Branislav Jakovljevic

Theatre of War in the Former Yugoslavia: Event, Script, Actors

Ed. note: TDR invited Branislav Jakovljevic, a dramaturg from the former Yugoslavia, to write this issues Comment. In the early 199os he worked as a theatre critic for the Belgrade independent daily Borba and the independent weekly Vreme. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the daily !DOSTA!, published during the two-month-long Belgrade University student demonstrations in May/June 199gg2. Jakovljevic is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU.

Terror and Performance. By Rustom Bharucha. New York: Routledge, 2014; 236 pp.

Rustom Bharucha dedicates the first chapter of Terror and Performance to Jean Genet and the last to Mahatma Gandhi. In this way, his rich series of reflections is bookended by a literary criminal and political saint, a (former) small-time crook and a (former) lawyer, a champion of stateless nations and a nation-builder, a traitor and a martyr... It seems that oppositions between them could go on forever. Even when Bharucha finally mentions them in the same sentence towards the end of the book, it is to illustrate their opposition, not similarity: here, one G stands for theatrical irony, and the other for sacrificial Truth (165). What brings Genet and Gandhi together is their queerness in relation to the world of letters and the world of politics, respectively. Their simultaneous position of marginality and excess in relation to their own historical and institutional situations came from their unique capacities for self-renunciation, so rare and precious in the contemporary world of literature, politics, and especially theatre. In Bharucha’s book, the route from Genet to Gandhi winds through the treacherous world of contemporary international politics and performance. This itinerary takes the reader away from the beaten paths of scholarly discourse on the two key terms indicated in the book’s title.

125.00 cloth,

people of color. An angry Brian Freeman (“When We Were Warriors”) challenges his black community: “Why do we other each other so in a community of others?” (250). Randy Gener (“The Kids Stay in the Picture, or, Toward a New Queer Theater”) offers hope with School’s OUT, a public program in New York City that brings together queer teenagers of color with theatre professionals to “explore the thistly themes in their lives—coming out, race, loneliness, sex, dreams and fears of the future, homophobia, racism, and AIDS—through art” (255). Another key tension running through the volume concerns the functions of queer theatre. Whereas coauthors David Román and Tim Miller (“ ‘Preaching to the Converted’ ”) attest to its power to forge community amid political struggle, David Savran (“Queer Theater and the Disarticulation of Identity”) emphasizes its capacity to destabilize and disarticulate identity. Savran claims that “the necessity of multiple identifications and desires that theatre authorizes—across genders, sexualities, races, classes—renders it both the most utopian form of cultural production and the queerest” (164). So, Savran asks, why not include John Guare, Mac Wellman, and Suzan Lori-Parks among queer theatre’s luminaries? His query prompts another, one not pursued in the volume’s modern and contemporary coverage: What about the community-building and disarticulating operations of queerness and same-sex desire in ostensibly “straight,” more conventionally canonical theatre? But when it comes to defining the lubricious boundaries of queer theatre, the volume only deserves credit for raising more questions than it answers. The critical point, made powerfully by all the essays, is that scholars and practitioners of queer theatre must continue to collaborate. In a moving endnote, Carmelita Tropicana evokes the memory of Frank Maya, an actor dying of AIDS backstage at the closing festivities of the 1995 conference. The special ephemerality and perilousness of queer existence onand offstage make this volume’s excellently rendered project of documentation through performance, writing, and publication not only admirable and necessary but urgent.

44.95 paper, e-book available

DiCenzo discusses some of the productions, offers an impressive reading of how the plays and the productions worked in light of McGrath’s ideas and commitments. :’s most famous production, The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil () is especially well discussed in terms of its structural principles and their link to the variety of dramatic forms employed (monologue, scene, sketch, song) and to their sources in panto, music hall, Scottish culture (Ceilidh) and documentary history. DiCenzo also describes the audience/company involvement in performance, and talks about the play’s reception in various parts of Scotland and in relationship to political occasions such as the Scottish National Party conference. The chapter provides the reader with a way to appreciate the interplay of the company’s productions, its audiences, its political context, and moment of production in relationship to the larger cultural context of Scotland and Britain through two decades of change. There are a few other books about alternative companies from this period: for example, Michael Coveney’s book on the Glasgow Citizens Theatre (Nick Hern Books, ), Rob Ritchie’s sourcebook on Joint Stock (Methuen, ), and Roland Reese’s Fringe First (Reese himself the Artistic Director of Foco Novo, one of the companies that rose and fell during this period; Oberon Books, ). They all make valuable contributions to documenting the history of their various subjects. But DiCenzo’s book is by far the best in terms of a sophisticated analysis and a politically interested account of a specific company of great importance.