Jill Dolan

Performance, Utopia, and the "Utopian Performative"

This essay is a rumination of sorts, the beginning of an inquiry into the ways in which performance might provide us with experiences of utopia. How can perform ance, in itself, be a Utopian gesture? Why do people come together to watch other people labor on stage, when contemporary culture solicits their attention with myriad other forms of representation and opportunities for social gathering? Why do people continue to seek the liveness, the present-tenseness that performance and theatre offer? Is the desire to be there, in the moment, an expression of a Utopian impulse? Certainly, people are drawn to theatre and performance by fashion and by taste, by the need to collect the cultural capital that theatre going provides. Live theatre remains a powerful site at which to establish and exchange notions of cultural taste, to set standards, and to model fashions, trends, and styles.

Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and Civic Engagement in Theatre and Performance Studies

1) A member of the acting faculty in my department at the University of Texas at Austin has a decal pasted on his office door designed in the ubiquitous Ghostbusters symbolic style that transliterates as “Don’t Think, Act.” Although I very much respect this man and his work with students and department productions, walking past this declaration of his values each day challenges everything I believe in as a theatre educator.

Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein

This essay suggests that the taxonomy of feminisms—liberal, cultural, and materialist—while usefully lending precision to our analysis, has inadvertently become hierarchical, privileging materialist feminist projects at the expense of more popular or mainstream plays and productions by liberal feminist playwrights. By returning to the oeuvre of Wendy Wasserstein, the author argues that although some of her initial critical misgivings about the playwright’s relationship to the feminist movement maintain, Wasserstein’s liberal feminist success on Broadway and in regional theatres needs careful consideration for what it accomplished for women. The essay analyzes two recent productions of Wasserstein’s final play, Third, written just before her death from cancer in 2006. Although the Geffen theatre production in Los Angeles panders to anti-or post-feminist perspectives, the Philadelphia theatre company production explores the tensions and contradictions between second-and third-wave feminists in ways both illuminating and useful to contemporary academics and activists.

Casual Racism and Stuttering Failures: An ethics for classroom engagement

“Casual Racism and Stuttering Failures” addresses the affective consequences of pedagogical experiences in which an instructor is surprised by the eruption of racist discourse in the classroom. In the context of an outwardly politically progressive graduate program, I found myself riding on the presumption that students and I thought alike about race and ethnicity, in our classroom discourse and in the theatre. Instead, on two different occasions, I found myself unprepared for addressing overtly racist comments in class. This essay meditates on what the experience of such failures means to feminist and progressive teachers.

Blogging on Queer Connections in the Arts and the Five Lesbian Brothers

I launched my blog, “The Feminist Spectator,” on Blogspot (now called Blogger) at the end of August 2005 (www.feministspectator.blogspot.com). My impulse to grab a piece of Internet territory for my own critical writing on performance was compelled by several things. One was my desire to return to the kind of immediate critical writing I had produced earlier in my career, for small weeklies in New York (e.g., the New York Native, an early gay paper, and the Villager). Living in Austin, I see lots of performance, very little of which gets the kind of attention it deserves from the mainstream press. Second, I had approached the arts editors of Austin’s weekly paper, the Chronicle, and its only daily, the Austin AmericanStatesman, about writing reviews, and while they were both supportive, I was stymied by contemplating the short word count their papers require. Finally, I knew that my interests were resolutely queer and intimately concerned with gender, race, and other identity issues. I was not sure I wanted to translate my preoccupations to the mainstream readership both papers presume. Instead, I was looking for a forum to reach friends, colleagues, and other sympathetic readers interested in a discussion about the meanings of the arts at this moment in U.S. culture. I think,

Feeling Women's Culture: Women's Music, Lesbian Feminism, and the Impact of Emotional Memory

Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor of English, Professor of Theatre, and the Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988), to be released in 2012 in an anniversary edition with a new introduction; Theatre & Sexuality (2010); Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (2005); and many other books and articles. Her blog, The Feminist Spectator, www.thefeministspectator.com, won the 2010-2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She received the 2011 Outstanding Teacher award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Feeling Women’s Culture: Women’s Music, Lesbian Feminism, and the Impact of Emotional Memory

On ‘Publics’ A feminist constellation of key words

The conjunction of the key words ‘publics’, ‘feelings’, ‘practice’, ‘utopian performatives’ and ‘performance’ drive most of my current work, from my own spectating habits and interests, to my blogg...

Seeing Broadly: A Cultural Omnivore's Menu

Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor of English and professor of theatre at Princeton University. Among other books, she is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988; rereleased in a 2012 anniversary edition); Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005); and The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen (2013). Her blog, The Feminist Spectator, won the 2010–11 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She received the 2013 American Society for Theatre Research Career Achievement award, and the 2011 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Teacher award.

Herbert Blau: 1926–2013

I was not yet 20 when I wandered into Ruby Cohn’s class in Modern Drama at San Francisco State College. Hanging around her office, as undergrads will when the class is life-altering, I noticed that her officemate was often, in the morning, taking a nap. Herb had been up late rehearsing at the Actor’s Workshop and was napping before teaching his classes. It was the golden age of SF State, when working-class students like me could still afford an education, and brilliant teachers, like Herb, son of a plumber, could inspire a generation that would hit the strike lines in favor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies, facing off riot-geared cops in front of the English Department. That same practice of radical knowing, always Herb’s signature, led him to take Waiting for Godot out of the theatre and into San Quentin penitentiary, and to envision a Cal Arts that would bring together the leading avantgarde artists and scholars at that raucous time, with Alan Kaprow’s students doing a “hum in” on the lawn, while Angela Davis visited the class of Maurice Stein.

Reading the Material Theatre (review)

choices it gave his plays, such as Cowboys or The Rock Garden done by Theatre Genesis in 1965. Lanford Wilson and director Marshall Mason were both closely linked to Caffe Cino, while Megan Terry (Viet Rock) and Jean-Claude van Itallie (America Hurrah) had work done at La MaMa, as did director-designer Robert Wilson. The PlayHouse of the Ridiculous was a carnavalesque home to Ronald Tavel and Charles Ludlam. Tracing the legacy of Off Off, Bottoms convincingly demonstrates that Tony Kushner’s “Theatre of the Fabulous” of the 1990s has its roots in “the distinctive blend of character-based realism and camp theatrically pioneered in the Caffe Cino plays” (365).