On March 7, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Centre hosted a Hungarian event, Theatre as Civic Response, by inviting the renowned Hungarian independent theater maker and director Árpád Schilling, and Andrea Tompa, critic and President of the Hungarian Theatre Critics’ Association. Unfortunately, Árpád Schilling could not make it to New York due to last minute visa complications, so he joined us via Skype, and the panel of Andrea Tompa, the editor of Theatre magazine Tom Sellar, the Hungarian cultural historian, cultural manager András Török, and the moderator Helen Shaw. The discussion was preceded by the screening of Krétakör’s Blackland in the afternoon.

I left Budapest six months ago to become a Fulbright Research Student at CUNY Graduate Center, so I was delighted to see some familiar faces, and hear the news about the Hungarian theater scene. The discussion was mainly about Schilling’s artistic style as a director, and his career from the foundation of the internationally acclaimed independent theater company, Krétakör to its dissolution, and his sudden shift from theater to education projects, site-specific and crossover experiences.

I am grateful for Professor Daniel Gerould and Frank Hentschker for their restless interest in Hungarian theater and culture, and their intention and continuous efforts to share it with their community. I am deeply touched by Martin E. Segal Center’s unique awareness of the current painful economic and political situation in Hungary. Ever since my arrival, they have made me feel that they seriously care and also worry about what is happening there.

However, the Hungarian event hardly touched upon current political issues. Apart from some vague references to general hardships that the Hungarian theater world is now facing, the presence of the extreme right in the Parliament and a hint on scandalous changes in theater leadership, the discussion was entirely non-political, and focused primarily on artistic matters concerning the theater of Árpád Schilling. Still, there was someone in the audience, who considered this 90 minutes of theater art talk already too dangerous to the reputation of Hungary. After the discussion and the Q&A session were over, he approached members of the audience, told them that all that had been said before was a lie, those people on stage were telling lies, they were besmirching the fair name of Hungary, where democracy is not endangered but flourishing. Claiming to be the representative of the Hungarian Writers’ Association, he distributed a handout signed by its President, János Szentmártoni with similar content. I am still wondering whether he referred to Shilling’s first or second period of artistic career, or the speakers got some dates wrong, perhaps the foundation of Krétakör. It would have been more stylish if the delegate had contributed to the discussion with his comments openly, during the Q&A, along the lines of freedom of speech and of differing opinions. His imput left the audience in the state of confusion and dismay.[1]

Anita Rákóczy

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[1] I hereby acknowledge that the views and information presented here are my own and do not represent the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State.

The Segal Center’s celebration of Prof. Daniel Gerould’s Quick Change:  Theatre Essays & Translations proved to be a justifiably crowded event.   If you didn’t reserve tickets in advance, chances are you didn’t get in.

The evening was divided into three parts.  It began with a staged reading of the English-language premiere of Andrzej Bursa’s one-act play, Count Cagliostro’s Animals (1957).  Originally written in Polish, Gerould’s translation was presented by members of Counterpoint; it was directed by Allison Troup-Jenson and performed by Jason Emanuel as Albandine, Andrew Vallins as Bartholomew, and Alenka Kraigher as Catherine.    The play opens with the sounds of stomping boots, and we soon learn that revolutionaries outside on the streets seem to be on the march against the Count Cagliostro.  These three characters are all being held captive in a basement by the unseen Count.  Each has been tortured by him in ways that have left emotional and/or physical injuries.  Throughout the play these three characters seem to support the revolutionaries, then switch sides, back and forth.  In the end, one of the three characters is dead, and as the other two hear more sounds of marching boots, there seems to be the suggestion that they may shift their support, yet again.

This staged reading was followed by a brief discussion between Gerould and Troup-Jensen.  Both agreed that this script seems particularly timely, especially given all the unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the world.  Clearly these characters want freedom, but they are willing to adjust allegiances as their conditions change.

The evening concluded with a conversation between Gerould and Elinor Fuchs.  Fuchs is currently a professor at the Yale School of Drama, and had been a student of Prof. Gerould’s  at the CUNY Graduate Center in the 1990s.  Fuchs asked Gerould about the many resonances conjured up by the title Quick Change.  Gerould said that these multiple potential meanings were intended, but that the title grew out of an essay on Witkiewicz that is included in the collection.  From their discussion we learned about the diverse topics that this book explores, and how some of them came to be of interest to Gerould.  We also found out that the book was intentionally arranged, not by chronology or by subject, but to allow the reader to move around as s/he saw fit and discover recurring themes in these essays that play off of one another.

Quite a few people in the audience were current and past students or colleagues of Prof. Gerould.  I left appreciating even more the example he has set for so many of us through his teaching and his scholarship.  I also look forward to reading Quick Change.

“American history,” I recently heard George C. Wolfe, director of John Guare’s latest play A Free Man of Color, say, “is not a well-made play.”  Last Monday before an enthusiastic audience at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center John Guare continued this thought in a free flowing dialogue with David Savran about his play, the poetry of theatre, racial stereotypes, and what it means to be American.

Directed by Wolfe at The Vivien Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center with all the visual excess Guare had wished for, A Free Man of Color employs the sexy, anything goes model of Restoration comedy to engage in an exploration, deconstruction, reassessment, and much more of the American dream.  Rich with references from the Country Wife to Barbara Bush (think Hurricane Katrina) A Free Man of Color tells of the life and times of former slave turned slave owner Jacques Cornet, played by the always exciting Jeffrey Wright, for whom Guare wrote the play.  Aided by his clever slave Murmur (in a nuanced performance by mos aka rapper Mos Def), fop Cornet indulges in fine clothes, maps, and women.  Lots of women.  Cornet is so hot; it only takes his signature whistle for the ladies of the town to drop on the nearest canapé.  The town is, of course, New Orleans, because where else in the US around 1800 could a black man celebrate his magic endowment?  What poetic truth that Cornet is such a libertine—after all the term originally meant “a man freed from slavery,” as David Savran discovered to his and Guare’s astonishment.

How my Father sold my Mother

Brocade purchased with the enormous inheritance from his white father may have given Cornet confidence, but it doesn’t protect him from the tidal waves of history.  After the Louisiana purchase the racial mosaic of New Orleans is forced into a brutal division of black and white, and Cornet ends up on a plantation; an ending that David Savran called “a nasty, sad surprise.”  A Free Man of Color, so Guare, is a play about narrative.  Cornet is seduced by the illusion of writing his own play, but history simply kicks him out of the narrative and into the mystical white spaces that symbolize American ideals of freedom and their flipside: living in chance—the ultimate uncharted territory.  Tragic that Cornet’s hope “all men are created equal” was one of Jefferson’s sharp statements that didn’t find their way into the constitution.  By the way, a Jefferson whom Guare depicts to this audience’s puzzled delight as a pragmatic comfort creature with a sweet tooth rather than as an intellectual heavy weight.

How One Man Became an American

In response to questions about his writing process Guare talked about exhilarating research that led him to findings such as Napoleon’s confinement to a bathtub to alleviate his skin disease and the Code Noir, that mind numbing, insane set of laws prohibiting blacks from everything but labor.  Cornet reciting it with a mix of terror and amazement and Guare talking about it make two memorable moments in my personal theatre history.  I found myself equally fascinated with the roles of trickster slave Murmur and Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture (also played by mos), two men who fight for freedom with literally all they have.  Toussaint dies a miserable death in France, Murmur sells Cornet to gain his own freedom.  Easy to admire upright, courageous Toussaint, but Murmur?  His actions are human, all too human, those tragic decisions people make when oppression pushes them into an ethical cul de sac.  The “humanity of America,” said Guare, “is the nightmare of America.”  Mos’ diminished, guilty look on his final line “now I am a Free Man of Color, and I find that very nice,” came back to mind as I listened to the irreplaceable voice of John Guare alerting us to the high price of freedom.

Tuesday night’s colloquium on David Savran’s new book was simply a gas–as a jazzman might say.  Upon walking into the Segal Theatre we were greeted by William McNally’s live piano ragging of Gershwin (who figures prominently in the book) and other tunes from the era.  So the party had started long before the reception…

That said, it proceeded to be a very heady conversation–no surprise given the seriousness of the author, “guest star” Professor John Graziano (Emeritus of the GC Music dept), and their interlocutor, recently anointed Dr. Kevin Byrne, who just completed his dissertation on minstrelsy under the aegis of these very same men!  David joked up front that he now felt it was he who was “defending” under questioning from his former student.

Among the topics discussed:

-What is/was “Jazz”?  Prof Graziano at one point did grace us with a formal mini-history of jazz as it grew out of ragtime, which spread the country after the 1892 World’s Fair, etc…But David’s book is premised on the observation that “jazz” (by the 1920s at least) was an incredibly and confusingly fluid category.  At one end you have “race records” of small ensembles of largely anonymous African American ensembles.  At the other you have bourgeois band leaders like Paul Whiteman rearranging the same tunes for white dance clubs.  And there’s also composers from Gershwin to Aaron Copland providing their own “riffs” in the classical concert halls with full symphonic orchestras.  All of these pieces at some point merited the label “jazz” in the popular press–which David takes as justification to consider Jazz as a broad “structure of feeling” (in Raymond Williams’ formulation) pervading US culture in the 20s.  (Thus a musicological argument over what jazz is and isn’t is not really in the book’s purview.)

-Jazz and Race:  This naturally led into exchanges over the racial significance of all this “crossing over” and “covering” of musical style, as well as what music means to different audiences.  David provided a wonderful aural illustration of the different ends of the jazz racial spectrum by playing two different recordings of WC Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”–one a “race record” by blues legend Bessie Smith, the other a dance-hall arrangement by Paul Whiteman’s band.  Same tune–two vastly different pieces of music.  Smith’s vocalization was slow, infused with pain and melancholy yet powerful size.  (“Tragic” was Kevin’s apt description.)  The Whiteman instrumental version was downright toe-tapping.  Quick-paced, jaunty, with even a Latin/”habanera” maraca-shaking interlude to really confuse things.  You could of course see this as the kind of cultural appropriation we later came to know in early rock ‘n’ roll (with Elvis and Pat Boone “covering” and cleaning up the earlier work of black artists).*  And you could see the “love and theft” argument of Eric Lott (regarding minstrelsy), where white musicians–and audiences–flock to this new music for its exoticism while simultaneously claiming it as their own.  In either case, the broad spectrum of the popular jazz movement was there for all to hear in these two recordings.

-A key “lover” and/or “appropriator” of black jazz (depending on how you see it) was George Gershwin, whom David was eager to spend some time talking about.  I think one of the most significant accomplishments of David’s book in the field of Theatre Studies is making the case for a musical composer as a major American dramatist.  It’s telling that when the Gershwin brothers’  Of Thee I Sing became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1931) George was the only one of the collaborators not awarded the prize, since music was clearly considered incidental or just background to the drama.  David points to the complex “through-composed” scores of several Gershwin musicals as evidence of the composer’s intense involvement in the dramatic structuring of his shows.  Graziano also emphasized the sheer harmonic uniqueness of a typical Gershwin song–”surprising” the listener with its modulations–and how, in the live theatre, that has dramatic import as well depending on the song’s placement in the drama and the character singing it….But since Gershwin’s career is perhaps best known for its attempt to win “legitimacy” for jazz in the concert hall (with Rhapsody in Blue, etc.), David’s interest in him also involves this compelling story of one artist’s striving for cultural consecration through this often controversial genre of jazz.

-Speaking of “consecration,” then there’s Eugene O’Neill: the dominant American playwright of the era and, arguably, still today.  O’Neill, it turns out, hated jazz.  But that makes him an even more ideal subject of David’s study because he came to represent kind of the “anti-jazz” in the American theatre.  Those who recoiled at the spreading influence of jazz in the culture took refuge in O’Neill’s aspirations to the high-modernist European theatre: highly aestheticized, catered to a highly educated and self-selecting audience, and concerned with “the popular” only in the sense of “the primitive.”  David said that his interest in O’Neill’s reputation (more than even his work) was a starting point for the whole book.  He concluded that, basically, even if O’Neill hadn’t existed, the drama critics of the time would have invented him–so ready were they to “advance” the American Drama above the popular forms of melodrama, musicals, and vaudeville.  Critics, therefore (like George Jean Nathan and Gilbert Seldes) also emerge as major players in Highbrow/Lowdown.

-Finally, the discussion turned to the nature of audiences and how the book approaches what it calls “the making of the new middle class.”  Here David acknowledged his debt to various sociologists (from Pierre Bourdieu to C. Wright Mills) in finding both methodologies and language to theorize audiences and audience-creation.  It turns out the 1920s offer a similar challenge to such research as earlier eras, since there were none of the convenient “audience surveys” and demographic studies we have gotten used to in the last fifty years.  One source David ingeniously turned to was Emily Post!  (Her etiquette book from the 1920s conveniently focuses extensively on how proper people should behave at a Broadway show.)  Audience and class structure become essential to Highbrow/Lowdown because of this fight for the soul, if you will, of the American theatre over whether it will be a jazz theatre or an “art” theatre.  (Or both–David provides many examples of adventurous highbrow jazzy experiments, like John Howard Lawson’s Processional.)  It’s not a coincidence to him that as Broadway became more middle class, it became less jazzy.

What I came away with most from the evening was something not necessarily in the pages of Highbrow/Lowdown itself, but something that is always evident in studying with David or listening to him speak about the subject.  And that is his free admission of the important–and often neglected–role of pleasure in theatre studies.  Part of his attraction to the form of the musical in recent years, it seems, is an embrace of the pleasure induced by musical performance as a totally valid and quite serious element of theatre.  He prefaced his remarks Tuesday night by noting how rarely he feels pleasure attending the New York theatre nowadays; it is too concerned, he said, with prestige.  And so it was not hard to infer that the loss of “jazz”–whatever that means–in our dramatic arts is a lamentable one.

*The appropriation model also reminds us of the more recent cultural migrations of Hip-Hop.  While he defers to others in analyzing the significance of Hip-Hop, David often references the debates around it as an analog to the cultural and racial tensions (“culture wars”) that once erupted over jazz in the 20′s.

Last night’s tribute to Joe Melillo at the Segal Center was a real treat. Roselee Goldberg proved an excellent moderator for the evening as she, with great finesse and having prepared for the event by “interviewing” each of the panelists beforehand, guided us through the interstices of Joe’s professional and personal connections. It became immediately evident that these panelists were not simply people with whom Mr. Melillo had artistic dealings; rather, they represented intimate and ongoing relationships, which Joe clearly cultivates through his visionary calling.

The evening got underway with a special visitation, a pre-recorded video message from afar, featuring a close-up shot of Daniel Bernard Roumain and his violin. Roumain began by creating a percussive soundscape with bow, strings, and violin-body. Then, after a beat of silence, he addressed the camera saying, “Joe,” and then launched into a gorgeous composition, clearly invented for and dedicated to “Joe.” I could almost hear the name “Melillo” scratched out in some of the violin strings in this semi-chordal, percussive, and ultimately harmonious and moving piece. When he finished playing, he plainly addressed Joe with such loving and laudatory sentiments that it became apparent that we were in for an evening of genuine tribute.

From there we heard from Mr. Melillo’s long-term artist-collaborators, representing (one each) the various disciplines presented by BAM over the past 25 years—dance (Susan Marshall), theatre (Marianne Weems), music (David Lang), and visual art (Dan Cameron).

The overriding message of the evening was that, thanks to Joe Melillo, there is a place in New York—a place in the United States—that is ultimately committed to producing, in the words of David Lang, “uncompromising, weird, challenging, often disturbing work” on a scale that no other presenting house is equipped or willing to handle. Each of the artists on the panel affirmed that Joe is a visionary’s visionary. He not only establishes and nurtures long term relationships with artists who show the seeds of greatness, even early in their careers, but he also forges connections between these artists, most of which last lifetimes and produce unforeseeable hybrids of global artistic influence. More than once Joe was referred to as a “matchmaker.”

In addition to presenting the most cutting edge, large-scale performance in the world for its New York audience, the artist-panelists also agreed that Joe exerts a powerful force in determining the course of artistic reception in the U.S. Followed by exuberant nods of agreement by the other assembled artists, David Lang commented that Joe challenges “our imagination of where we think art can go.” Not only does Joe open up creative avenues in the minds of the artists with whom he works, he also does much of the exploratory work for other theatres throughout the country. Later in the conversation, someone (I think it may have been Melillo himself, but my notes unfortunately omit the name of the speaker…) even asserted that BAM “does the R & D [research and development] for the presenters in the rest of the country.” These are all bold claims, but sitting amidst the evidence being presented last night, it is hard to see how any of this is the result of hyperbolic thinking.

On a final note, two new BAM initiatives were mentioned. The first, which has been underway for a year or two now, is the Bridge Project, the “global BAM” producing project, which teams up international teams of artists who create and tour new works of theatre. The recent co-productions directed by Sam Mendes exist under this umbrella. The second, about which I did not know, is the construction of a brand new BAM theatre space in the Fisher building on Ashland Place. The new space will function as a flexible, 250 seat space, dedicated not only to producing works of theatre that are not appropriate for the scale of the other BAM spaces, but also to hosting community events and educational programming. This is sure to be a welcome addition to the Fort Greene neighborhood, which often does not have sufficient access to BAM’s more large-scale programming. It also promises to be an exciting new destination for the plethora of smaller-scale, high quality works of performance in the country and from across the globe.

Congratulations, Joe! Now for the next 25 years. . . .

–Brad Krumholz

In anticipation of METC’s May 18 evening with Professor David Savran…

One of the many privileges of studying at the CUNY Grad Center Theatre department has been to work closely and frequently with a scholar as at the top of his game as is David Savran.  Having already made an estimable reputation in the 80s and 90s as a chronicler of experimental theatre (his now-classic Wooster Group history Breaking the Rules) and groundbreaking applications to theatre of gender and queer studies, he is now forging an entirely different, though no less radical, path.  My first class with David in 2005 was in American Musical Theatre–a field he had long taught in but only recently began publishing on.  So lucky was I to first encounter him at this very moment when he was working on Highbrow/Lowdown, his ambitious wedding of neglected musical theatre history to modern sociological analyses of class and taste.  This uniquely “Savranian” matching of methodology to seemingly unlikely subject matter was a thrill to watch in action.

And now we can all read it, too.  Hardly a culmination of all of David’s important musical theatre scholarship, Highbrow/Lowdown gives us a fascinating case study of the role of jazz in the formation of American theatrical taste in the 1920s.  In my journey through the book so far, I am most stimulated by the intensity (“symbolic violence” as David’s guiding spirit Pierre Bourdieu calls it) of the cultural battles it relates: between musicals and dramas, between jazz and classical, between populist and elite, and between “legitimate” and “popular” venues of performance.  Most surprising of all is how his narrative marches toward such a foundational moment in US drama as the emergence of Eugene O’Neill–an artist as far from the American Musical Theatre tradition as there is.  But by that point in the argument, O’Neill’s entrance onto the stage makes perfect sense as the triumph of drama over music, as it were, that has come to define the historiogaphic trajectory of “US Modern Drama” ever since.

There’s much to look forward to in Tuesday night’s event–where David will be joined by another fine CUNY professor who has become indispensable in the study of musical theatre of this era, John Graziano (from the music department), as well as my friend Kevin Byrne (the newly baptized “Dr. Byrne!”) whose recently completed dissertation on the persistence of minstrelsy into the early twentieth century will no doubt soon follow David’s book onto the shelf of essential reading in theatre studies about the period.  (I also understand there will be live music performed? Stay tuned…)

I suppose what I most look forward to David elucidating is exactly how he manages to pull off the extension of jazz studies into so many areas of US theatrical and cultural history.  While the book certainly makes its own case quite clearly, I must say the (deliberate) audaciousness of the book’s subtitle still astounds me: “Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class.”  I mean, “the making of the new theatre audience” would have been ambitious and intriguing enough.  But to raise the stakes to the fate of an entire social class–well that’s quite an opening gambit!  The title itself, thus, launches us well beyond just theatre studies into a promise of interdisciplinary inquiry that begs us to keep reading.  A good reminder to us “emerging” scholars to always tell our readers why our arguments matter–the so-called “so what?” element of the classic thesis statement.

So I hope you will join me Tuesday night to see one of our finest teachers walk this daunting scholarly high-wire.

-Garrett Eisler

Since 1999 Joseph Melillo has been Executive Producer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). In that time—and even before that as he pioneered the Next Wave Festival—his impact on the New York theatre scene has been monumental. Where do you go to see Peter Brook when he’s in the US? BAM. Where do you go to see Robert Wilson? BAM. Where do you go to see any of the hottest, new theatre innovators from across the Atlantic? The answer is consistently BAM. And we have Joe Melillo to thank for it.

Well, on Monday, May 17, 2010, we’ll have a chance to thank him in person, as the Martin E. Segal center hosts “25 Years at BAM: An Evening with Joe Melillo.” I can only imagine who’s going to be in the audience, but joining Mr. Melillo on stage will be David Lang, Dan Cameron, Susan Marshall, and Marianne Weems, with RoseLee Goldberg moderating the conversation.

Here is some basic info about the special guests to whet your appetite:

David Lang is a Pulitzer Prize winning composer best known for his The Little Match Girl Passion and The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, who has also collaborated with diverse talents such as the Kronos Quartet and La La La Human Steps.

Dan Cameron is an internationally renowned curator, whose most recent work has taken him to New Orleans, where he served as Director of Visual Arts for the Contemporary Arts Center and where he founded the ambitious U.S. Biennial international exhibition. He is currently the curator for the Next Wave Visual Art Festival at BAM.

Susan Marshall is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Award for her groundbreaking choreographic work. Her connection to BAM dates back to the mid-1980s with her Next Wave commissioned piece, Interior with Seven Figures.

Marianne Weems is the artistic director of the New York based theatre company, The Builder’s Association. Her most recent finished work, CONTINUOUS CITY (“a meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our ‘networked selves’ occupy multiple locations”), was commissioned by the Next Wave Festival.

RoseLee Goldberg, recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and Communication, is the author of Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present—the major text for the study of the history and practice of Performance Art. In her various curatorial and producing positions over the years, she has presented works by most, if not all, of the BAM perennial favorites, including Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, and Meredith Monk.

The panel discussion will commence at 6:30pm, and it’s FREE! I hope to see you there!

–Brad Krumholz