Theatre design history is an ideal location for studying creativity because theatre design blends knowledge from many fields, from visual arts and literary history to psychology, engineering, and physics.

 


Recent Research:

Listen to my June 2022 interview with “Crossroads of Rockland History” about designer and costume historian Millia Davenport:


Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

“The Dark Ride Immersive and the Danse Macabre,” Theatre and the Macabre, University of Wales Press, pp. 207-220.

This chapter in Theatre and the Macabre (2022) looks for new historical ancestors for the US immersive theatre boom: the amusement park dark ride and the medieval allegory of the danse macabre. It discusses two popular immersive theatre companies, New York’s Third Rail Projects and Pittsburgh’s Bricolage Production Company; both companies’ productions emphasize dance, movement and spectacle above text or narrative progression, and they employ a structure in which audience members are led or transported through a series of rooms. After initial successes with productions in 2011 and 2012, they continued to build ‘dark ride’ immersive experiences as major parts of their company identities. At the same time, they drew on the danse macabre as inspiration for their spooky, dance-based content. Together, these companies blended the dark ride structure and the danse macabre motif into an influential model for 2010s immersive theatre.

“Immersive Witches: New York City Under the Spell of Sleep No More and Then She Fell,” Theatre History Studies 40 (2021), pp. 172-186.

This article reflects on the ten-year history of commercially successful and widespread immersive theatre in the United States. As part of a special section of this journal on “Witch Characters and Witchy Performance,” this article observes that two of the longest-running immersive experiences in New York City depend on themes of witchcraft. By aligning authoritative witchlike characters with an audience encouraged into childlike exploration and submission, creators of the performances Sleep No More (2011) and Then She Fell (2012) made use of stage witch tropes to introduce a new phase of immersive theatre.

Defending the Standard Contract: Unmeasured Work, Class, and Design Professionalism in United Scenic Artists Local 829,” Theatre Survey 61.2, pp. 231-251.

How much is a theatrical design idea worth? Alternatively, how much should a professional theatre designer be paid? For many working today, standard minimum contract scales and “industry standards” help guide fee negotiations. In the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA) Local 829 was among the first bodies to align theatrical design with organized labor activism, and as such, its standard minimum contract for design is an object lesson in the value of artistic labor. These scales were developed nearly a century ago, and were the product of hard negotiation and legal action taken by US-American designers in the interwar period. Lee Simonson and Jo Mielziner are best remembered for their revolutionary use of space, scenery, and lighting, yet their professional advocacy within USA Local 829 provided the basis for today's standard design fees. Further, their defense of fair payment during the Depression and war years preserved scenic design as a form of labor analogous to other backstage crafts and trades.

“‘I Want You to Feel Uncomfortable’: Adapting Participation in Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” Theatre History Studies 38 (2019), pp. 133-148.

This essay on Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, as presented in its second full-length performance in San Francisco calls attention to Mac’s self-adaptation of the 24-Decade project to the large proscenium house of the Curran Theatre. Mac used the limitations of the space as a metaphor for uneven historical terrain. By aligning the themes of the performance with the topographical and social codes of the theatrical space, Mac made us embody our literal standing in and against history. Mac’s dramaturgy extended participatory aesthetics and ethics away from reductive hopes of producing democracy or citizenship through participation alone. Rather, Mac’s management of participation and site play inflated the space with the potential for community by acknowledging difference, distance, and identity. Audience participation invited us to queer the space, to embrace personal and political discomfort, and to subvert the spatial codes of traditional proscenium theatres.  

“The New Stagecraft,” The Routledge Companion to Scenography, ed. Arnold Aronson. Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2018. pp. 420-425.

 Narrative history of New Stagecraft: The New Stagecraft was a scenographic movement that adapted European modernist practices for the American theatre, beginning in 1915 and ending after World War II. Surveys work of Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Norman Bel Geddes, and others, and argues that New Stagecraft "introduced and institutionalized the designing workman-artist."

Robert Edmond Jones’ Scenic Renderings as Design Artifact and Professional Tool.” Theatre & Performance Design 1.3 (January 2016). pp.220-235.

This article argues that Robert Edmond Jones adopted European scenic rendering techniques during the first five years of his career. While use of the perspective drawing (rendering) was uncommon among Jones’ predecessors, after Jones, New Stagecraft designers readily accepted the rendering as a key element of professional practice. By comparing Jones’ early style to that of Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, especially the work of art director Ernst Stern, the article suggests that Jones adapted Reinhardt and Stern's representational techniques for use in the US-based New Stagecraft movement. Jones’ particular developments included the inclusion of lighting and shadow, the presentation of a posed, costumed figure alongside scenic architecture and the compositional use of figures to illustrate moments of high drama. Viewing renderings as artifacts within a design process, rather than as evidence of the production itself, clarifies the instrumental value of such perspective drawing. Renderings’ depiction of composed dramatic moments afforded designers greater control and autonomy over the completed stage picture at the beginning of the New Stagecraft movement.

Audience Participation as Consumption and Citizenship in Contemporary Storytelling Performances of The Iliad.Etudes: An Online Theatre & Performance Studies Journal for Emerging Scholars. (June 2015)

As American military actions in the Middle East continue, the Trojan War has become a useful text for exploring the emotional landscape of war. In this article I contrast audience engagement strategies in two storytelling performances of The Iliad, 2012’s An Iliad and 2013’s Measure Back. Both productions use the Homeric epic to link ancient and modern war, yet their methods for framing audience agency differ sharply. An Iliad attempts to create shared responses of ritualized mourning through realistic, individualizing techniques, while Measure Back cultivates independent spectator-citizens by provoking immediate, emotionally uncomfortable reactions and encouraging judgment of fellow audience members. By applying Gareth White’s concept of “horizons of participation,” developed in his study of immersive and participatory performance, I argue that the style of audience engagement offers an opportunity to reflect on the agency of the individual citizen. Interactive audience strategies highlight the performativity of citizenship—you are shaped by what you do—whereas a realism-based mode tends to reduce citizenship to consumption: the spectator as consumer of the actor’s emotional labor rather than co-participant in historical meaning-making. While neither production fully develops viable political interventions outside the theater, the participatory techniques of Measure Back constitute a strategy for developing individual agency through dissensus, and uncover implicit assumptions of passivity and affective consumption on which An Iliad is based.

“Visualizing Postmemory on Documentary Stages: Postmemorial Dramaturgies in Annulla: An Autobiography and I Am My Own Wife.” Text and Presentation, 2013. (2014) pp. 184-200.

Writing about the special relationship children of Holocaust survivors bear to their parents, Marianne Hirsch theorizes postmemory, the ability of a second generation to remember the trauma of the first. This paper compares the visual worlds of two plays about Holocaust survivors: Emily Mann’s first play, 1985’s Annulla: An Autobiography and Doug Wright’s 2004 Pulitzer-Prize winning I Am My Own Wife. Both plays employ postmemorial dramaturgies: the narrative presence of the playwright/creator and the constructed life of their subject are interwoven, staging a memory that the author cannot possibly recollect. Such dramaturgies invent, imagine, and reconfigure by leading an audience through the process of memorial re/construction, aided by the presence of playwright-narrators and theatrical stage objects.

"Researching Historical Theatre Design: Max Reinhardt and Norman Bel Geddes," Exhibit at Binghamton University's Bartle Library. November 7, 2017-May 31, 2018

"Researching Historical Theatre Design: Max Reinhardt and Norman Bel Geddes," Exhibit at Binghamton University's Bartle Library. November 7, 2017-May 31, 2018


Performance and Book Reviews

Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theatre Labor,” by Christin Essin. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 36.2, Spring 2022.

Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting,” by Amy Cook. Theatre Topics 29.2, July 2019.

Off-Sites: Contemporary Performance Beyond the Site-Specific,” by Bertie Ferdman. Theatre and Performance Design 4.4, January 2019.

Ghost Light, by Zach Morris.” Performance Review, Theatre Journal 70.2, June 2018.

“Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor. Ed. Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth.” Theatre Annual 70, 2017.

Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater. By Timothy R. White.The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) 28.2, Spring 2016.

Christin Essin. Stage Designers in Early Twentieth Century America.” Theatre Journal 67.3, October 2015.

Measure Back, by Christopher McElroen and T. Ryder Smith.” Performance Review, Theatre Journal 66.3, October 2014.

Michael Y. Bennett.  Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension Between Rationalism and Empiricism.” Theatre Survey 55.2, May 2014.

Tobin Nellhaus.  Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism.” Theatre Journal 64.2, May 2012.

Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954) at work, c.1920

Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954) at work, c.1920