2009 ASTR Conference

Katherine Zien, Northwestern University

Tamara Underiner, Arizona State University

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento, Wesleyan University

Shannon Steen, University of California, Berkeley

Carolina San Juan, University of California, Los Angeles

Chantal Rodriguez, University of California, Los Angeles

Ana Elena Puga, Northwestern University

Patricia Herrera, University of Richmond

Armando Garcia, Cornell University

Marcela Fuentes, University of California, Los Angeles

Soyica Diggs Colbert, Dartmouth College

Ivone Barriga, University of Minnesota , Twin Cities

Francine A’Ness, Dartmouth College

Candice Amich, Rutgers University

Renee Alexander Craft, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Kevin Landis, University of Colorado
Carlos Uriona, the lead actor for the renowned Double Edge Company, began his career as a street performer in Buenos Aires, Argentina with a company called Diablomundo. He has memories of creating street art in the midst of the Dirty War of the 1970s in which artists, mentors and community [...]

AnnMarie T. Saunders, University of Maryland
Challenging memberships in social, racial, and national identity groups as well as delineations between public and private life, Cornyation – part cultural and political parody, part drag show – proudly bills itself as “the raunchiest, cheapest event of Fiesta.” Part of a nation-wide fad of historic pageantry, Fiesta San Antonio [...]

Milla Riggio, Trinity College
In Act IV, scene ii of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Aaron the Moor tells boys who have asked him to pray for his mistress, who is also their mother: “The gods are not on our side; pray to the devil, boys.” The idea that one must look to the devil when [...]

Jimmy A. Noriega, Cornell University
On May 1, 2006, hundreds of thousands of workers across the United States came together to rally under the banner: “Day without an Immigrant.” Working to draw attention to growing anti-immigrant legislation and sentiment, the campaign intended to demonstrate the presence of the immigrant community and its vital role in American [...]

J.L. Murdoch, Bowling Green State University
A popular and therapeutic form of entertainment in historic Korea, the folk masked dance-drama form of Talchum was nearly lost during the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. Each of the 13 regional iterations begins with a processional of musicians and colorfully costumed and masked [...]

Jenna Kubly, Tufts University
Although the United States did not enter the First World War until 1917, popular entertainment and community practices from 1914 onward reflected the looming presence of the war in the American psychological landscape. However, the theatrical scene from 1914 to 1918 has received scant attention.
Historical re-enactments and pageants had been in [...]

Kate M. Kokontis, University of California-Berkeley
In the Bay Area, an important hub of artistic and cultural activity during the Chicano Movement, autumn is a flurry of Day of the Dead events, ranging from private ceremonies conducted by spiritual practitioners to corporate-sponsorship street fairs to altar exhibits in the art galleries of cultural centers. Underscoring the [...]

Charmel A. Joiner, Ohio State University.
One of the most effective forms of public display conducted by African American men in the form of a political march or parade was Barnstorming. Unlike marches led by civil rights activists, the Black Panther Party or the Nation of Islam, whose agenda was justice and equality for black [...]

Courtney Elkin Mohler, California State University
Santa Barbara’s “La Fiesta,” or “Old Spanish Days,” festival is well noted for its function as a regularly renewed public performance of “nostalgia” for a long lost “authentic identity.” In its current form, “La Fiesta” comprises five days of events including a rodeo, nightly performances of traditional Spanish and [...]

Christian DuComb, Brown University
Almost every New Year’s Day since 1901, thousands of Mummers—most of them white, working class men from South Philadelphia—have paraded up Broad Street, performing everything from tightly choreographed pageants to carnivalesque displays of social inversion. This paper will trace a genealogy of the Mummers “wench,” a popular parade figure traditionally performed [...]

Edwin Emilio Corbin Gutiérrez, Northwestern University
This essay analyzes Superbarrio’s performances against “corrupt authorities and voracious landlords” through relajo. Superbarrio, Mexico City’s masked crusader, blurs the boundaries of formal political-legal procedures and popular cultural performances through protests that deploy poignant parody and create alternative spaces of community-based law. Using historiography, I claim that through his performance [...]

Jason Bush, The Ohio State University
Danza de las Tijeras (scissors dance) is a colorful acrobatic ritual dance from the departments of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac in the central Andes of Peru. The dancers, almost exclusively male, are ritual specialists who mediate between the rural Andean community and the spiritual entities of the natural landscape [...]

Rachel Bowditch, Arizona State University
Over the past twenty years, from 1986 until today, Burning Man has transformed from a personal healing ritual into a contemporary cultural phenomenon where ritual, religion, visual art, and performance collide on a magnificent scale. My paper Rehearsing Utopia: Staging Identity, Politics, and Political Performance at the Burning Man Festival is [...]

Pablo Assumpção, New York University
Intended as a contribution towards the advancing of new methods and modes of inquiry in carnival research, this paper departs from ethnographic data in order to present Brazilian carnival as an experience lived and elaborated on the level of the bodily senses. I will argue that an anthropology of the senses [...]

Jenny Spencer, University of Massachusetts in Amherst

Title Stoning Mary by Debbie Tucker Green

Publication Information London: Nick Hern Books, 2005.

Abstract

Among many well-produced plays by women at the Edinburgh Fringe festival last summer, only Debbie Tucker Green’s Stoning Mary, despite its amateur production, left me hungering for more. Green has an extraordinary ear for patterned, colloquial speech [...]

Susan Russell
Penn State University, State College

Title 9 Parts of Desire by Heather Raffo

Publication Information Dramatist Play Service, 2006

Abstract

As artists in the theatre, we live in the hopes that a play can make a lasting and global impact. As scholars in the theatre, we seek evidence of such impact in order to secure cultural value for [...]

Chris Olsen, The University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
A. Title
Telling Tales, by Migdalia Cruz
B. Publication Information
In Telling Tales, ed. Eric Lane, New York: Penguin, 1993.
C. Abstract
Territories of Violence in Telling Tales by Migdalia Cruz—
One of the premises of this workshop is that there existed a kind of golden age of feminist writing during [...]

Juliana Omoifo Okoh, University of Port Harcourt, Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Title: Closed Doors by Julie Okoh

Publication Information: Pearl Publishers, Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 2007

Email: monukpon2000_at_yahoo.com

Abstract:
Set against contemporary Nigerian society where sexual harassment, rape, baby racketing, ritual killing of female teenagers et cetera are on the increase, the play Closed Doors depicts the rejection and trauma suffered by [...]

Karen O’Brien
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Email: obrien@unc.edu
Title
Woman and Scarecrow by Marina Carr
Publication Information
London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Abstract
Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow is a poetic, end-focused drama that examines a woman’s impending death to explore the gravity of her life. Literary allusions to fairy tales and paintings heighten eschatological thinking to a nightmarish, Gothic [...]

Melissa Lee, The Ohio State University
A. Title
Playhouse Creatures by April De Angelis.
B. Publication Information
New York: Samuel French, 1994.
C. Abstract
In Playhouse Creatures, De Angelis conjures the theatre stages of Restoration England when women were, for the first time in English history, “given leave” to represent female characters in performed drama. De Angelis’s fictional account, inspired [...]

Kate Kelly, Texas A&M University
A. Title
Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

Publication Information

London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2008.
C. Abstract
I’d like to consider Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin as a history play.  Like most history plays from Shakespeare onwards, this one distances a contemporary issue–recent western feminism’s loss of memory and vitality–by setting it in a [...]

Anne García-Romero, University of California, Santa Barbara

Title

Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by Quiara Alegría Hudes

Publication Information

Dramatists Play Service, 2007.

Abstract

Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by Quiara Alegría Hudes explores the life of a young Puerto Rican soldier from Philadelphia confronting a second tour of duty in Iraq. A 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist, this play provides a compelling and [...]

Sharon Friedman, New York University:  Gallatin School

Title

Palace of the End by Judith Thompson

Publication Information

Toronto, Playwrights Canada Press, 2007.

Abstract

Palace of the End received the 2008 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for distinguished plays by women in the English-speaking theatre.
Aesthetic considerations in feminist theater have always intersected with political concerns. In her 1996 volume, Feminist Theatre and Theory, [...]

Jill Dolan
Princeton University:  New Jersey
jsdolan@Princeton.edu

Title

An American Daughter by Wendy Wasserstein

Publication Information

Harcourt Brace and Co., New York, 1998. Also available as an acting edition from Dramatists Play Service, 1999.

Abstract

An American Daughter might be Wendy Wasserstein’s most overtly political play. Produced on Broadway in 1997, it recalled Hillary Clinton’s “cookie-gate” gaffe during her husband’s 1992 campaign, [...]

Mary K. DeShazer
Wake Forest University:  North Carolina
deshazer@wfu.edu

Title

Sistahs by Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis

Publication Information

Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1994. (US publication 1999 by Theatre Communication Group.)

Abstract

Sistahs deserves feminist critical analysis for its powerful representation of familial relationships among Canadian/Caribbean women, the history of slavery and colonialism, and women’s lived experience of gynecological cancers. Set primarily [...]

J.K. Curry
Wake Forest University:  North California
curryjk@wfu.edu

Title

Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage

Publication Information

Dramatists Play Service, New York, 2005. Also available in Intimate Apparel/Fabulation (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2006)

Abstract

Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage clearly fits into the category of work that gets produced. Following the commissioning and first production by South Coast Repertory (Costa [...]

Eileen Curley
Marist College:  Poughkeepsie, New York
Eileen.curley@marist.edu
eileencurley@gmail.com

Title

After Mrs. Rochester by Polly Teale

Publication Information

London: Nick Hern Books, 2003. (Available in the US through TCG.)

Abstract

The Madwomen We Inherit—
Polly Teale’s After Mrs. Rochester traces the life of Jean Rhys (née Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams) and her writing process for her novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea; both texts intertwine [...]

Ryan Claycomb
West Virginia University:  Morgantown, WV
Ryan.Claycomb@mail.wvu.edu

Title

4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane

Publication Information

London, Methuen, 2000; A&C Black, 2001; in Kane’s Complete Plays, Methuen, 2001.

Abstract

Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and the Crisis of Autobiographical Criticism—
It is no wonder, given the timing of the play’s introduction to the world, that much of the critical response to Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis [...]

Claudia Barnett
Middle Tennessee University:  Murfreesboro, TN
cbarnett@mtsu.edu
A. Title
Frozen by Byrony Lavery.
B. Publication Information
New York: Faber & Faber, 2002; Dramatists Play Service, 2004.
C. Abstract
Frozen is a remarkably original play. It’s also plagiarized. How can it be both?
Beautiful and brutal, Frozen hauntingly conveys the devastating loss of self, the insatiable thirst of science, and the mad illogic [...]

James Al-Shamma
Belmont University: Nashville, Tennessee
james.alshamma@belmont.edu

Title

In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl

Publication Information

Ruhl and her agent have granted permission to distribute the unpublished manuscript to session participants.

Abstract

Sarah Ruhl will make her Broadway premiere with In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) this fall. In this play set during the [...]