Seminars

Molly Picon (1898-1992) was the darling of the interwar Yiddish stage and screen and arguably the most famous Yiddish actress of all time. Her career spanned nearly the entire 20th century, charting the evolution of American Jewish entertainment from vaudeville to Yiddish theater to radio to film, Broadway, Hollywood, and television. From her early roles as an unconventional Yiddish theater actress to her iconic portrayal of Yente the Matchmaker in the film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof, Picon’s career both reflected and shaped the transformation of Jewish performance in twentieth-century America. More broadly, I read her career as emblematic of the shifting dynamics of American theater and its gradual incorporation of “ethnic” performers, theatrical styles, and themes into mainstream entertainment. My talk will consider how Picon’s thoroughly unconventional and frequently gender-bending approach to Yiddish theater allowed her to bridge divides between the theaters of the Lower East Side and uptown, ultimately redefining how Jews (and in particular, Jewish women) and Yiddish were portrayed on the American stage and screen.

This talk explores how the Civil Rights and decolonization movements helped to instigate a new era of empire and colonialism. It examines how, at the same time that formerly colonized nations were gaining independence, and black people across the globe were beginning to secure social and political freedoms, outer space became a new frontier of global empire building and colonial exploration. It argues that, in the face of this watershed transformation of modernity’s racial geographies, imperial powers like the United States and France worked to convert outer space into the provenance of a distinct post-war site of imperial and colonial expansion. Further, it considers how this quest to colonize outer space entailed a strategic reanimation of prior colonial geographies and networks of colonial relation. But in the face of this scramble to colonize outer space, black artists and activists—from Zambia to the United States to Martinique—used performance to craft anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-racist critiques of this global endeavor to constitute empire anew.

The Donmar Warehouse Prison Trilogy used an all-female cast to stage, in succession, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, and The Tempest. In this essay I explore the political implications of both the single-sex casting, and the outsized space given to Hariet Walter within the all-female company, as well as the unstable framing of Shakespeare’s plays within a prison education or arts rehabilitation program. I argue that as a theatrical sequence, the trilogy exceeds the liberal feminist politics of inclusion that the director, Phyllida Lloyd, first articulated, to embody an admittedly intermittent anti-carceral feminism that poses the prison as the site where the intersecting systems of racism, sexism, and classism are exposed with particular intensity. To make this argument I focus in particular on several aspects of these productions: the repeated disruption of the “Shakespeare story” by the “prison story”; the theatrical supersession effects created by the contrast between Walter and other cast members; the movement from adaptation to appropriation; and the interpolation of the audience into the carceral experience.

Drawing on history plays by Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, and especially Edward Bond, I argue that British playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century continue to write state-of-the-nation history plays of a particularly bleak but dialectical cast in which the past is always intensely in dialogue with present concerns. My focus for this paper will be partly Bond’s Bingo, engaged through the lens of J.K. Barret’s Untold Futures, but with sections on Brenton’s Romans in Britain and Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. I will welcome feedback on this material, which is looking for its final form, but will also explain the larger frame for the book which moves between British and American history plays and posits quite different lineages and functions for each.

In January of 2018, one of Harvey Weinstein’s former assistants filed a lawsuit claiming sexual harassment. By then, the former Hollywood powerbroker had been accused of sexual harassment, exploitation, and assault by scores of accusers, both famous and not. The former assistant’s legal claim, however, contained one particularly sordid detail. The claimant alleged that, as part of their employment, they were obliged to clean bodily fluids from the couch in Harvey Weinstein’s office. After months of scandalized reporting on Weinstein’s cruel, callous, and criminal exploitation of women employees (many of whom were actresses), this was perhaps the first mention of that rarest of objects: an actual “casting couch.” In this talk, I excavate the history of the “casting couch” as a cultural construct. Drawing from an archive that includes the illegitimate press (gossip rags, gentlemen’s magazines, “sleaze” paperbacks) and “under the counter” entertainment genres (party albums, joke books, stag films), I explicate how the “casting couch” became one of the twentieth century’s most efficient discursive devices for referencing the reality of sexual abuse and exploitation that “everybody knows about” while simultaneously concealing the actuality of that abuse from public scrutiny. As a titillating catch-all (neither so real as the fainting couch or the analyst’s couch but related to both), I argue that the peculiar metonymic power of the “casting couch” collapsed the complex transactional intimacies, collaborative proximities, and material realities of the entertainment industry within an enduringly evocative narrative scenario of the actress as a readily compromised worker.

This talk introduces the modern phenomenon of mass performance systems: political systems that, at their height in the era of nationalization, trained thousands of people to perform the same physical movements at the same moment in time. This lecture concentrates on how Soviet-era leaders sought to give ideological shape to the energy generated by thousands of coordinated bodies. Performance videos will illustrate how multiple choreographies of mass gymnastics reveal different approaches to shaping citizenship in the Czech Republic and beyond.