Abstract: Since its inception forty years ago, Taiwan’s Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT) has been contemporizing xiqu (Chinese opera) through productions that combine xiqu with other forms. However, the use of nontraditional source materials can have powerful and unavoidable political implications, and the incorporation of multiple, often competing, classical performance forms further complicates these dynamics. CLT’s The Tempest (2004) brought to the fore ethnic, tribal, cultural, and political tensions. Though seeking cultural repair, the performance ultimately reinforced long-standing divisions. Analyzing the production’s purported theme of reconciliation and its incongruities with choices of ethnicity in casting, characterization, and role types, this article explores the negotiation of Taiwanese history in relation to Shakespeare’s play and examines the production’s reinforcement of power hierarchies through visual design.
Abstract: Based on the American Theatre and Drama Society’s States/Stages of Emergency symposium of summer 2024, this online Note from the Field addresses contemporary attacks on DEI pedagogy, international and undocumented students, LGBTQ+ rights, academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure in the United States. The coauthors, principally theatre and performance studies educators-scholars-artists working in Republican-controlled states, offer a toolkit of strategies, including refusing to obey in advance, attending to the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law, and acting in solidarity.
Abstract: At the top of Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play (2019), a six-year-old South Korean boy is handed off from one US-based adoptive family to another. Jung writes child protagonist Wolf as played by shifting configurations of an adult actor “of East Asian descent” and an “Asian boy doll,” also referred to as a “puppet.” Drawing on her own experiences directing this play in 2024, the author explores how Wolf’s puppet/doll helps Wolf confront the racialized aspects of his identity, process and communicate his trauma, and reclaim his life story. Puppets/dolls, the essay argues, are uniquely equipped to illustrate the deeply fraught nature of representing children’s difficult experiences onstage. In fact, when children are played by puppets/dolls, form serves as more than a container for content—it becomes its ideal reflection.
