011. 19. Carey Wall, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” in Lawson-­Peebles, Approaches to the Ameri­can Musical, 31. 20. Park Myeong-­seong, Musical Dream (Seoul: Book House, 2009), 96. 21. Kim Seung-­mi, Full House Cases of Arts Management (Manwonsarye yesulgyeongyeonghak) (Seoul: Neulbom, 2008), 56.

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22. Park Byeong-­seong, “Prospects of the Musical Industry in 2013” (2013nyeon musicalgye jeonmang), The Musical, no. 112 (Janu­ary 2013), 47. 23. Park Byeong-­seong, “What Happened to the Musical Market in Korea in 2012” (2012nyeon musicalgyee eotteon ili), The Musical, no. 111 (De­cem­ber 2012), 46. 24. Jo Yong-­sin, “Prospects of the Musical Industry in 2013” (2013nyeon musicalgye jeonmang), The Musical, no. 112 (Janu­ary 2013), 48. 25. Jang Won-­suk, interview by the author, March 24, 2013. 26. Jo Young-­sin, “Prospects of the Musical Industry in 2013.”

Stages of Experience Theatrical Connections between the Seven Stages of Experience and His­tori­cal Museums Erin Scheibe

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is­tori­cal attractions and sites are increasingly theorizing ways to craft experiences for their guests and shape what society remembers about the past. Sandra Richards observes in her research about Ghana’s his­tori­cal tourism that “the project of memory, upon which travel to his­tori­cal sites or heritage tourism is built, raises other issues familiar to theater scholars. Like theater, memory is constructed through processes of selecting, repeating, forgetting—­willfully as well as unconsciously—and reassembling narratives”. 1 R ichards’s analy­sis of Af­ri­can slave castle tourism and how these sites construct memory may also be applied to other types of educational and commercial enterprises devoted to memorializing past traumas. With society’s increasing demand for entertainment, museums are searching for new ways to present information dynamically. Some museums offer experiences that are performance-­oriented and immersive. The Titanic Museum and Attraction in Branson, Missouri, implements theatrical techniques, offering tourists an entertaining, emotional, and informative experience. Throughout the process of visiting the museum, guests form memories that persist long after the experience ends. One method in the formation of memory was constructed by Disney designers. The method, called the 7 Stages of Experience, was created for the development of attractions and rides through­out their many parks. This method breaks down how an individual’s judgment and experience are formed, allowing architects to stage a person’s journey in a specifically organized direction. When analyzed, the 7 Stages of Experience can be applied to the Titanic Museum. The museum has carefully

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cultivated guest involvement, beginning with guests receiving a unique boarding pass representing a real passenger. By incorporating hands-­on activities and interaction with a cast of characters, tourists receive a true commercial performance experience, immersing themselves in the stories of their passenger, as well as those around them. By tracing a visitor’s journey through the Titanic Museum and Attraction, this paper dissects how the 7 Stages of Experience can be implemented within both commercial theatre and his­tori­cal museums. At their core, his­tori­cal museums and commercial theatres are built upon similar foundations. In the first chapter of their book Stage Money, Tim Donahue and Jim Patterson list some of the characteristics of commercial theatre: “1) Typically formed as a partnership or company to produce one play only and then disband. 2) A production is of­ten planned as an open-­ended run, playing for as long as ticket sales support it. 3) Box office results determine if a show runs. 4) Profits for investors are taxable; losses are deductible for the most part.”2 Using this definition as a foundation upon which commercial theatre is built, one could compare it to the business structure of a museum. Museums are constructed to accommodate the partnership of the owners with artifact collectors to share a specific incident in history. For example, the Titanic Museum collaborates with private collectors and the Titanic His­tori­cal Society to present the stories of passengers and crew members who were on board the ship. Museums are also produced to withstand long periods of time. As long as admission sales or donations are able to sustain life within the business, the museum remains open. In a similar realm, if an exhibit is able to boost the museum’s ticket sales, that exhibit will remain for a longer duration; if not, plans are made to present a new exhibit with intent to further profit. Profits from a museum are taxed accordingly and any losses are considered to be primarily deductible. Donations made by private collectors are also considered a deduction in taxes. At their core, however, both commercial theatre and museums aim to attract the masses. Perhaps, then, it is the responsibility of theatres and museums to provide a lasting experience for their guests in order to achieve commercial gain. With the current generational addiction to technology and immediate results, customers are expecting an expedited experience. Forrester Research and Consulting, a company specializing in the research of rapidly changing trends in customer service, suggests that companies begin reconstructing customer experience by measuring tactics and how well they are received, engaging with customers and deciphering strengths and weaknesses in practices, and, finally, managing new techniques in service.3 These techniques of­ten set the course for how

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theatrical and his­tori­cal experiences are formed for audience members and guests. The 7 Stages of Experience is one such technique. The 7 Stages of Experience, or 7 Stages, were designed to enhance and individualize guest experience. Placed on a visual structure, the 7 Stages of Experience would look similar to the literary Freytag Pyramid, beginning with the informing of an audience, rising to a climax and ending with a definitive conclusion. Bryan Campen identifies the 7 Stages of Experience:



1. Image: The pictures and preconceived notions the in­di­vidual has in his/ her head prior to the experience. 2. Embark on a Journey: The first impression and glimpses one has at the beginning of the experience. 3. Labyrinth: The bombardment of information channeled through the senses causing confusion and a sense of overwhelming. 4. Beacon: The first visual of “the light at the end of the tunnel.” 5. Payoff: The conclusion of the physical experience. 6. Reintegration: How one adjusts to leaving the experience and entering the norm of life again. 7. Memento: The emotional, psychological, and physical additions made to an individual’s life as a result of the experience.4

What attractions hope to achieve through these stages are in­di­v idual memories that will attach to people long after they leave, inspiring them to share their memories with others, inviting future consumers to partake in the experience, or spurring former guests to return in the future for a sec­ond passage. These stages can be used to shape the experience of a theatre patron before, during, and after their attendance at a theatrical performance. The first stage, Image, is analogous to the preconceived notions audience members may have formed from previous theatre experiences, posters, or other publicity as they prepare to see a show. Preconceived notions can of­ten be a determining factor in the decision-­making process for whether or not to attend a production or attraction. For attractions in Grenada, for example, this process of­ten involves specific choices in how destinations are portrayed in publicity. Velvet Nelson, a professor of tourism geography at Sam Houston State University, writes, “Tourism has been described as uniquely visual, and this visualization is a factor that is used for place promotion. Because it may be said that usually, the first contact a sightseer has with the sight is not the sight itself but with some representation thereof.”5 By carefully controlling the publicity surrounding a production or museum, businesses are able to regulate pub­ lic opinion from the start.

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In the theatre, previous experiences can have a large impact on how a person accepts a new idea or concept. If people have had a negative experience, perhaps having attended a mediocre production, they might have developed a negative response to the play in general. In order to impact audience response, some theatres are reaching out to communities before they attend the play. For instance, the Woolly Mammoth theatre in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., is one of several theatres to use newer advertising techniques. In a recent production of In the Next Room or the vibrator play, by Sarah Ruhl, Woolly media manager Alli Houseworth began a conversation via social media in connection with the play. Houseworth encouraged Twitter users to tweet about their secret desires and thoughts surrounding the themes of sex, fantasy, and fetish within the play. While the topic seemed scandalous, the conversation sparked interest in the production, causing it to become the highest-­grossing in-­house play in the thirty-­year production history of the theatre.6 The Twitter conversation clued potential audience members in on the themes within the play, causing them to attend it with preconceived expectations planted by the theatre itself. Within the Titanic Museum, visitors also have preconceived notions upon entering the museum. Many employees are asked questions such as, “Well, what is this place? A show?” or “So, what do you do here?” This expectation stems from the physical environment in which the museum is placed. Branson is a town built around entertainment. Shows of a wide variety are offered to tourists each year and many people expect to be entertained through­out the duration of their visit. They assume that the massive ship in the middle of Branson is also a show. In addition, guests come aboard with a certain level of knowledge about the Ti­ tanic’s tragedy. These expectations can influence attitudes as guests prepare for their visit to the museum Similar to theatregoers, museum guests of­ten depend on previous experiences to inform their expectations of a visit to the Titanic Museum. Many times a crew member will hear, “I went to this exhibit in Vegas and I thought this was gonna be like that, but it wasn’t at all!” Another previous experience that affects a guest’s visit is the 1997 movie Titanic. In some cases, the movie inspires guests to come to the museum; however, it also sets a standard for what they want to see. They expect to find out something about the characters of Jack and Rose, they expect to see the Grand Staircase, and they have notions from the movie of events that occurred on the ship.7 Finally, there are images that create a feeling of expectation for guests when they come to visit the museum. Guests around Branson see commercials, billboards, posters, and brochures that create an expectation when they visit the museum. Janie and Jamie, two

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first-­class maids aboard the Titanic, also shape expectations with appearances in commercials and events around town. Guests visit the museum expecting to see the Grand Staircase they have seen depicted on the museum’s website, and to hold the fictional Heart of the Ocean diamond, made so famous by the movie. These expectations set the stage for how guests approach their journeys. Stage Two, Embarking on the Journey, is one of the most important. It is the first time audience members have the chance to engage relationally to a performance. Humans are wired to judge the aesthetics of their surroundings, and in the theatre a journey can start with the simple state of the building. Embarking on the journey is also an important stage in the guest experience at the Titanic Museum. Terri Tucker, the training coordinator for the museum, insists that these first impressions are the most important in a visitor’s memory.8 Like a lobby display in a theatre, the building itself provides a gateway to this his­tori­cal experience. The building is a replica of the front portion of the Titanic. Upon entering the admission line, the patrons are informed that the building has been built to half-­scale, meaning that it is half the size of half the ship. This immediately gives them an idea about the size and grandeur of the real vessel and allows them to begin the journey with an understanding of the actual voyage. The key to the experience is human contact. Guests are immediately greeted by a maid or an officer standing at the ready to give them a boarding pass and kindly guide them to the appropriate line for their party.9 This human contact begins the individualized journey for the passenger. Richard Chase and David Tansik suggest that in such high-­contact areas of commerce, businesses should strive for effectiveness rather than efficiency.10 At venues such as a museum where immersive experiences are encouraged, meaningful contact with guests can be far more beneficial to commercial gain than encouraging employees to overcrowd a tour. The same can be said of a theatre trying to determine main-­stage versus black-­box seasons when arguing quantity of people versus intimacy of show. Patrons receive their own version of a program with their boarding passes. Boarding passes are quite unique in that each pass contains the story of a passenger who was actually on board the ship. Guests are encouraged to pay close attention as they travel through the exhibits because they “might just see their passenger somewhere on board.”11 This gives passengers an anchor to hold onto as they navigate through the museum. Cary Carson, retired vice-­president for the research division at Colonial Williamsburg, insists that stories are one of the most powerful media a museum has in its possession.12

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Similar to theatre audiences being allowed a glimpse of an exposed set or the mystery of a closed curtain, museum patrons are given an impression of the “stage” inside the museum, through the physical building. As they wait to process through admissions, visitors are introduced to the grandeur of the ship’s size through the entrance. Hung on the ceiling of the lobby is a giant propeller that is the same size as the smallest of the Titanic’s three propellers. To their right is a mural comparing the length of the Titanic to the height of famous buildings, statues, and monuments from around the world. These small pieces of information are only the introductory elements that a guest is exposed to before entering the attraction they are about to experience. Within the Titanic Museum and Attraction, guests become quite engrossed in the ship’s experience during Stage Three, appropriately labeled the Labyrinth. The museum is laid out to tell a story. The Labyrinth of the Titanic Museum begins with the first rooms, where guests are introduced to the people and places integral to the building and planning of the ship. As they travel through the many exhibits of the museum they are guided through the classes of the ship. Passengers travel through the boiler room, where men toiled to keep the fires going and the ship moving, through third class, where guests experience the tight quarters and dim sparse hallways, and to the Grand Staircase, the halfway point in their journey. Guests embark up the stairs where they traverse through first-­class staterooms, the dining salon, Marconi room, and the Captain’s bridge. The movie theatre allows guests to watch the only video footage ever taken of the Titanic and travel through the timeline of the disastrous night. Each room is filled with large amounts of information. Guests are encouraged to listen to the audio players provided during the admission process, giving them even more insight to the museum. Additionally, there are knowledgeable cast members and characters strategically placed through­out the museum. Terri Tucker stresses that it is human contact that elevates a visitor’s venture from good to unforgettable.13 Cast members deliver speeches or simply interact with guests, pointing them in the direction of their passengers, or telling them stories about the events and people on board. Bombarded by information as well as the knowledge of what took place that night, guests begin to connect with the passengers personally. By the time they reach the timeline room, guests are so connected they may need an emotional release. The buildup of energy can cause confusion and frustration in individuals as they feel surrounded by all sorts of information with little way to process it. Gary L. Hunter, professor of marketing at Illinois State University, describes this pivotal moment of experience as information overload.14 Many guests become attached to specific pieces of the museum

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as an outcome in order to stay grounded: their character, the trade of a passenger, experiences on board, and the mechanics of the ship, among other things. This personal connection can be formed by the passenger’s sense of self-­efficacy, their belief in their ability to process information.15 By connecting with something they personally understand, passengers are able to create a foundation and a “home” for retention. This journey is comparable to an audience member’s experience through­out the rising action of a play. Theatrically, the Labyrinth can have a similar effect on audience members as it does museum visitors. As the performance begins, the audience is introduced to characters, plots, information, and, of course, language. Trying to sort through all of this can be quite the challenge for audience members. They become caught up in what is going on and may feel overwhelmed by the story. In an attempt to sort through the chaos of a performance, many individuals will focus on a singular aspect of the play. This begins the unique experience for each person. They follow one character, or one plot that relates to emotional linkage, something they can connect to and empathize with. In the Punchdrunk production of Sleep No More, audience members are given masks that integrate them into the performance. Throughout their journey in the production, audience mem­bers choose a character or plot to follow within the story of Macbeth and watch the performance from that particular perspective.16 With such an immersive experience, onlookers are also provided a place of sanctuary, a hotel bar, where they can release tension by shifting their focus from being a part of the story to interacting with the world around them. Like the climax of a play, Stage Four is the Beacon, where visitors glimpse the end of the journey.17 The Interactive Room is a place for guests to engage in hands-­on experiences in the ship. However, it holds a much more important value for guests in that it is a chance to release energy that has built up through­out their time at the museum. Guests are encouraged to attempt Morse code on a computer as well as on a his­ tori­cal Marconi machine, walk the decks of the ship at vari­ous inclines calculated to simulate different points during the ship’s sinking, sit in a full-­size lifeboat, and feel the cold of the twenty-­eight-­degree water. This room offers the guests a mental break for the first time since entering the museum. They are able to process the immense amounts of information they have collected. Some of the experiences within the interactive room allow for physical connections to the night the Titanic sank. Cary Carson explains in her article on history museums that the tactile activities allow patrons to connect education to fun.18 Imagery processing such as this allows an in­di­vidual to retain an event or piece of information by attaching one of the senses to a piece of information. This process trans-

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forms information from the abstract to the concrete.19 By being able to process this information the guests will not feel so overwhelmed when they enter the next stage, the memorial room of the museum. In studies of schema structure, students in learning environments expect specific aspects of plots when reading stories.20 This expectation is seen in Stage Five, the Payoff. In this stage, audience members expect to be presented a conclusion within the story they are seeing. Once the play concludes, the physical experience is over. However, the emotional and psychological experience continues. At this point the audience receives the play that has been presented and begins to determine what it means and why it was interpreted that way. Is it relevant? In short, the audience’s job has begun. Similar to the conclusion of a play, passengers expect to see a conclusion to their stories on board the Titanic. The same is true with a museum, attraction, or production. After the cognitive release of the interactive room, guests enter the memorial room and the fifth stage of their journey, the payoff. This room is designed to bring honor to the people on board the ship. This is also where the guests find out the fate of the passenger on their boarding pass that they have come to know so well. On the wall are four glass plates, and each one is dedicated to a class that was on board the ship: first, sec­ond, third, and crew. Each plate has the names of all the passengers on them. If the names are underlined, they survived; if they are not, they perished during that fateful night. This room signals the conclusion of the story they have witnessed. As the 100th anniversary of the sinking approached, the museum decided to involve guests in a ceremony to honor the passengers of the Titanic. Each guest was given a rose petal and invited to take part in a ceremony that mirrored the actual anniversary tribute in which the Coast Guard released rose petals where the ship sank. By taking part in this ceremony, guests were able to pay tribute to the passenger on their boarding pass and also personally play a part in the story of the Titanic. The payoff of the rose petal ceremony and the discovery of their passenger’s fate allow museum guests to have personal closure to their experience. In Stage Six, Reintegration, guests begin the process of reentering the world around them as they leave the memorial room. The final room of their journey displays photographs and a video detailing the discovery of the sunken Titanic in 1985. This room provides hope, as it tells the final installments of how the stories and the memories of the people have been preserved on the ocean floor. It also offers a shock of reality for guests. Guests discover the realities of where the ship lies, the state it is in, and how the people of the world were truly affected by the tragedy. This room leads to the Grand Staircase, where the guests descend one

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last time through the dream that was the Titanic. As they descend they catch a glimpse of the gift shop, which leads them out of the world of the Titanic and back into the world of today. In the theatre, this could be compared to the curtain call, where audience members are reminded that actors merely represent their characters but do not become them. As the physical experience at the museum ends and the guests begin their journeys home, the Final Stage, Memento, describes what the guest takes with them as they leave. In the theatre, patrons may keep their program or ticket as a reminder of their journey through a story. At the museum, guests might go through the gift shop, choosing items that bring them joy and a reminder of what they saw inside the museum. Some hold onto their boarding passes, having connected with their passengers and not wanting to forget their story. Others attach themselves with cast members and ask for photographs so they may remember their visit to the museum. The most important memento that encourages guests to recommend the Titanic experience is the psychological memento. In the theatre, these kinds of memories can result in the sharing of a good or bad review. Within the museum, as guests leave it is the emotional and mental connection that will compel them to share their experience. By sharing their journey through word of mouth, others may feel compelled to go and experience the story of the Titanic for themselves. As in the theatre, word of mouth is the most powerful tool. A vicious critic can deter a person from coming. Theatrically, the memento left from a play can be a powerful tool for a production company. Physical mementos such as programs, posters, and photographs with actors can remind individuals of a unique experience, adding psychological value to physical objects. Mementos aren’t only physical, however; psychological mementos can stimulate conversation or thought after a performance, furthering an individual’s understanding of history or culture. These types of mementos impact the review a person gives to others who are contemplating attending the show. Chad Bauman, managing director of Milwaukee Repertory Theater, reminds artists that word of mouth carries a crucial impact on ticket sales. Just as social media can impact a production before its run, social media can be a great ally or strong foe after a production opens. Bauman insists that theatres ignore social communication at their own peril. With the quickly increasing dependence on social media, people are relying on instantaneous reviews for inspiration. By providing a carefully crafted theatrical experience for an audience, 140 characters can have a great impact on audience development within the current generation. Social media strategies used in the theatre have not gone ignored by theatre historians. According to Andrée Gendreau, “New developments

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in communication, theatrical staging techniques, the exchange and circulation of works, and the plethora of international rapports are clearly putting rising pressure on museums, which are now among the most vibrant and productive cultural institutions in the West­ern world.”21 By gently guiding guests through the 7 Stages of Experience, museums can implement theatrical techniques to educate and inspire visitors. In turn, however, its usage raises the question: Is the concept of the 7 Stages of Experience exclusively theatrical? Perhaps not, but it should be considered that using the approach is a wise business strategy, one that generates an effect on business through the implementation of theatrical tactics. With that in mind, theatre would do well to pay attention to these techniques, borrowing back the methods it invented to avoid being eclipsed by museum attractions. Care and practice go into both the theatre and museums to ensure guests a good experience. The Titanic Museum’s approach offers guests an interactive experience designed to provide a lasting memory long after they disembark. Similarly, theatrical groups such as Punchdrunk and Woolly Mammoth Theatre are implementing contemporary tactics using social media and audience immersion to encourage the engagement of the audiences of today.

Notes 1. Sandra L. Richards, “What Is to Be Remembered? Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-­Dungeons,” in Critical Theory and Performance, revised and enlarged edition, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 85. 2. Tim Donahue and Jim Patterson, Stage Money: The Business of the Professional Theater (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 1–7. 3. Forrester Research and Consulting, “Climbing the Digital Experience Maturity Ladder Through and Integrated Technology Approach,” e-­spirit, http://www.e-­spirit.com/media/downloads/researchpapers/Forrester-­W P_ CXM_August2012.pdf?name=Forrester%20Whitepaper, accessed May 1, 2013. 4. Jim Jacoby, “The Seven Stages of Experience,” The New Architect: People Before Technology, Janu­ary 26, 2011, http://www.thenewarchitect.com /episodes/the-­seven-­stages-­of-­experience. 5. Velvet Nelson, “Representation and Images of People, Place and Nature in Grenada’s Tourism,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 87, no. 2 (2005): 131–43, http://www.jstor.org.argo.library.okstate.edu/stable/3554306. 6. Chris Klimek, “More Sharing Services Tweet Seats: Got Lots of Social-­ Media Buddies? D.C. Theaters May Comp You a Ticket,” Wash­ing­ton City Paper, De­cem­ber 31, 2010, http://w w w.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/40212 /tweet-­seats, accessed June 21, 2013. 7. Cedar Bay Entertainment, Titanic: World’s Largest Museum Attraction Crew Member Handbook (Branson, Mo.: Cedar Bay, 2011).

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8. Terri Tucker (Tucker Resources), Titanic Employee Training, Branson, Mo., May 25, 2011. 9. Titanic: World’s Largest Museum Attraction Crew Member Handbook. 10. Richard Chase and David Tansik, “The Customer Contact Model for Organization Design.” Management Science 29, no. 9 (1983): 1037–50, http://www .jstor.org/stable/2630931. 11. Titanic: World’s Largest Museum Attraction Crew Member Handbook. 12. Cary Carson, “The End of History Museums: What’s Plan B?,” Public Historian 30, no. 4 (2008): 9–27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2008 .30.4.9. 13. Terri Tucker (Tucker Resources). “Titanic Training,” Speech, Employee Training from Cedar Bay Entertainment, Branson, Mo., May 25, 2011. 14. Gary L. Hunter, “Information Overload: Guidance for Identifying When Information Becomes Detrimental to Sales Force Performance,” Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management 24, no. 2 (2004): 91–100, http://www.jstor .org/stable/40471977. 15. Hunter, “Information Overload.” 16. “Punchdrunk,” http://sleepnomorenyc.com/hotel.htm, accessed May 17, 2013. 17. Jacoby, “The Seven Stages of Experience.” 18. Carson, “The End of History Museums.” 19. Deborah MacInnis and Linda Price, “The Role of Imagery in Information Processing: Review and Extensions,” Journal of Consumer Research 13, no. 4 (1987): 473–91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489369. 20. Jill Whaley Fitzgerald, “Readers’ Expectations for Story Structures,” Reading Research Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1981): 90–114, http://www.jstor.org/stable /747250. 21. Andrée Gendreau, “Museums and Media: A View from Canada,” Public Historian 31, no. 1 (2009): 35–45, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2009 .31.1.35.

Grover’s Corners Gets Sexy The Appealing Dissonance of David Cromer’s Our Town Tony Gunn

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avid Cromer’s production of Our Town has been an astounding commercial hit, selling out in every city it plays. This contemporary reimagining of Thornton Wilder’s classic began in Chicago with The Hypocrites in 2008 before moving off Broadway to the Barrow Street Theatre, where it ran for over 600 performances. Since then, Cromer has been invited to stage the production at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica and at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. Designed for intimate spaces and played in a three-­quarters round, Cromer’s production is able to adhere to Wilder’s famous stage directions, which call for very spare setting and props, while interpolating intriguing conceptual choices that dramatically shift the tenor of the show. Chris Jones, in his review of the origi­nal Hypocrites production, raved that Cromer “removes every last shred of sentimentality from the piece, replacing it with a blend of cynicism and simple human truth. But—and here’s the rub—he does so without removing the vitality and sincerity. Like many great revivals . . . it’s neither archly conceptual nor a subversion of a great Ameri­can play, but an explication for the modern age.”1 This article explores the multiple threads that weave through this intriguing production. My observations and analy­sis are based on reviews of the vari­ous manifestations, and also from two performances I witnessed at the Huntington Theatre Company in Janu­ary 2013.2 First, I consider a brief production history of Our Town and show how its reputation as a life-­affirming portrait of Ameri­can life and its usual tone of sentimental yearning for the past have formed over time and were not apparent at the show’s Broadway premiere. Second, I place Cromer’s production within this history, outlining what makes the show so distinc-

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tive. Of Cromer’s conceptual choices, the most noteworthy is a reversal, what I refer to as the magic trick, which he introduces during the third act. Critics have described this choice as “jaw dropping,”3 “profound and stunning,”4 and “audacious and brilliant.”5 The simple but innovative directorial choice changes everything about the show for a few moments, bringing new life to the play’s emotionally rich ending. The magic trick along with Cromer’s other directional choices help rediscover the thematic possibilities found in Our Town and highlight aspects of the play that are of­ten glossed over. As a result, the show experiences a renewal, ripe with rejuvenation that transcends traditional notions of nostalgia and restores relevancy and commercial viability to the well-­k nown classic. As Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town, he famously attempted to mirror the theatre as it was performed by the Greeks and by Shakespeare, letting the conventions of the stage carry the meanings of his play rather than resort to realism. Concerning the thematic importance, he states that the play “is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death. It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.”6 Brooks Atkinson, in a glowing review of the 1938 Broadway premiere, focuses on these same themes: “Day by day we are buoyed up by the normal bustle of our families, neighbors and friends. But the long point of view is a lonely one and the little living that people do on this spinning planet is tragically unimportant. It has been repeated so many times in so many places without plan or deliberation, and there are centuries of it ahead. Some of the simplest episodes in Our Town are therefore touching beyond all reason.” It is noteworthy that Atkinson says nothing in his review about Ameri­can values or the idyllic beauty of small-­town life, but focuses on how the play brings forth meaning through the simple and mundane. He points out that Wilder is able to reveal insights about the universe through the niche of Grover’s Corners. He also states that the actors “preserve the dignity of the human beings they represent and communicate kindliness without sentimentality.”7 Understanding Wilder’s intentions for the play and seeing that the criti­cal reception mirrors these intentions indicate that there is a stark difference in the how the play was origi­nally presented and how it exists within our current cultural imagination that so of­ten shelves the play as an old-­fashioned piece of Ameri­cana. Part of the prevalent perception of Our Town comes from the play’s immense popu­larity. Since its premiere there have been many famous revivals, in­clud­ing four on Broadway, starring Stage Mangers as diverse as Henry Fonda, Spalding Gray, and Paul Newman. There have been two different television specials, starring Art Carney and Hal Holbrook, a

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musical version, also made for television, starring Frank Sinatra, a radio production featuring Orson Welles, and a Hollywood movie starring William Holden. Along with these are the innumerable regional, community, and high school productions that have coated the play with the sort of contempt bred through familiarity. Cromer, aware of this challenge, observes, “The first line in Thornton Wilder’s script calls for no scenery and no curtain, the origi­nal intent was to strip away artifice. But over the years, Our Town acquired its own artifice simply from the fact of being so produced.”8 Along with audience fatigue for the play, another issue that Cromer faced is the tone the play can easily take. He states, “With Our Town I realized productions have a tendency to be folksy, to seem very, very precious, about a foreign environment with lots of gingham dresses.”9 Thornton Wilder, also aware of this issue of tone, told the cast of the 1959 Williamstown Theatre revival, “Keep it dry. . . . You’re not playing the ‘cello. The danger here is playing it dolefully, turning the play into a welter of sentimentality.”10 Tappen Wilder, the author’s nephew and the head of the Wilder estate, gives this insight into how the tone changed from the origi­nal production to how the play is now mostly understood: “The cost of the forties and fifties and sixties was a dumbing down, if you will, a sentimentalization of Our Town.” He also points out that “the play was considered a safe celebration of Ameri­can values, and as such it was appropriated by conservatives during the years when anything ‘un-­ Ameri­can’ was dangerously taboo.”11 Cromer’s production attempts to position the play away from these familiar notions and reintroduce audiences to a version of the play that more closely mirrors the Broadway premiere with regard to tone and message. While Cromer’s production seeks to turn down the sentiment of the play, it should be noted that he certainly is not the first to recognize the thematic layers within the work that are sometimes glossed over. Nancy Bunge, in a thoughtful analy­sis of the misconceptions of Our Town, points out that what many critics see as a “golden community” in ­Grover’s Corners actually “consists of people terrified of change who not only stifle themselves, but give no signs of confidence or hope in others.”12 Edward Albee is reported to have stated, “Our Town is one of the toughest, saddest plays ever written. Why is it always produced as hearts and flowers?”13 Cromer’s aspirations for the play mirror these statements. After viewing the famous 1989 Lincoln Center production, Cromer explained that he first appreciated what he thought of as the play’s “astringent” qualities: “It explained how the play had, at times, this almost clini­ cal detachment to suffering, to sentiment, to sweetness, to love. . . .The play seems quite cruel . . . because it suggests that the sentimental ver-

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sion of the things we sometimes tell ourselves—that love will conquer all . . . or that God is watching from above . . . are not necessarily true in the way you think they are.”14 In order to bring out a darker side of Our Town, Cromer employed a few simple conceptual tactics. Critics have noted that these tactics might have the audience asking, as Charles Isherwood pointed out in his review of the New York production, “Where’s the heady perfume of nostalgia? The lyric feeling for small-­town life?” Isherwood answers, “Nowhere to be seen, and good riddance.”15 Jeffrey Gantz makes a similar observation of the Boston production: “Cromer’s goal is to dispel the nostalgia that has settled”16 on many different productions of the play. While it is clear that these critics are distinguishing Cromer’s production from others of Our Town, their comments are somewhat misleading in stating that Cromer’s piece functions without nostalgia. While the play successfully avoids what Christopher Wallenburg calls the “amber glow of folksy, homespun sentimentality and reflexive nostalgia”17 that are of­ten associated with the play, the production and, I would argue, the play itself create an emotional sensation that is a blend of joy shaded by a deep sense of pain and loss, which, for lack of a better word, seems a lot like nostalgia.18 This is not a nostalgia that seeks to contain the past in the present, but rather a raw emotion that is experienced on a personal level by the audience. So Cromer’s production eschews nostalgia, yet, paradoxically, nostalgic sensations strongly radiate through­out. Charles P. Pierce faced a similar nostalgic conundrum. In an article for Grantland he writes about revisiting Marquette University years after he graduated and about the intense feelings and emotions he experienced. He writes that the sensation he felt is like nostalgia, but: “There has to be a better word for the way a longtime feeling of community rises unbidden when the right song pops up on a jukebox, or how I can still tell to this day the difference between the way yeast smells and the way hops smell, or the way the chill wind comes off the big lake.” After struggling for the length of the article to come up with a better word, he finally settles on the term “belonging” and reasons, “That’s a better word than nostalgic.”19 While Pierce’s discovery overlooks several important aspects of nostalgia, his distinction of “belonging” is helpful in understanding how Cromer’s Our Town functions. Instead of the radiating nostalgia for America’s lost past, the production brings a deep sense of belonging and community within the audience, essentially making Our Town ours. Cromer’s production brings a sense of belonging and community through acting technique and simple and intriguing costume and lighting design, but he then blows up all expectations and conventions with the magic trick that takes place at the end of the play.

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The first way that Cromer made his production relate to his audience is through the use of a very understated and emotionally detached acting style that is devoid of any regional accents. The character of the Stage Manager shows this shift most clearly. So of­ten a well-­seasoned and wise older actor portrays the role with a large amount of country charm or whimsy. Paul Newman is the quintessential example of this type of Stage Manager, and his performance, forever captured on video and available through PBS, shows that a traditional portrayal of the character can be very effective. The Cromer Stage Manager, on the other hand, whether played by the director himself or by a well-­k nown performer such as Helen Hunt, has been described by Charles Isherwood as not having “an avuncular bone in his body. . . . He has the impersonal, businesslike tone of an office manager showing the new employees where the water cooler and the bathrooms are.”20 Joel Colonder, who replaced Cromer for the two performances that I saw, mirrored the matter-­of-­fact portrayal. When Colonder first entered the performance space, he held his cell phone in the air with one hand and brought it down to his eyes, referring to it each time he stated the time in Grover’s Corners through­out the evening. He also carried a yellow legal pad that he referred to while making the vari­ous introductions and setting the scene of the town and the two households. He kept a very brisk pace and had an understated vocal approach. In spite of this, the character maintained a charming demeanor, showing that Wilder’s lines can be underplayed and still retain their generosity. During the more philosophical moments, when the Stage Manager expresses insights on humanity, rather than being passionate like Newman or chilly like Spalding Gray, Colonder was more thoughtful, but still very subtle. At the beginning of act 3 he pulled out a stool and sat on the steps next to one side of the audience while he quietly recited the lines: “Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very of­ten. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”21 The lines were stated with a rather off-­ hand delivery that suggested the character was still working through the complex ideas himself, saying them quietly enough that I felt the need to lean closer to make sure I could hear him. This fact that the Stage Manager quietly contemplates while sitting among the audience suggests that he is just like us, trying to fig­ure out what the play—and life, for that ­matter—is all about. This businesslike and somewhat brusque Stage Manager set the tone for muted performances by the other actors. Scenes that of­ten can be

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played, as Wilder warned, “dolefully” were quite “dry,” in­clud­ing the famous soda fountain scene between George and Emily. In the Huntington production actors Derrick Trumbly and Therese Plaehn—both appeared to be in their late twenties—played the two characters. The scene is crucial to the play as George states his appreciation to Emily for being such a good friend and for being honest with him about his faults. He then reconsiders his plans to attend farm college the next year, preferring to stay in Grover’s Corners as he cares for Emily and wants to remain close to her. She reveals she feels the same way for him and she always has. Rather than relishing the confession of first love, the scene carried a hint of sadness. Both characters seem happy to reveal their inner feelings for each other, but there was also a sense of remorse for the lost experiences and growth that George would have if he were to go to college. Having this complicated emotional reaction, rather than ruining the romantic affect, added a rich emotional dissonance and a multiplicity of ideas to the scene, showing both the romance of the moment, but also the future consequences that the decision would bring. The scene was made more poignant through the multiplicity, which was made possible by the older age of the actors who brought out the emotional complexity. Another way that Cromer related the play to the audience is through costuming the actors in contemporary clothing. Rather than putting boys in knickers and suspenders and girls in gingham dresses, which suggests a production longing for yesteryear, the costumes, as Isherwood points out, “look as if they’d been pulled out of [the actor’s] own closets.”22 Allison Siple’s designs, while seemingly simple, beautifully represented the emotionally conflicted nature of many characters in the play. These conflicts were realized in two ways: first, through the use of layering, such as having long-­sleeved undershirts emerging from short-­ sleeved tops or wearing zippered sweatshirts and hoodies; and sec­ond, by adopting a monochromatic color scheme. These two simple design choices clearly demonstrate the emotionally guarded nature of everyone in ­Grover’s Corners. George, Emily, Mrs. Gibbs, and Mrs. Webb all wear layers with subdued colors through­out the show that indicate an emotional hesitancy highlighted by the safe and guarded choices these characters make through­out the play. Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Webb wear long sleeved, patterned button-­ups that denote their characters as emotionally conflicted. This is shown most forcefully when Dr. Gibbs, played by Craig Mathers, chastises George in act 1. Rather than laying a gentle guilt trip, Mathers becomes enraged, shouting the lines, “And you eat her meals, and put on the clothes she keeps nice for you, and you run off and play baseball—like she’s some hired girl we keep around the house but that we don’t like very much,”23 at which point, seeing that George is crying,

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he immediately catches himself, seems to feel embarrassed, and promptly raises George’s allowance. The long-­sleeved, patterned shirt represents the testy and somewhat volatile nature of Dr. Gibbs by keeping his heart region covered with a complicated pattern. There are vari­ous moments in the play during which Emily experiences emotional ruptures, and these were supported by changes in her wardrobe. During her tearful confrontation of George in act 2, Emily, who has worn a jacket through­out the play, now ties it around her waist, making her heart region much more exposed. This is repeated during her short breakdown at the wedding scene in the end of act 2 where she wears a sleeveless gown. Both instances leave her more exposed physically, which nicely mirrors her vulnerable emotional state. It was the seemingly simple but nuanced nature of Siple’s costumes that made the characters very relatable without sacrificing artistic merit. The Stage Manager states that the play is taking place during the years origi­nally placed in the script, from 1901 to 1913, but the contemporary and thoughtful costuming choices place the emphasis on the ideas in the play rather than the time period in which it is set. The last way in which Cromer’s production created a sense of belonging within the audience was made possible by the lighting designed by Heather Gilbert. It might have seemed to a casual observer that the house lights remained on for the majority of the play, but the reality of the show’s lighting was that members of the audience became an active participant in the play—not that they would be called up onstage, but that the intricate lighting design included the spectators as if they were performers. For example, the lights did not change at all when Colonder, as the Stage Manger, walked onstage to begin the play. The jarring effect of being able to see everyone around you eventually went away, replaced by a feeling of comfort. I felt as though I knew the people sitting around me by the end of the first act. The simple nature of the lighting design should not be mistaken for not having any lighting design. The lights faded at the end of act 1 as night fell on Grover’s Corners, but a sneaky special light, specifically fashioned to be unnoticed, was used on George and Emily for their wedding to provide the couple with an extra glow. The overcast, rainy day of act 3 was dark and shadowy, so much so that I found it difficult to see Colonder as he performed the Stage Manager’s act 3 opening monologue, creating an ambiance that perfectly set the tone for the final act. In addition, as noted above, the very fact that members of the audience were included and not separate from the lighting design made them feel as though they belonged with the characters, that they were a part of what the characters

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were doing. There were no physical or design elements that separated us from them. The last conceptual choice, and easily the most memorable, upended every other conceptual aspect of the production that I have mentioned so far, yet the moment fortified the emotional complexity of the show. The magic trick in act 3 was what sets Cromer’s Our Town apart from the other famous iterations of the play and likely astonished unsuspecting audience members. In the Huntington production the upstage wall, the only one that didn’t have anyone sitting alongside of it, was covered with a thick, black, curtain. It could easily have been assumed that this curtain merely masked an ugly wall in the theatre. In act 3, after Emily has died, she requests to return and relive her twelfth birthday. At this request, the Stage Manager walks to the black curtain, which up to this point in the show has been completely ignored, and opens it to reveal a highly representational and functional box set of a nineteenth-­century kitchen, bathed in the glow of sunrise. The scene is said by the Stage Manager to be taking place in 1899, and all the characters in the flashback wear period costumes and speak with thick New England accents. The smell of bacon that Mrs. Webb is cooking wafts through the audience, capping the sense of enchantment that the set evokes. Like a skilled magician, Cromer directed the audience’s attention away from the area where the ultimate surprise would take place until the final moment when the set is revealed, and this illusion would appear and disappear in a matter of a few moments. Emily, still in her modern attire and with her unaffected accent, first observes and then enters the unveiled space. While the kitchen was meticulously detailed, it was very hard to see, as the only lighting was a gas lamp fastened to the wall and the effect of sunrise that beamed through the windows. This lighting made the characters appear mainly in silhouette, while outside the windows frozen tree branches could be seen as the morning light struck them, cold and beautiful.24 As the scene plays out and Emily becomes more and more disenchanted and frustrated with living in the past, rather than having a huge outburst of emotion she stays calm and cries quietly, “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another,”25 in a subtle and subdued manner. Almost as quickly as the new setting appears, it is gone, as Emily, after taking one last look, closes the curtain and returns to her place in the cemetery. This scene highlights the dissonance that the Cromer production brings out in Our Town and poses as many questions about the play as it answers. The first time I observed the production I knew about the hidden set and was still overwhelmed by its presentation, not really noticing

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any details because of the powerful emotional affect. Upon my sec­ond viewing I forced myself to pay closer attention, and I saw the great pains that had been taken with regard to props and set dressing to make that setting as his­tori­cally accurate as possible, from the texture of wallpaper to the working condition of all the appliances. In a very clear way, having Emily’s flashback cross into the realm of the highly representational echoes Wilder’s notion of the small things in life being of the utmost importance. Emily’s twelfth birthday is so beautiful, and the fact that no one pays any attention to it makes it unbearable for her to remain. This production is the first of note to take Emily’s flashback out of the realm of the imaginary and place it, literally, before our eyes. In order for the magic trick to work it has to be stunning, and Cromer along with his designers do not fail to deliver. The overall effect of this noteworthy reversal does more than just r­ eify Wilder’s origi­nal thematic intent; it also calls into question the nature of reality. Is the magic trick supposed to represent what is real, or is the rest of the show, with its imagined settings and props, placing us in reality? These distinctions are important since the way the audience views the hidden set shapes their perception of the overall message of the show. Does it glorify the wonderful past or does it highlight the problematic nature of memory and not living in the present? An appealing aspect of Cromer’s production is that it effectively presents all of these ideas and gives them equal weight. The magic trick is beautiful, but strange in that it is very hard to see and is in distinct opposition to every other aspect of the production. The dichotomy found within the scene wonderfully mirrors themes within the play that are so of­ten overlooked, that life is both precious and straining, that sadness accompanies death, but also that death offers relief from this world. Cromer’s production successfully shows ambivalence in a play that from the surface can seem simply optimistic, but the magic trick also brings a tremendous outburst of spectacle to the extremely muted production. Beyond the surprise set, one of the most impressive feats of Cromer’s Our Town was that it made Thornton Wilder’s play a sexy draw to theatregoers. On one level it shows that audiences love to see a thoughtfully conceptualized restaging of a classic, a fact that of­ten compels theatre companies around the country to feature such shows on their seasons each year. But on another level the popu­larity of the show points out that audiences will support and attend a production that does not have a happy ending, is challenging, and might even “hurt [their] feelings,”26 as the Stage Manager warns in act 3. Perhaps the many optimistic aspects of Our Town make the astringent qualities palatable. Or perhaps Cromer’s

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magic trick is so amazing that audiences no longer care about the show’s themes, being so overwhelmed by spectacle. Whatever the reason, the production certainly shows the artistic viability, and financial marketability, of a well-­k nown classic play when the artifice surrounding it is stripped away and a director is able to effectively explicate the play for a modern audience.

Notes 1. Chris Jones, “David Cromer’s Utterly Astounding Our Town Hits Home, but Hard,” Chicago Tribune: The Theatre Loop (blog), May 2, 2008, http://leisureblogs .chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2008/05/david-­cromers-­a.html. 2. Thornton Wilder, Our Town, Huntington Theatre Company, Boston, Massachusetts, Janu­ary 19 and 20, 2013. 3. Chris Jones, “David Cromer’s.” 4. Hedy Weiss, “Inspired Production keeps Our Town Clever, Modern,” Chicago Sun-­Times, April 29, 2008, http://www.chopintheatre.com/event.php ?id=180. 5. Brian Nemtusak, “Our Town Review,” review of Our Town by Thornton Wilder, TimeOut Chicago, May 1, 2008, http://www.chopintheatre.com/event .php?id=180. 6. Thornton Wilder, “Preface,” Three Plays (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), xxx. 7. Brooks Atkinson, “How They Used to Live,” New York Times, February 13, 1938. 8. Sid Smith, “Actor-­d irector Cromer Fulfilling Early Promise,” Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2010, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008–05–18/news /0805160517_1_steppenwolf-­cider-­house-­rules-­big-­apple. 9. Christopher Wallenburg, “Blowing the Dust off Our Town,” Boston Globe, De­cem­ber 6, 2012, http://w w w.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-­a rt /2012/12/06/david-­cromer-­brings-­stripped-­down-­our-­town-­huntington-­theatre /SLNDnmSnHDlWBqlVXfV W5M/story.html. 10. Ira Henry Freeman, “Wilder Brings Our Town to Williamstown,” New York Times, August 23, 1959, Proquest His­tori­cal Newspapers (1851–2009), X1. 11. Mara Tapp, “Talk of Our Town,” Chicago Magazine, February 2009, http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-­Magazine/February-­2009/Talk-­of-­Our -­Town/index.php?cparticle=2&siarticle=1#artanc. 12. Nancy Bunge, “The Social Realism of Our Town,” in Thornton Wilder: New Essays, ed. Martin Blank et al. (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1999), 360. 13. Jeremy McCarter, “The Genius of Grover’s Corners,” New York Times Book Review, April 1, 2007. 14. Wallenburg, “Blowing the Dust off Our Town.”

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15. Charles Isherwood, “21st Century Grover’s Corners, with the Audience as Neighbors,” New York Times, February 26, 2009, http://theater.nytimes.com /2009/02/27/theater/reviews/27town.html?_r=0. 16. Jeffrey Gantz, “David Cromer Brings Unique Approach to Our Town,” Boston Globe, De­cem­ber 13, 2013, http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater -­art/2012/12/13/david-­cromer-­brings-­unique-­approach-­our-­town-­performance -­boston-­center-­for-­arts/SUpnDPxeVz1zqFlCG8HgVN/story.html. 17. Christopher Wallenburg, “Blowing the Dust off Our Town.” 18. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books 2001), 49–50. Boym distinguishes between what she calls “restorative nostalgia,” or an emotion that connects the urge to restore the past to the present, and “reflective nostalgia” that is more about “mediation of history and the passage of time.” She continues: “It reveals that longing and criti­cal thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or criti­cal reflection.” Cromer’s Our Town shifts the nostalgia of the play out of the restorative and into the reflective. 19. Charles P. Pierce, “The NCAA and Nostalgia,” Grantland, De­cem­ber 4, 2011, http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7318012/the-­ncaa-­nostalgia. 20. Isherwood, “21st Century Grover’s Corners.” 21. Thornton Wilder, Our Town, in Three Plays, 89–90. 22. Isherwood, “21st Century Grover’s Corners.” 23. Wilder, Our Town, in Three Plays, 39. 24. The image called to my mind the line from Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner where vari­ous characters exclaim that outside of the house “every least twig is wrapped around with ice.” Thornton Wilder, “The Long Christmas Dinner,” in Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theatre (New York: Library of America, 2007), 62. 25. Wilder, Our Town, in Three Plays, 110. 26. Ibid., 90.

“There’s Too Many of Them!” Off-­Off-­Broadway’s Performance of Geek Culture John Patrick Bray

I

n the spring of 2013, Garage Rep at Steppenwolf Garage Theatre presented Buzz22’s production of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters. In his review for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones called the play “clever, funny, moving, lively and delightfully geeky,” and playwright Qui Nguyen “a refreshing, break-­the-­rules writer—he has a ready embrace of pop culture, high-­school speak and High Fidelity cool, and he also has a mission to redeem gaming geeks everywhere.”1 The play was previously produced at The Flea Theatre in New York City, where Eric Grode of the New York Times found the production “impressive,” due to Nguyen’s and director Robert Ross Parker’s ability to temper gore with “depictions of the more conventional wounds of adolescence, the ones that come from loving and not being loved in return.”2 What has become known as “Geek Theatre” has a dual mission that has informed the commercial theatre: to present outsiders—namely, gamers, comic book collectors, cosplayers (costumed role players inspired by fantasy or character imagery), and those who have a fascination with science fiction and fantasy (SF&F)—while also reflecting the “wounds of adolescence.” For example, the framing apparatus for the earliest draft of Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark dealt with comic book geeks who imagined Spidey’s adventures, while The Book of Mormon features an over-­t he-­ top musical number with Jedi from the Star Wars universe and Hobbits from the pages of Lord of the Rings. While these musicals may speak to the larger trend of appropriating geek culture, Qui Nguyen and his company, Vampire Cowboys (VC), have risen in the ranks of New York independent theatres by actively cultivating not just an audience or subscriber base, but a fandom. In the latest VC production, Geek!, author Crystal

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Skillman has crafted an adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, setting the play at a comic book convention where two heroes travel through vari­ous levels of the convention center in order to meet an admired comic book artist. This play reaches a high point for Geek Theatre, as it lovingly depicts the fans that have been developed by, and now follow, VC and other indie geek companies building on the VC model in NYC. In this article, I discuss Geek Theatre and how Geek Theatre constructs its audiences via fan culture. I begin with some considerations regarding how we can define “geek,” and what we might consider to be a “geek aesthetic.” Then, I use the VC production of Geek! as a case study, as it reflects both the approach of the Geek Theatre movement and celebrates the very fandom it has cultivated by representing not just their passions, but the fans themselves onstage. Finally, I suggest that Geek Theatre offers a possible model that commercial theatre might consider for creating new audiences.

“Fan” or “Geek”? At last year’s Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, actor Wil Wheaton, known for his role as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), was asked by an audience member if he had any words of advice for her newborn daughter. Wheaton responded: Being a nerd, or being a geek, which is another word you’ll hear and I sort of use the terms interchangeably, it’s not about what you love, it’s about how you love it. . . . The way you love that, the way you find other people who love it the way you do, is what makes being a nerd awesome. The defining characteristic of us, of the people in this room . . . that ties us all together is that we love things. Some of us love Firefly. Some of us love Game of Thrones. . . . Some of us love Star Trek or Star Wars or anime or games or fantasy or science fiction, some of us love completely different things; but we all love those things so much that we travel for thousands of miles . . . so that we can be around people who love the things the way that we love them.3

For Wheaton, a geek or a nerd is one who has an intense passion for what is known in literary studies as “genre fiction,” which includes SF&F and noir. For geeks, genre fiction—or “the genres,” for short—also includes comic books, anime, tabletop and live-­action role playing games, cosplay, and video games. (It is important to note that “the genres” as suggested by literary studies is different than the classic genres as defined by theatre studies: tragedy and comedy, and the vari­ous subgenres of tragicomedy, melodrama, etc.) This intense love causes the enthusiast to find like-­minded persons in order to form a community of enthusiasts (the

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comic con being an example). From an outsider perspective, a geek may be a “fanatic,” a pejorative term that has been appropriated/reclaimed by geeks in its milder, abbreviated form, “fan.” In Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practices, Ken Gelder classifies “fans” as a subculture. For Gelder, the term “subcultures” may be used to describe “social ‘worlds’” in which participants’ “conformity or non-­normativity must always be understood” as a “structured refusal of one of . . . alienation.”4 Gelder asserts that “subcultures are brought into being through narration and narrative: told by the participants themselves, as well as by those who document them, monitor them, ‘label’ them, outlaw them, and so on.”5 In his study, Gelder considers the term “fan” and its root word, “fanaticus, which relates to temple rituals and worships and connotes divine inspiration, even possession by a deity.”6 When considering fans at science fiction conventions, Gelder looks at the theories of fandom presented by the sociologist Henry Jenkins: “For Jenkins, fans are routinely cast as excessive, over-­enthusiastic consumers, too heavily identified with and invested in the media texts they build their fandom around: like Star Trek, for example, or The X-­Files. The anti-­fan retort, ‘Get a Life!’ [as stated by actor William Shatner to Star Trek fans in a popu­lar Saturday Night Live sketch] precisely expresses this view that fans don’t have enough criti­cal distance, that they are too immersed, too removed from reality.”7 Although Gelder’s larger project both problematizes and embraces the notion of fandom as a kind of pathology, Matt Hills uses the kinder term “enthusiast,” differentiating between the “follower” and the “fan” by how much the latter builds an identity predicated by a love of a certain niche media.8 Taking these thoughts into account, an agreeable definition of a fan may be one who enthusiastically participates in the construction of a subculture dedicated to an aspect of cultural or pop-­culture mythology. In other words, being a “fan” is not an isolated occurrence, but rather relies on the participants’ dedication to a group under a similar identity branding (the term “Trekkies” for Star Trek fans or “Browncoats” for fans of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, for example). For Wheaton and many others, the term “geek” has become a catchall identifier for fans of SF&F subculture. Since the emergence of the financially successful “computer geek” (the earliest example being Bill Gates, a thin man with thick glasses), there has been a reclaiming of the label, both as a term of empowerment (geeks are smart and successful) and to signify an expert (e.g., the Geek Squad at Best Buy, geeks who make sure our technology is fully functional). Computer geeks may be identified by their nuanced interest in technology and how advances in technology (specifically, video games and other forms of interactive media) have opened up new avenues for storytelling prac-

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tices.9 As John Gatz suggests in Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho, “Geeks’ passions of­ten crisscross back and forth between technology and more traditional forms of culture, with unusual depths of interest in both.”10 Jay Clayton takes this notion further, arguing that the tension that has existed between the sciences and humanities as disciplines can be assuaged with the emergence of an interdisciplinary geek—someone who has just as much passion for technology as literature.11 As suggested, the term geek may be viewed as pejorative, but those who self-­identify as geeks use the term to describe membership in a particular subcultural fandom. However, as Nguyen suggests, anyone who has an enthusiasm for an aspect of any kind of culture may already be a geek: “A geek is anyone who has a more than average love of any particular piece of pop culture. It can be anything. It could be anything from football geeks, foodie geeks, music geeks, to more traditional comic book/sci-­fi/fantasy geeks. Wikipedia and the internet have made it easy for anyone to geek. Anything you like you can become a super enthusiast for in an hour.”12 For Nguyen, even sports fanatics, accepted members of the dominant U.S. culture, can be viewed as geeks. Although Nguyen’s view of the term geek is very positive (and in some ways, interchangeable with fan), I assert, for the sake of clarity, that what separates geeks from other fans (in particular, sports fans) is the subculture status of the former: while someone may be a sports fan, it might be more difficult to self-­identify as a “sports geek,” given the low subcultural status of the geek label. As Nguyen furthermore suggests, thanks to the Internet, material is readily available for those who have an obsession on any given topic, making most people potential geeks. Geek Theatre takes this notion one step further by fully embracing geek (subcultural fan) life, thereby attracting a very responsive geek (subcultural) audience. As a result, Geek Theatre has made a niche for itself in New York Indie Theatre thanks to its recognizable aesthetics and sincere dialogue with its fans.

Geek Aesthetics! Qui Nguyen is the cofounder and coartistic director of the Obie Award– winning Vampire Cowboys in New York, one of the most visible theatre companies producing works dedicated to genre fiction. He has written a number of plays that draw on comic books, tabletop role-­playing games, and video games for inspiration, and he has earned the Andrew W. Mellon Playwright Residency at Mixed Blood Theatre Company in Minneapolis. I asked him about Geek Theatre and how it can be defined. According to Nguyen:

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‘Geek Theatre’ was a term that was really created solely for grant writing purposes for my company, Vampire Cowboys [VC]. When our producer Abby Marcus (who is now my wife) and I sat down to write our first grant, she needed to clearly state what we were doing in a simple mission statement. But it was hard to do so using traditional categories. For instance, we did a lot of stage combat, but we weren’t a purely ‘physical theatre company.’ We use puppets, but we’re not a puppet theatre; we do a lot with comedy, but we’re not a comedy troupe—we couldn’t fig­ure out what the heck we were without writing a three-­page mission statement. So after hearing me go round and round, she simply stopped me and asked, ultimately, ‘What audience in NY are you trying to appeal to?’ And without a pause I said, ‘Oh, the Geeks!’ And in that moment she coined the term ‘Geek Theatre’ to be an umbrella for the type of work we were doing. It was the first time I ever saw those two words together.13

When defining the aesthetic of Geek Theatre, the playwright Crystal Skillman has suggested that there is aesthetic fluidity rather than strict parameters for Geek plays: “While all Geek Theater plays are very, very different—some plays put an origi­nal genre story on stage while others follow real characters who are actual geeks living in the geek community (as in this play)—both approaches are using genre for their characters to discover something greater. I think we are all excited to use genre to explore the story of the outsider, which we pour our hearts into because it is indeed personal. The story of the outsider longing to find their place in the world is one everyone relates to.”14 Nguyen further suggests that VC was not necessarily the first company to produce plays focused on superheroes and sci-­fi. For example, there has been a Superman musical, It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman, as well as campy and cult musicals such as The Rocky Horror Show, a well-­documented homage to 1950s science fiction B-­movies and deconstruction of science fiction’s (hidden) transgressive sexuality.15 What makes Geek Theatre different from previous stage productions of science fiction and comic book adaptations is its dedicated focus on geek culture, and its mission to create a theatre for a geek audience. Playwright Crystal Skillman defines Geek Theatre as “a celebration of creativity: the things we share, the way we share story, the way we process these things; we have fun with it. In the real world, I find the joy of creativity and imagination gets kind of lost: we go to a museum, we do a craft project and show it; and those things are valuable, but I feel like every moment should be about joy and imagination. . . . I feel like we should live our lives with a little bit of wonder.”16 This sense of geek wonder is where VC draws its inspiration. In sum, plays that can be considered Geek Theatre appropriate popu­lar narratives and archetypes found in the (geek-­defined) genres. As suggested earlier, plays such as She Kills Monsters, which appropriates the Dungeons and Dragons table­

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top role-­playing game, are both poignant and over-­t he-­top campy fun. Skillman also suggests that Geek Theatre deals with outsiders looking in, people who watch a world operate beyond their grasp due to their love of the genres, as with Skillman’s play Geek!; or, they may deal with central characters who find themselves on quests in which they meet characters torn from the pages of comic books, or from science fiction and fantasy films, as in Qui Nguyen’s A Beginner’s Guide to Deicide. As a result, the scenes are quite short, self-­aware, and episodic—of­ten relying on stage combat (a protagonist versus a threshold guardian) to advance the narrative. While the aesthetics of geek theatre may differ, the mutual love for the genres, as well as the theatre, is what has brought a number of artists together to work with companies such as VC.

Enter the Vampires! The Vampire Cowboys premiered their first Geek Theatre production, Vampire Cowboys Trilogy, in 2000 at Ohio State University, and later as part of the New York International Fringe Festival in 2004. VC has steadily gained visibility via acceptance from the mainstream: Living Dead in Denmark, a sequel of sorts to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, included makeup designed by Chuck Varga, cofounder of the prop-­band Gwar, and was nominated for five New York Innovative Theatre Awards in­clud­ing Best Original Score, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Design, and Best Production; it won for Best Choreography/Movement. In 2010, VC won the prestigious Village Voice Obie Award Grant, and Nguyen earned his first GLAAD Media Award nomination, given by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Nominees are drawn from film and television, as well as live performance. In an interview with Jason Tseng of Scarlet Betch, a company described in its overview as “a podcast and blog about all things gay and geek,” Nguyen noted, “Part of our mission, that we say is our ‘unwritten mission’ has always been to promote positive images of minorities and queer people on stage. But we never want to advertise that, we don’t put it out there.”17 What VC does put out, however, is a niche form of theatre, and it cultivates its audience by actively seeking out fans of geek culture. Since 2007, VC has been the only theatre company to earn official sponsorship from the New York Comic Con. New York Comic Con is, in the words of their website,



the East Coast’s biggest and most exciting popu­lar culture convention. Our Show Floor plays host to the latest and greatest in comics, graphic novels, anime, manga, video games, toys, movies and television. Our panels and

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autograph sessions give Fans a chance to interact with their favorite creators. Our screening rooms feature sneak peeks at films and television shows months before they hit either big or small screens. . . . New York Comic Con is the sec­ond largest pop culture convention in America and the only one that takes place in the comic book, publishing, media and licensing capital of the world—Gotham City [a nickname for New York City, and also the home of DC Comic’s Batman].18

VC’s participation with the New York Comic Con has included presentations of battle sequences from their plays, as well as quick training sessions, as a way of building audience members for their theatre.19 However, this is not to say that their marketing is in anyway disingenuous, as Nguyen considers himself to be a geek. In other words, Nguyen is already an active participant in the subculture.

Geek! VC’s subcultural participation has come into full fruition with their latest offering, Crystal Skillman’s Geek!. Set at an SF&F convention, Geek! is a celebration of the fan base they have cultivated via active participation at New York Comic Con, as well as the visibility they have gained with the New York indie theatre. Geek! ran from March 22 through April 13, 2013, at St. Mark’s Church as a coproduction between VC and The Incubator Arts Project. As summarized in Time Out New York, Geek! tells the story of Dayna and Honey, two “‘cosplaying pals’ who are on a mission to meet their favorite comic-­ book creator, but first need to conquer the nine levels of the h ­ ellish Dante’s Fire-­Con” (a fictitious SF&F/anime convention in Ohio).20 There are two points worth considering in this summary: the first is the notion of cosplay, or, “costume role-­play,” which is, as defined by Scott Duchesne, “a type of performance art wherein fans transform themselves into their favorite fictional characters through costume, makeup, gesture and behavior.”21 The more one resembles the character, the larger the cultural capital.22 In Geek! the central characters are therefore representations of persons already engaged in the act of representation and per­ formance. The sec­ond point has to do with the stakes for the “cosplay pals” who are seeking their favorite comic book creator. The exchange between fan and celebrated guest(s) at conventions is an example of what Du­chense calls “human synergy.”23 In his article, “Stardom/Fandom: Celebrity and Fan Tribute Performance,” Duchense offers an analy­sis of SF&F conventions, suggesting “synergy is the basis of the relationship between

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fans and celebrities at such events”:24 “From the Greek ‘sunergia¯ ’ (cooperation) or sunergos (working together), synergy refers to the cooperative interaction among groups that create an enhanced combined effect. SF&F conventions are defined by human synergy—in the sense that both fan and celebrity momentarily merge for mutual advantage—exchanging emotional, psychological and social benefits through their interactions.”25 With Geek! the central characters are on a quest to experience the height of SF&F human synergy by meeting a beloved comic book celebrity before the convention closes. The audience for this play, well versed in the SF&F experience, would recognize the need to connect, to meet someone with a deity status in the hierarchy of fan subculture, and in the process recognize themselves in the characters onstage. Writing for nytheatre.com, Richard Hinojosa says that “Geek! is a celebration of the imagination. It revels in a subculture dedicated to living life according to their own rules and while managing not to poke fun at anyone for enjoying some role play it actually tells a great story about how we relate to the world and to those closest to us.”26 The notion that the play “reveals a subculture” without “poking fun” is, as suggested earlier, what makes Geek Theatre what it is: a theatre for geeks, not for people who want to bully them. In his New York Times review, Andy Webster writes, “‘Geek!’ is a riot of visual invention. Kristina Makowski and Jessica Shay’s costumes are wondrous riffs on ‘Star Wars,’ superheroes, princesses and Japanese she-­warriors. The puppet designer David Valentine has created Squeaker, a giant furry Pac-­Man of sorts (but with legs). Matthew Tennie’s video effects add sparkle. The weapons and abundant battle scenes surely kept the fight director, Ray Rodriguez, busy.”27 ­R aven Snook of Time Out New York also gives the play a positive review: “Crystal Skillman’s script goes beyond the superficial snark and touches on topical issues such as bullying and suicide, without seeming preachy or ripped from the headlines. . . . Dorks may grow up to inherit the earth, but when you’re young, one nasty comment from an online troll can really ruin your day.”28 For Skillman, the show’s greatest success, and the success of Geek Theatre in general, has to do with the relationship between the production and the audience. As Skillman explains: “Geek theatre is about the fandom: getting together and seeing something you love. . . . Geek theatre cares about its fans. And they’re not audience members, and they’re not subscribers, they’re fans.”29 Viewing audience members as fans—­ focusing on the emotional interchange rather than direct economic exchange (though it would be foolhardy to suggest one does not exist)— is a key component in creating new audiences for the theatre.

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Creating Fans! Skillman takes her cue regarding artist-­and-­audience relations from her husband, Fred Van Lente, a comic book writer whose credits include Action Philosophers and Marvel Zombies. As Skillman notes, “The comic-­ book world—in a way that can be crippling, sometimes—they respect their fans and take them very seriously. That’s probably the best thing [Marvel Comics writer and editor] Stan Lee did.”30 Lee created the Bullpen Bulletin, which was featured toward the end of each issue of Marvel comics from 1965 to 2001, which promoted future issues in a very friendly, conversational tone, and was the first to create a letters-­to-­t he-­editor page for comic book fans. These are the fans that both conventions and Geek Theatre reach out to, people who are already used to having a prominent voice in the creation of popu­lar art. Skillman continues, “We have a lot of moving stories from geeks who came to see Geek! and it was great to hear these stories. . . . There were a lot of folks who came up to us who were very grateful to see themselves on stage.”31 Broadly speaking, thanks to productions such as Geek! new theatre audiences are being created. For example, The Brick Theatre, a nonprofit theatre company based in Brooklyn, New York, holds both The Comic Book Festival and The Game Play Festival. Gyda Arber, the executive producer for the festival, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “For the Brick, we tend to get a lot of the same audience all the time, big theater geeks. But with the Game Play festival we find all these people come to the shows who are not big theater people but who are gamers or who are just interested in games and interactive technology. For us it’s really great to be able to reach out to a whole new audience.”32 In 2007, VC began hosting The Saturday Night Saloon at The Battle Ranch in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Saloon was a serialized evening featuring the works of a number of other New York indie theatre companies, in­clud­ing Nosedive, May-­Yi, and LABrynth.33 The Saloon was an opportunity for like-­minded theatre artists to band together in a community of geek enthusiasm and theatrical camaraderie. Nguyen remembers: “It was basically a party. And the whole idea was you have six groups of people from different companies and the artists themselves would become each other’s audience. . . . However what we didn’t realize is if you get artists involved doing something they actually like they’re going to invite everybody. So, suddenly, every month the Saloon blew up to be this crazy party out in Brooklyn.”34 The Saloon series continued through 2011, growing both VC and Geek Theatre’s visibility. A glance at the Now Playing section on nytheatre.com suggests that more compa-

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nies are looking to attract geek audiences, with titles such as Duct Tape Girl and Fetish Girl Conquer the World (I should note that the play was in a Park Slope Living Room), How I Became a Superhero, and the hipster live action/puppet play Fucking Up Everything. Nguyen’s Living Dead in Denmark, origi­nally produced by VC, is currently being revived by the Just Kidding Theatre Company. In short, Geek Theatre is now being produced at indie and regional theatres, simultaneously bringing in new audiences for the theatre and embracing geek fandom. When discussing the work of VC, Skillman says: “Each play dissects the genre and creates deep, soulful questioning characters. Vampire Cowboys’ plays are always diverse as well—these are stories that can touch many different audience members because they can look on stage and see themselves in the play.”35 Skillman is inspired by Vampire Cowboys due to the company’s ability to represent the hopes and fears of comic book geeks in a way that is not “Othering” but embracing. Perhaps this is the strongest lesson to be learned from Geek Theatre: in order for theatre to sustain itself, producing organizations need to be dedicated to having an authentic connection to their audiences.

Synergy with an Audience! Geek Theatre has emerged at a time when geek culture has exploded across media. Geek Theatre has found an audience by creating a human synergy with its fans via mutual appreciation, as well as a nuanced understanding and celebration of Otherness. As playwright James Carter eloquently suggests in his blog dedicated to the Vampire Cowboys, the answer to sustaining the life of the theatre in the United States lies in “listening” to an audience: “When creators authentically listen, they lay the foundation for a long conversation with a dedicated and engaged audience. It can’t just be about the next box office transaction. It must be about cultivating a sincere relationship. If large institutions are going to thrive in an ever-­changing digital landscape, these are the values they, too, must embrace.”36 Perhaps this is the greatest challenge to commercial theatre, as it presents the most financial risk: rather than finding the next big musical, commercial producers should consider exactly who the work is supposed to be in conversation with, as well as ways in which conversation can continue via a series of plays, different playwrights, and varying aesthetics. While no one work can answer the need of every spectator, if an audience knows it is being unapologetically embraced, then perhaps theatre itself can continue to thrive in the years to come. Although listening is one part of the equation, the other part is actively finding and recruiting a spectator.

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As I have argued, VC has built an audience (a fandom) via subcultural participation at the New York Comic Con. They have given classes and demonstrations and have actively met like-­minded geeks who were amazed at the potential for live performance. As a result, VC has been able to bring in a much larger audience for its own work, and for the New York Indie theatre. Perhaps if commercial producers were able to meet groups of people at conferences and conventions—in particular, folks who are not immediately considered a “theatre audience”—and listen, perhaps then they can explore the same kind of human synergy created by Geek Theatre by building a fan base one play at a time.

Notes 1. Chris Jones, “‘She Kills Monsters’ Conjures D&D Cool,” review of She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen, as performed at Steppenwolf Garage Theatre, Chicago Tribune, March 13, 2003, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013–03–03 /entertainment/ct-­ent-­0304-­garage-­rep-­review-­20130303_1_garage-­rep-­buzz22 -­chicago-­black-­top-­sky, accessed March 17, 2013. 2. Eric Grode, “The Pains of Evisceration and Unrequited Love,” theatre review of She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen, as performed at the Flea Theatre, New York, New York Times, No­vem­ber 18, 2011, http://theater.nytimes .com/2011/11/19/theater/reviews/she-­k ills-­monsters-­by-­qui-­nguyen-­at-­t he-­flea -­review.html, accessed March 17, 2013. 3. “Wil Wheaton—Why It’s Awesome to Be a Nerd,” April 27, 2013, video clip, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_BtmV4JRSc, accessed July 31 2013. 4. Ken Gelder, Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practices (Lon­don: Routledge, 2007), 66. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid, 143. 7. Ibid. 8. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (Lon­don: Routledge, 2002), x. 9. For a detailed discussion regarding interactive storytelling, and the false binary of “interactive” and “non-­interactive” storytelling techniques, see Jesse Schell, “The Myth of Passive Entertainment,” in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Burlington, Mass.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008), http://www.spesifikasii .com/pdf/the-­art-­of-­game-­design-­a-­book-­of-­lenses-­83283.pdf, accessed July 31, 2013. Schell contends that “the idea that the mechanics of traditional storytelling, which are innate to the human ability to communicate, are somehow nullified by interactivity is absurd. It is a poorly told story that doesn’t compel the listener to think and make decisions during the story. . . . The difference only comes in the participant’s ability to take action. The desire to act and all the thought and emotion that go with that are present in both” (263). 10. John Gatz, Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho (New York: Villard: New York, 2000), 83.

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11. Jay Clayton, “Convergence of the Two Cultures: A Geek’s Guide to Contemporary Literature,” Ameri­can Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 807. 12. Qui Nguyen, telephone interview with the author, February 8, 2013. 13. Ibid. 14. Jody Christopherson, “The Origins of ‘Geek!’: An Interview with ­Crystal Skillman,” HowlRound, April 10, 2013, http://www.howlround.com /the-­origins-­of-­geek%E2%80%94an-­i nterview-­w ith-­crystal-­skillman-­by-­jody -­christopherson, accessed July 25, 2013. 15. These examples are just scratching the surface. Ralph Willingham’s Science Fiction and the Theatre (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994) offers a comprehensive list of science fiction play productions and describes the context for each production, in­clud­ing contemporaneous technological innovations as well as the fears and paranoia surrounding these innovations (such as radiation from atomic bombs, a popu­lar trope for 1950s and 1960s science fiction and horror films). 16. Crystal Skillman, telephone interview. 17. Jason Tseng, “Interview; Qui Nguyen of Vampire Cowboys,” Scarlet Betch!, February 26, 2010, http://scarletbetch.blogspot.com/2010/02 /interview-­qui-­nguyen-­of-­vampire-­cowboys.html, accessed March 13, 2013. 18. “About,” New York Comic Con, http://w w w.new yorkcomiccon.com /About-­N YCC/NYCC-­Fan-­FAQs/, accessed Sep­tem­ber 6, 2013. 19. “Vampire Cowboys Artistic Director at NY Comic Con 2011 with Host, Tim Dowd,” Silver Cheese TV, http://www.silvercheese.tv/tv/ny_comic_con _2011/vampirecowboysgeektheater.html, accessed Sep­tem­ber 6, 2013. 20. Raven Snook, “Geek!,” review of Geek! by Crystal Skillman, as performed at Incubator Arts Project, New York, Time Out New York, April 4, 2013, http:// www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/geek, accessed April 6, 2013. 21. Scott Duchene, “Stardom/Fandom: Celebrity and Fan Tribute Performance,” Canadian Theatre Review 141 (2010): 22. 22. Scott Duchene’s article, referenced above, gives a detailed look at the economies of cosplay and social strata at Science Fiction and Fantasy conventions. 23. Scott Duchene, “Stardom/Fandom,” 21. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Richard Hinojosa, review of Geek!, by Crystal Skillman as performed at the Incubator Arts Project, New York, nytheatre.com, March 22, 2013, http:// www.nytheatre.com/Review/richard-­hinojosa-­2013–3–22-­geek, accessed March 24, 2013. 27. Andy Webster, “Ohio Fangirls Embark on a Perilous Quest,” review of Geek! by Crystal Skillman, New York Times, March 29, 2013, http://theater .nytimes.com/2013/03/30/theater/reviews/geek-­from-­vampire-­cowboys-­at-­st -­marks-­church.html, accessed April 4, 2013. 28. Raven Snook, “Geek!,” review of Geek! by Crystal Skillman as performed at Incubator Arts Project, Time Out New York, April 4, 2013, http://www .timeout.com/newyork/theater/geek, accessed April 5, 2013. 29. Crystal Skillman, telephone interview with the author, March 26, 2013. 30. Ibid.

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31. Ibid. 32. Seth Schiesel, “Tragedy and Comedy, Starring Pac-­Man,” New York Times, July 15, 2010, http://theatre.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/theatre/16video.html, accessed March 30, 2013. 33. “Season7,” Vampire Cowboys, n.d., http://w w w.vampirecowboys.com /season7.htm, accessed March 15, 2013. 34. Qui Nguyen, telephone interview, February 8, 2013. 35. Jody Christopherson, “The Origins of ‘Geek!’” 36. James Carter, “authentic listening, part 2: the rise of geek theater (and death of the theater geek)—an origin story,” Kentile Floors (blog), No­vem­ber 29, 2012, http://onemuse.com/2012/11/29/authentic-­listening-­part-­2-­t he-­rise -­of-­geek-­t heater-­a nd-­death-­of-­t he-­t heater-­geek-­a n-­origin-­story, accessed July 31, 2013.

Contributors

Dean Adams is an associate professor in the department of theatre and associate dean of performing arts services at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a member of the Stage Directors and Chore­ ographers Society, Actors’ Equity Association, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the Southeast­ern Theatre Conference, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Entertainment. Jane Barnette, associate editor of Theatre Symposium and the resident dramaturg of the department of theatre and performance studies at Kenne­saw State University, is a theatre historian who writes about adaptation, train culture, and Ameri­can pageantry. She has published reviews and articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Symposium, Theatre InSight, and TPQ. Barnette serves as the southeast regional vice president for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and is the 2014 Theory and Criticism Focus Group conference planner for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She completed her work on volume 22 before moving to Lawrence in the summer of 2014 to begin a new post at the University of Kansas in the department of theatre. For examples of her dramaturgical websites, visit http://www.kennesaw.edu/theatre/ dramaturgySites.shtml. John Patrick Bray is a lecturer in the department of theatre and film studies at the University of Georgia. He earned his PhD in theatre studies at Louisiana State University and his MFA in playwriting from The Actors Studio Drama School/The New School for Drama. John is a

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member of the Dramatists’ Guild of America, Inc., and he is an Equity membership candidate. His research interests include new play development and production, adaptation studies, and Geek Theatre. For more information, visit www.johnpatrickbray.webs.com. Tony Gunn is a third-­year theatre studies doctoral student at Florida State University. His research interests include nostalgia, performance in sports broadcasting, and the theatrical work of Edward Gorey. Boone J. Hopkins is an assistant professor in the department of theatre and dance at Converse College, where he teaches courses in acting, directing, theatre history, and performance studies. Boone completed his PhD in theatre studies at the University of Kansas in 2012 after receiving an MFA in acting and directing pedagogy at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. His research focuses on histories of rehearsal and contemporary rehearsal practices. Boone is currently developing his dissertation into a book entitled Everyday Rehearsal Rhetoric: Director/ Actor Communication, which documents collaboration between professional directors and actors in U.S. regional theatres. Jae Kyoung Kim completed her PhD in theatre at the University of Georgia in 2012. She is a lecturer in the English department at the Catholic University of Korea and Korea University, ROK. Her research is primarily focused on international theatre festivals, intercultural theatre, East Asian theatre, and Korean musicals. Jacek Mikolajczyk is an assistant professor in the drama department at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland). In the 2012–2013 academic year he was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wash­ing­ ton in Seattle. He is also a dramaturg at Gliwice Musical Theatre. His research is focused on the history of musical theatre in Poland and relations between politics and theatre. He is an author of two books, The Destructive Flirtation: Literature and Terrorism (2011) and The Musical at the Vistula River: The Musical in Poland in 1957–1989. George Pate is a PhD candidate in the department of theatre and film studies at the University of Georgia. He is currently writing his dissertation on the ideological stakes of conflicts between text-­based and performance-­based models of theatre from the 1960s to the present. In addition to his scholarship, George is an award-­winning playwright and has had plays produced or workshopped in New York and New Orleans.

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Erin Scheibe holds a BA in theatre/speech education from Evangel University, and she recently completed her MA at Oklahoma State University. Her thesis focused on the development of curriculum for the high school theatre classroom, an ongoing passion. Her performance credits include leading roles in productions of The Drowsy Chaperone, Hello Dolly, and The Light in the Piazza. Erin has spent two years working as a cast member at the Titanic Museum and Attraction in Branson, Missouri, and is currently working to develop innovative curricula to connect schools to the museum. David S. Thompson, Theatre Symposium editor, is the Annie Louise Harrison Waterman professor of theatre and chair of the department of theatre and dance at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. He is the 2014 recipient of the Suzanne M. Davis Memorial Award for distinguished service to theatre. He is also a past president of the Southeast­ern Theatre Conference, the sponsoring entity for Theatre Symposium, and a frequent contributor to the organization’s publications. Jeff Turner is an associate professor of theatre arts at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He also works as a freelance dramaturg for theatre companies in the Twin Cities. Christine Woodworth is currently an assistant professor of theatre at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She teaches an array of theatre history and dramatic literature courses and works actively as a director and dramaturg. She is currently coediting a collection with Elizabeth Osborne (Florida State University) entitled Conspicuous Work: Theatre, Performance, and History in Process. Her articles have most recently been published in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Symposium, and a number of edited collections.